Founder’s Journal: Class of 2025
James Farrow, co-founder and CEO, Cyft
Bio: A college football player and former recording artist (yes, he did appear on Fox’s short-lived music competition show The Four, Season 2), Farrow took his first “real job” in 2020 on the sales team at Arctic Wolf before jumping over to Adlumin in Minneapolis. A distaste for paperwork gave him the inspiration to create a new tool.
Startup: Cyft is an app that turns voice memos into point-of-sale tickets to spare sales teams the data entry time. Launched in 2023, Cyft was being used by 17 companies as of September.
2025 goals: Farrow, who has three co-founders, is in fundraising mode but anticipates hitting profitability in 2025. “We’re not fully at product-market fit yet, but with the right tweaks, we’re close to defining a new category for managed-service providers.”
Meredith Englund, co-founder and CEO, Camperoni
Bio: A former McKinsey & Co. consultant, Englund rose through the ranks at Ecolab to become a vice president. She served as Ecolab’s corporate liaison for the Techstars farm-to-fork accelerator, and in 2022 she went to work for the venture-backed startup Carbon Origins. But it was during a work sabbatical in 2023 that she became aware of a problem in need of an innovative solution. “I had just left a high-tech startup leveraging VR, AI, and robotics, but once I returned to mom world, there were no good tech tools for the daily mental and administrative loads of parenting.”
Startup: Camperoni.com helps parents find and manage kids’ camps, sports, and activities, including calendar reminders for registration and backup plans for popular camps. With one camp season under its belt, Camperoni has more than 11,000 users and lists thousands of camps from nearly 500 Twin Cities providers.
2025 goals: Launching this fall in Duluth and Rochester, followed by Denver, Boston, and Atlanta. “In addition to our geographic expansion, we’re testing a number of different revenue streams, including Camperoni Concierge, a team of local experts who will manage no-school day-camp planning.”
“It wasn’t until I set off to tackle a problem so dear to my heart and critical to my life that I found the confidence and urgency needed to take the CEO role.”
—Meredith Englund, Camperoni
Sean Murphy, founder and CEO, DemoHop
Bio: Murphy has 20 years of experience leading large teams—he’s Target’s former vice president of e-commerce (you can thank him for your Target Wallet and grocery home delivery). In 2022, he left Optum after two years as senior vice president of digital pharmacy to become a first-time founder, driven by the desire to create deeper connections online.
Startup: DemoHop is a live online events platform designed to foster collaboration, with features like a “science fair format” and options to engage before and after the actual event.
2025 goals: “As a tiny little company doing big events, we need to earn trust and gain awareness. I’m hoping to be cash-flow positive in the next year. We could hit it this year.”
