birmingham-alabama
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Jack's Family Restaurants
Alabama's answer to McDonald's turned 65 this year. Here is how a 15-cent hamburger stand in Homewood became a 280-store Southern institution - and why it still hand-breads the chicken.
Fleetio
Fleetio is a Birmingham, Alabama-based SaaS company that makes cloud and mobile software for managing fleets of vehicles, equipment, parts and drivers. Founded in 2011 by Tony Summerville, its platform helps organizations track maintenance and service history, run digital inspections, manage fuel and parts, automate work orders and connect telematics data so they spend less time wrestling with spreadsheets and more time on their core operations. Thousands of customers across more than 80 countries use Fleetio, which reached unicorn status with a $1.5B valuation after a $450M+ Series D in March 2025 and the acquisition of maintenance-authorization platform Auto Integrate.
Josh Tetrick
Josh Tetrick is the co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, Inc., the San Francisco-based food technology company behind JUST Egg (a mung bean-based egg substitute) and GOOD Meat (the world's first commercially sold cultivated chicken). Starting with $37,000 of personal capital in 2011, he has raised over $456 million to build a company that simultaneously cracked the plant-based egg market and won the world's first regulatory approval for lab-grown meat in Singapore in 2020. A former Fulbright Scholar, UN initiative leader, and Cornell-educated lawyer turned food disruptor, Tetrick has made it his life's work to prove that removing animals from the food system doesn't mean sacrificing flavor or scale.