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The Little Fund That Turned $44 Million Into a $1.15 Billion Habit
It started as a modest state bet on Rhode Island's innovation economy. Twenty-five years and 144 companies later, Slater is the quiet engine underneath the state's startup scene - and it keeps recycling its wins.
HAVERHILL
HAVERHILL is a fifth-generation, family-owned fine jewelry company based in Warren, Rhode Island that makes personalized 14k gold birthstone jewelry to order. Founded by designer Haverhill Leach in 2013 and run alongside CEO Andrej Strojin, the brand pairs an in-house, waterfront studio with a direct-to-consumer, Shopify-powered storefront, shipping custom rings, necklaces, bracelets and earrings in a matter of days. It has landed on the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies three years running.
Andrej Strojin
Andrej Strojin is the co-founder and CEO of HAVERHILL, a Warren, Rhode Island fine-jewelry house that makes 14k gold, birthstone-personalized pieces to order rather than in advance. A Slovenian-trained mechanical engineer and former Deloitte and Strategy& consultant, he met fifth-generation jeweler Haverhill Leach on a dating app in 2018, married her four months later, and turned her artisan brand into a fast-scaling direct-to-consumer operation. When COVID shut down suppliers before Mother's Day 2020, the couple built a jewelry assembly line in their garage and cut turnaround from seven days to one. Under Strojin the company has quadrupled sales, reached $16M in 2024 revenue, and landed on the Inc. 5000 three years running.
David Durand
David Durand is the CEO and co-founder of Tizra, the Providence-based digital publishing platform that helps associations and scholarly publishers sell, organize, and deliver high-value content. A PhD computer scientist who has worked with markup languages and hypertext since 1984, he helped shape the standards that quietly run the web - XML, TEI, HyTime, XLink, and WebDAV - and co-wrote the first in-depth guide to HyTime. He taught at Brown, served as Chief Scientist at its Scholarly Technology Group, and turned decades of document-engineering research into a company that powers digital libraries for groups like the American Dental Association.
Narragansett Brewing Company
Narragansett Brewing Company is New England's storied lager brand, founded in 1890 in Rhode Island and once the largest brewery in the region. After the brand nearly vanished in the early 2000s, Rhode Island native Mark Hellendrung and a group of local investors bought it back in 2005, rebuilt its reputation around the classic Lager and the 'Hi, Neighbor, have a Gansett!' slogan, and in 2021 finally brought brewing home to a new 18,000-square-foot brewery and taproom in Providence's Fox Point neighborhood. Today it is an independent craft brewer producing roughly 100,000 barrels a year.
Maria Gabriela Salvador
Dr. M. Gabriela Salvador is the CEO of Maternova, Inc., a Providence-based global health company that runs an e-commerce marketplace for vetted, life-saving medical devices, diagnostics and nutrition products aimed at low- and middle-income countries. A physician trained as a pediatric ophthalmologist in Argentina, the United States and Mexico, she spent two decades building high-impact health programs at Americares, Grameen Foundation, Freedom from Hunger and Pro Mujer before taking the helm at Maternova in March 2023. Originally from Salta, Argentina, she pairs a medical degree from the National University of Cordoba with a Harvard MPH in health policy and management.
Mark Hellendrung
Mark Hellendrung is the Rhode Island native who bought a fading 1890 beer brand for less than $100,000 and made it New England's again. As owner and CEO of Narragansett Brewing Company, he resurrected a lager that had nearly vanished, brought brewing back to Rhode Island after a 30-plus-year exile, and opened a waterfront brewery and beer hall on the Providence harborfront. Before beer, he ran Nantucket Nectars and coached the team at Magic Hat. His pitch has always been the same: stay homegrown, stay local, and don't sell out to the big guys.