Baton Rouge has surged to become The Center for Digital Government’s third-ranked midsized city in the nation for digital innovation. BTR is disrupting expectations with explosive job growth, competitive pay, and cutting-edge infrastructure investments. Nexus Louisiana is at the center of it all, building momentum across the “Silicon Bayou.”

These tech startups are tackling Louisiana challenges with Louisiana innovation, but luckily for everyone, those solutions scale beautifully. When you understand the real needs of farmers, energy companies, and communities, you build technology that works in the real world.

The Nexus Community

Nexus gives startups a complete ecosystem—mentorship, capital, community, and hands-on experience—all in one place.

"Nexus was instrumental to MasteryPrep's founding,” says Craig Gehring, CEO and Founder of the Baton Rouge startup that has grown to one of the country’s fastest-growing ed-tech companies.

“We would not be here today without being Nexus members," Gehring says. "Nexus lets founders know they're not alone."

Tech Cup Champion

That community support was on full display when Colin Raby stepped onto the Nexus Tech Cup stage with his team from FarmSmarter.AI. The LSU alumnus just spent a year in D.C. as a congressional AI specialist, returning to Louisiana with a mission: solve real problems for real farmers using cutting-edge technology.

FarmSmarter.AI swept every competition they entered this year, taking home the Tech Cup's college division championship and the $15,000 prize. Their success story started in a classroom at LSU, when an Ag Center professor approached them about farmers “drowning in” 500-page research documents to figure out the problem with their crops. They saw the perfect problem to solve.

"We thought, this is exactly what AI should be solving," Colin explains. So they built a network of AI experts trained specifically for agriculture–not a generic chatbot that hallucinates answers, but a system that actually understands farming. The technology streamlines complex agricultural research into user-friendly insights, enabling farmers and agricultural professionals to efficiently diagnose crop diseases, identify pests or fungi, and receive best-practice recommendations—simply by uploading photos to the app.

For farmers in remote areas, that's game-changing. For precision agriculture using drones and robots, it's revolutionary.

The FarmSmarter.AI co-founders recently finished training their advanced vision system on LSU's supercomputer, creating the first agricultural AI that runs offline on phones.  

The first annual Tech Cup was held June 17-19th, replacing Nexus Louisiana’s longtime Baton Rouge Entrepreneurship Week (BREW) with an event completely zeroed in on innovative technology.

In Louisiana's Silicon Bayou, there's never been a better time.

For additional questions or information about the Nexus Technology Cup, please contact Na’Tisha Natt at (225) 408-5018 or [email protected].