Haley Marie Keith and the Business Hidden in the Glue

Haley Marie Keith found a business in a place most people would have been content to leave a class assignment. At Oklahoma State University, an MBA course introduced her to a material developed by professor Ranji Vaidyanathan and his research team. The students were supposed to investigate its commercial possibilities. Keith and Kevin Keith kept going after the assignment had served its academic purpose. There was something here worth asking manufacturers about.

The discovery was well suited to someone who had grown up in Elkhart, Indiana, around the recreational-vehicle industry. Manufacturing was familiar territory before graphene entered her vocabulary. Her early career included work in RV dealerships and operations at an Arkansas business. She had seen companies from the side where a new idea must fit into a working organization, with its existing habits, equipment, customers, and bills.

That background gave her a particular angle on advanced materials. A promising invention could improve a product. It also needed a buyer, a route into production, and someone willing to explain why a manufacturer should bother. Keith took responsibility for the commercial questions. The university had supplied an invention; the company would have to supply reasons to use it.

Homework with a laboratory attached

In the early customer interviews, Keith noticed where attention was going. People were working on stronger composite fibers. She saw an opportunity in the material binding those fibers together. It was an unglamorous place to look, which is often an advantage when everyone else is admiring the same shiny object. A composite depends on the relationship between its ingredients. Improving that relationship could change what the finished part could withstand.

The invention belonged to a larger research effort, and the roles mattered. Vaidyanathan and his student researchers developed the technology. Kevin brought engineering to the founding partnership. Haley handled company operations and conversations with investors. The couple continued working with the university to move the material toward practical applications. Trust between an inventor and the people commercializing an invention became part of the arrangement.

They founded MITO in 2016. By their December 2017 graduation, business-plan competitions had brought in $161,000, with another $70,000 from grant organizations. They began working on MITO full time and entered their first lab in January 2018. A classroom exercise had acquired the rather expensive habit of requiring laboratory space.

A small ingredient, a large adoption problem

MITO’s approach was to modify additives so they could work inside materials manufacturers already used. In an early formulation, the team combined graphene oxide with POSS chemistry, aiming for reactive dispersion in thermoset resins at a loading of 0.1 percent by weight. Dispersion sounds like a detail until the ingredient you have bought refuses to distribute itself properly. Then the detail becomes the whole meeting.

The company’s functionalization process adds chemical groups to a scaffold such as graphene. The commercial intention is straightforward: help an additive bond and behave usefully within a host material. Keith’s 2021 technical presentation placed the central challenge at the factory, where manufacturers need a way to integrate a material at scale. Novel chemistry has to survive that encounter with an existing process.

This helps explain her attention to the customer. A manufacturer buys a result in a particular product, made in a particular way. A useful demonstration must travel from the laboratory into those conditions. The business case rests on the work between the exciting material and the repeatable part. For Keith, that stretch of ground became a career.

The day the skis arrived

One of the clearest rewards arrived in the shape of skis. MITO began working with Folsom Custom Skis in late 2020. The partnership gave the young materials company something unusually satisfying: a customer it could name and a finished product it could hold. For a supplier whose contribution disappears inside somebody else’s product, visibility is a considerable luxury.

Folsom built test pairs and put them through laboratory and on-snow evaluation. Its public account described introducing functionalized graphene oxide into custom skis. The point was to improve the experience of using an actual product, with the mountain supplying a useful second opinion on the laboratory work.

A few weeks after the positive feedback, a pair of MITO-branded skis reached the office for an upcoming trade show. Keith remembered the pride of holding them and credited the team’s persistence. A pitch deck can promise a future customer. A pair of skis occupies space. Her company’s work had become something another person could take outside and use.

“It seemed impossible, but I like impossible.”

Haley Marie Keith, 2021

Indiana, and the people who understood the pitch

MITO relocated to Indianapolis in 2019. Keith looked for investors who understood a business built around physical materials. Through Indiana’s venture community she reconnected with VisionTech’s Ben Pidgeon, whom she had met in 2017. The connection led to screening, preparation, and an April 2020 pitch delivered virtually.

The due-diligence process included an exchange that she remembered with particular approval. A VisionTech investor and MITO’s head of business development, both Brazilian, discussed the customer pipeline and company strategy in Portuguese. They also discussed how the team worked with married founders. Keith considered that a reasonable subject for investigation. It let another member of the company contribute directly to the funding process.

VisionTech joined an oversubscribed $1 million seed round. The anecdote offers a useful picture of what Keith valued in an investor: curiosity about the actual business and a willingness to talk to the people doing the work. Capital arrived with a network. In a small company selling unfamiliar chemistry, a knowledgeable introduction could be part of the product’s route to market.

The filing system earns its keep

The awards were easier to put on a slide. Haley and Kevin were recognized on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Manufacturing & Industry list. She also received the Courageous Women in Entrepreneurship Award at the Rice University Business Plan Competition. Recognition helped draw attention to work that generally happens far from the finished product’s label.

Her later reflections on entrepreneurial training were more wonderfully prosaic. In December 2025, Keith singled out file organization and stress tests as lasting lessons from VentureWell. MITO still used the program’s Google Drive outline. Knowing where documents belonged had helped her close funding rounds. Nobody puts a folder hierarchy on a magazine cover; this may be an editorial oversight.

The stress exercises had another use. They helped the founders understand which problems each person was better equipped to handle and how to prepare for unexpected events. Keith also described a difficult investment environment, with fewer venture investors concentrating on climate and materials businesses. Finding investors able to contribute beyond money remained a challenge. The filing system could make a round easier to execute. It could not make the investor appear.

Making room for a business background

Keith became outspoken about the systems a young materials company must navigate. In an April 2024 letter submitted to Congress, she argued that support programs should welcome founders with business backgrounds. Otherwise, promising commercialization efforts could be overlooked. She also called for clearer expectations around grant documentation and accounting, having spent weeks putting requirements in order herself.

Her position grew out of direct experience with NSF’s Small Business Innovation Research program. Government support had helped MITO commercialize its technology. The process also consumed scarce time. She wanted useful feedback on applications and a clearer account of what an award required. Those are practical requests from someone trying to run a business while satisfying a program designed to help it.

Standards work posed a related question of participation. Keith has argued that small businesses need a voice while benchmarks for graphene are being established. Attending takes money and staff time; staying away leaves others to define the rules. Her commercial work had expanded into the institutions surrounding a market, where a small company’s ability to be heard can matter alongside its ability to make a material.

A partnership has to fit, too

The collaboration with recycled-carbon-fiber company Vartega made the question of fit literal. Vartega had developed fiber bundles suitable for common thermoplastic compounding systems. MITO’s team investigated where its chemistry could enter that process. The resulting graphene-enhanced sizing treatment adhered to the fiber, creating Fenix Fiber+.

The case study describes microscopy and mechanical testing used to examine dispersion, bonding, and integration. Early third-party tests reported improvements in elongation and impact toughness for the tested system. Those results belong to that material and those tests; their interest lies in showing how a collaboration becomes an application. Two companies had to understand each other’s process well enough to produce something useful together.

Keith kept bringing that translation work to public stages. In 2024 she won Stella Foundation’s Women’s Fast Pitch competition, receiving a package of grants and services worth more than $50,000. At the Startup Ladies summit that December, she discussed MITO with construction executive Travis Tucker. The settings differed. The task of making the business understandable traveled with her.

A different title, the same commercial question

On June 18, 2026, First Graphene announced completion of its acquisition of MITO’s assets, including intellectual property, equipment, and four product lines. Keith was appointed Vice President Business Development, with responsibility for supporting commercial activity and expansion in the United States. The founder who had worked to find applications now had a larger manufacturing organization behind the next stage.

Her explanation for the deal was about adoption. MITO needed global operations and manufacturing capacity to take its technology further. First Graphene offered a broader materials portfolio and international reach. Keith also brought experience representing smaller manufacturers through IACMI and a nomination as an ISO industry expert for graphene-related materials. The commercial education had widened considerably since the MBA assignment.

Outside that work, her interests have their own agreeable consistency. She enjoys puzzles and business podcasts, and has described herself as a “blackbelt in retail.” Reselling her children’s clothes sharpened her sense of how to position something for its audience. She has also expressed an ambition to write a book and eventually invest in other entrepreneurs. For now, the recurring problem remains absorbing enough: finding where a useful idea fits, and helping somebody put it to work.