Three startup founders from New York and California who spent a year living rent-free in Huntsville say the experience was transformative.
“I think it’s very clear that our company would not exist if it wasn’t for the opportunity to live there,” Maurice Landers, chief technology officer of Doctours, who has since relocated to San Francisco, Calif., told AL.com.
Doctours, a medical tourism company, connects people experiencing hair loss with overseas hair transplant clinics offering lower prices than U.S. providers.
“We would have had jobs,” Landers continued. “We wouldn’t be helping people with these medical procedures that they’ve been thinking of and dreaming about.”
In 2024, Doctours co‑founders Landers and Girum Tihtina were living in New York, and NEET SHEETS founder Ruth Young‑Loaeza was living in California, when they won the Sweet Home Alabama grant. NEET SHEETS sells patented ergonomic bed sheets designed to make bed‑making faster and easier.
Thanks to the grant, the trio moved to Huntsville that fall and stayed at the Metronome apartment complex in MidCity.
The Decatur-Morgan County Entrepreneurial Center, or The E-Center, conceived the grant idea as a job growth driver, executive director John Joseph told AL.com.
“The reason that we want to continue to promote entrepreneurs and promote entrepreneurship is because that’s how we create more good paying jobs for the people who already live in Alabama,” he said.
The E-Center proposed the idea for the grant to Innovate Alabama, a statewide public-private partnership focused on entrepreneurship, technology and innovation, which provided about $145,000 in funding.
Joseph said 12 out-of-state entrepreneurs stayed for one year in Alabama, mostly in the Huntsville and Birmingham areas.
“We were able to recruit multiple entrepreneurs,” Joseph said. “And what that means is we’re getting people who want to start companies, and they’re here, and they’re trying out Alabama.”
Partners included Apollo Coalition, the nonprofit arm of MidCity developer RCP Companies, and gener8tor, a startup accelerator and venture firm.
‘The grants let us focus’
Tihtina, Doctours’ CEO, said the Sweet Home Alabama grant meant they could devote more time to building their company.
“We were going to build this company part-time instead of full-time,” he said. “The grants let us focus on that full-time. There was also a bunch of things that you wouldn’t risk.
“We had maybe $100,000 in the bank, and we spent a third of it buying doctours.com, which is a huge investment. If we had to pay rent, we wouldn’t be taking these larger risks. But because we had a safety net, we were able to do that.”
The three entrepreneurs capped their one‑year stay with September pitch‑competition wins and secured hundreds of thousands of dollars in investor commitments.
The founders of Doctours said they got $900,000 after winning first place in Huntsville at a pitch competition organized by California-based Halogen Ventures.
NEET SHEETS won first place in the venture’s Alabama-wide competition in Tuscaloosa, and received $750,000 in commitments.
Young-Loaeza decided to stay back in Alabama and has relocated her business headquarters here, crediting her win with cementing her decision.
“I was praying and I said, God, give me a sign. Do I stay here? Do I go back to California or move to Florida? And I believe it was very clear,” she said.
“And I’ve been gaining all this traction in Alabama. I wanted to stay in Alabama. Honestly, I like it. I like Huntsville. I ended up moving to Madison. The whole thing makes sense. And I was just so happy that things are happening the way things are happening. The progress is clear. I end up actually renting a little house in Madison.”
‘I didn’t want to be talking to many investors’
Soon after arriving in Huntsville, Landers, Tihtina, and Young-Loaeza participated in a seven-week business accelerator program, gBeta Huntsville, organized by gener8tor.
Tihtina recalled Sierra Peña, the gBeta Huntsville project manager at the time, challenging him and Landers about their business practices or lack thereof.
“We had customers that were coming in, but we weren’t treating them well,” Tihtina said. “We weren’t calling them. We just didn’t care. And after that conversation, you can literally see it in our number of bookings. That’s what changed the trajectory of our future.”
“It was instrumental in our success. Without it, I don’t think we would have succeeded.”
Success meant going from signing up their very first patient in January 2025 to now getting a couple of patients every week, they said. Their startup has also grown from two to five full-time employees in addition to four contractors.
NEET SHEETS now has a full-time CEO and two full-time contractors.
Young-Loaeza credited the gBeta Huntsville program with teaching her how to pitch to investors.
“I didn’t want to be talking to many investors before Sierra had us doing the exercise because I was really scared,” she said. “But then, she had us talking to the investors every week. So mentally I was relaxed.”
Peña is now gener8tor’s Bronze Valley Investment Accelerator managing director, based in Birmingham.
She is holding out hope for a relaunch of the Sweet Home Alabama grant, especially since Doctours and NEET SHEETS represent “two awesome use cases,” she said.
“I feel just like a proud startup mom seeing them from the very start to where they are now, especially during the Halogen Draper pitch competition this past summer, seeing both Doctours win the first-place prize in Huntsville and Ruth win the state,” Peña said. “I just couldn’t help but to smile from ear to ear.”
The program is part of Huntsville’s growth story, the Apollo Coalition said.
“Initiatives like the Sweet Home Alabama Grant add a new dimension to that growth,” said managing director Joanna White in a statement to AL.com. “Watching these grant recipients collaborate in our community and utilize our resource-rich environment demonstrates that the foundation we’ve built is working. This is just a glimpse of what’s possible as we continue to lower the barriers for talent and build a home for the next generation of Alabama-grown innovation.”
While it is not clear how many are still in Alabama months after the end of the program, Joseph said the program is under review for possible renewal.
“So, we’re discussing that now,” he said. “We needed, of course, to wait and see what kind of results we saw. But it does seem like there’s enough interest and results to look at whether we continue or grow this. So those will be the next conversations now that we know some of the results of this first pilot effort.”
