Two local companies will use funding provided through Ben Franklin Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania to move their firms forward.
Scranton-based Global Key Solutions (now KeyPedia) and Honesdale-based Redemption Business Solutions LLC were among 13 early-stage companies to receive a total of $2,247,500 in investments to foster innovative product development, workforce expansion and operational growth, Ben Franklin officials said.
Ben Franklin Northeast provides investment capital and business support to startups, manufacturers and business incubators across Northeast Pennsylvania through working to refresh, retain and reimagine Pennsylvania’s innovation economy by creating high-paying, sustainable jobs throughout its 21-county region, officials said.
KeyPedia — an incubator tenant of the Scranton Enterprise Center — provides a data analytics platform that scrapes and processes regulatory, office and business documents, turning unstructured inputs into actionable compliance and keyword insights, Ben Franklin officials said.
“They have a product that provides data and information using AI tools for the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry to identify information around FDA regulators and inspectors who may be coming to review a manufacturing facility,” said Ken Okrepkie, regional manager for Ben Franklin’s northeast division. “They can also search tens of thousands of points of data to give that individual within the pharmaceutical company the data and information they need to make sure they stay compliant with good manufacturing practices.”
George Kwiecinski, co-founder and CEO of KeyPedia, said he and Zephaniah Odidika, co-founder and chief operating officer, started the firm about 3½ years ago.
The pair “essentially committed to doing research as engineers on the Food & Drug Administration,” Kwiecinski said. “Our mission is not just to provide and harmonize data for industry so drug companies can get products to market and stay regulated safely. We’re also providing our data to help champion policy around generic drug safety from a quality perspective. Up to this point, even now, generic drug procurement, for the American people, is primarily focused on cost and not drug quality. We hope to change that by showing the gaps in the drug supply chain. We’re looking to hear about the interactions people have had with drugmakers as well as their healthcare experiences with generic drugs and even beyond that to really help alleviate some of these challenges around national security issues with our drug supply chain.”
Kwiecinski, 23, of Dalton, has witnessed the company grow from two employees to about five in Pennsylvania, he said.
“We also have about 12 to 14 advisers — experts on the Food & Drug Administration and essentially industry compliance,” he said. “We’re now working with some top 20 pharmaceutical companies, as well as a top insulin and medical device company.”
Redemption Business Solutions LLC — located in the the Stourbridge Project, a business incubator owned by the Wayne Economic Development Corp. — delivers a cloud enterprise resource planning system called Ownly designed for retailers (especially lease to own), helping to modernize operations, payment flexibility and digital transformation, Ben Franklin officials said.
“The goal was to make a business model that had traditionally been out of reach (for some),” said Felix Chujoy, president and CEO of Redemption Business Solutions LLC. “When I entered the industry, I realized there was a very obvious gap. The big-box corporations were coming into areas and catering to these more marginalized type of clientele, yet there was a disconnect because they didn’t really understand their needs and their challenges. We’re able to go where the customers are and understand the realities of their needs, and we’re able to supply for them because we know the products that we offer will.”
Chujoy (Courtesy Redemption Business Solutions)
Chujoy, 34, of Honesdale, stressed the company began developing its own tools as the tech operation continued to grow.
“We had a real need and we wanted to continue that growth and scaling, and the only way to do it was to make sure we created the product ourselves,” he said. “It gives a small-business owner the ability to build a relationship with their customers as opposed to handing off that financial mechanism when they sell a product. The small merchant can then be the entity that benefits from that margin on the financial opportunity. This tool allows them to manage the inventory, manage the financial relationship with their customers, and then continue to build that relationship and hope the lifetime value of that customer goes up as a result of that good working relationship.”
Susan Shaffer, director of commercialization, noted the technology meets the needs of small businesses in a user-friendly, forward-thinking and innovative way.
“We realized installment payments not only could, but were being applied universally,” Chujoy said. “We established a risk spectrum of different models and the technology ended up being very flexible and very relevant regardless of what type of goal you’re dealing with because it offers the ability to enable multiple recurring payments.”