A startup with promising vehicle technology usually can't sell it to an automaker yet. The price is too high at low volume, the sales cycle runs for years, and the runway does not. Ann Arbor SPARK's mobility programs help startups get from proof of technology to the first customer.
As director of mobility programs at SPARK, Janis Seabolt spends her days connecting startups to grant money, testing facilities, mentors, business training, and other opportunities to hone their technology and scale their business. The companies she works with are not always the ones you would expect.
"I think when people first hear mobility, they think of cars," she says. "Cars and trucks. And so they think autonomy and they think electrification."
But mobility covers any technology that enables the movement of people and things in safer, more sustainable, and more accessible ways. That definition includes the hardware and software behind satellites, robots, drones, batteries, traffic signals, farming and construction equipment, and vehicle seating.
The breadth of the definition matters, because it changes what a mobility startup's market looks like and who its first customer might be. A company with a sensor or a control system does not have to wait for an automaker to place an order. The same technology can go into a tractor, a drone, or a traffic signal, and those buyers move on timelines a young company can handle.
Seabolt joined SPARK almost three years ago after working for the U.S. arm of a German lidar sensor company. She came up on the marketing and operations side, not the technical side, which gives her a unique perspective when it comes to the needs of startups.
"I know what it's like to know that we only have maybe three months of runway of funds before we have to make hard decisions or get some revenue," she says. "I know what it's like to flip from tariff codes to bookkeeping to event planning."
Her job now is figuring out which of SPARK's resources a company needs and when. "I tend to think of it as a wheel. I function as the center of the wheel, and I am pushing out to the different spokes as needed and appropriate."
That can mean a grant, an introduction, or a harder conversation about who the company should be selling to. Early on, a startup's problem is usually that the technology costs too much at low volume for an automaker to buy it, so SPARK points the company toward a different industry first. Farming or construction equipment can serve as a beachhead market, a way to build revenue and traction while the price comes down enough for automotive to make sense.
One of the spokes on that wheel sits a few miles east of Ann Arbor. The American Center for Mobility is a nonprofit proving ground on the historic Willow Run site in Ypsilanti Township, 500 acres of controlled testing environment built for exactly the validation problem a young company runs into when a customer asks whether the technology actually works. ACM logged 5,596 test hours in 2025 across more than 200 customers, and its work has moved well past cars.
Motmot builds autonomous underwater robots that deploy through a standard fire hydrant to inspect municipal water mains, giving cities condition data on buried pipe without excavation or a service shutoff. The company ran a phased validation program of its platform inside ACM's live water distribution system.
"For municipalities to trust new technology, it must be validated in realistic conditions," says Elliot Smith, Motmot's CEO and co-founder.
Snowbotix is the same story in a different medium. The company builds an all-electric, all-terrain robot for snow and ice management, work that is hard to staff, dangerous in the wrong conditions, and usually done with diesel equipment. Snowbotix came into the region through SPARK's Global Epicenter of Mobility entrepreneur-in-residence program, which paired founder Sasi Prabhakaran with EIR Richard Broo on project management, customer validation, and stakeholder coordination. The company went on to win a $200,000 grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and pilot its robots at Gerald R. Ford International Airport.
"GEM EIR and Global EIR programs have accelerated our growth, connected us with the right people," Prabhakaran says.
Neither company sells to an automaker. Both are mobility companies, and both prove it on the same campus the automakers use.
The rest of SPARK's support is practical. SPARK connects mobility startups to state grants, business accelerator grants, mentoring, and intern programs. It maintains a talent database used to make warm introductions when a company is hiring and a candidate is looking, and SPARK's job portal carries hundreds of tech-oriented roles from companies across the region.
And every year, SPARK books a trade show booth and brings four startups along, companies that would not otherwise be able to afford the floor space. The show rotates so the opportunity reaches a wider range of technologies.
The rest of the portfolio spans the definition the same way. One Ann Arbor startup is working on high-speed charging battery systems. Another takes data collected during vehicle drives and turns it into post-drive reports for legacy automotive and trucking, showing where the near misses were. Another is developing seating technology to prevent motion sickness, currently selling a seat back that gives haptic cues before a turn so back seat passengers can brace for what is coming. Local drone companies including SkySpecs and Sniffer Robotics use aerial technology for inspection work that would otherwise put a person on a lift or a ladder. These are a few of a much larger set of mobility companies across Michigan.
Source: Ann Arbor SPARK
Every one of these companies eventually runs into the same constraint, which is finding people to build the thing. Mobility startups in Washtenaw County hire engineers and technicians out of the same pool as automakers, suppliers, and national tech employers. Much of what makes that competition survivable is a set of programs the region built on purpose to widen the pool, and it is one of the reasons companies keep choosing Ann Arbor.
Toyota anchors a large share of that pipeline. Toyota Motor North America's research and development operation is centered in Ann Arbor, with staff in a building on the ACM campus, and the company is the founding employer of Michigan's FAME chapter at Washtenaw Community College. FAME, the Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education, is a work-and-learn program where students spend three days a week in paid, on-the-job training and two days in class, graduating with an associate degree in mechatronics. Ann Arbor SPARK administers the chapter, which is Michigan's only one, and more than 40 people applied for the 14 spots in this year's cohort.
"It's a great story," Seabolt says. "You are solving your own problem. You're giving an opportunity to somebody who might otherwise struggle to go to school."
Larger companies have followed the same talent logic. Autonomous trucking company Torc opened an Ann Arbor engineering center with plans to hire up to 500 people. SPARK worked with Torc and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation on the site decision, which came down in Michigan's favor over competing sites in Texas and Virginia, and SPARK continues to provide job portal exposure, marketing support, and connections into the region's talent pipeline and mobility ecosystem.
Then there are the meetups. SPARK partners with the state's Office of Future Mobility and Electrification and MICHauto on regular mobility gatherings, and Seabolt encourages people to walk up to any group and introduce themselves. She recently learned that someone who attended a past meetup, introduced himself to the panel, and kept in touch had landed a job.
"I felt so good last night knowing that I just provided an environment where that could happen," she says.
SPARK's Mobility Summit returns September 30, 2026 at the American Center for Mobility, part of the a2Tech360 series. The lineup includes Dushyant Wadivkar, Vice President and Global Head of AD/ADAS at Woven by Toyota, Michigan Chief Mobility Officer Justine Johnson, and a live taping of the At The Wheel podcast with Tu Le of Sino Auto Insights and longtime auto journalist Joe White. Sessions cover safety thresholds for autonomous vehicles, satellite and space as communications infrastructure, and robotics.
Seabolt's pitch for it is simple. "Be in the room for the conversations shaping what's next in mobility."
Registration is open at a2tech360.com.