BINGHAMTON — Enduraphin, a startup targeting “on-the-go” sports nutrition, raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-seed round of funding to begin production of its patent-pending product, a bottle for whey-protein consumption. 

Enduraphin is a business located in the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator in Binghamton. 

Danny Drake and Mike Dalberth, both graduates of Cicero-North Syracuse (C-NS) High School, co-founded Enduraphin. Drake is the company’s CEO and Dalberth is the firm’s president. 

Both Drake and Dalberth describe themselves as athletic, have played sports and exercised, and after high school, discovered what they considered to be a problem in the sports-nutrition market. Endurphin is working to address that problem, the co-founders say.

They are currently Enduraphin’s lone employees and working full time focusing on the company.

“This pre-seed round was to get up and going and start production and start selling our product,” says Drake, who spoke with CNYBJ in a telephone interview from Binghamton on July 19.

David Reh, a Clarkson University graduate and owner of Victor–based Raytec Group Inc., led the round with investors that included Ty Muse, president and CEO of Visions Federal Credit Union; Frank Meier, president of Meier Supply Company, and Dan Mori, president of Elmira–based Employment Solutions, according to a company news release issued June 5. Mori is also director of business incubation at Binghamton University, according to its website. 

 “We had to approach them for funding,” says Drake. As Enduraphin started operations, Drake and Dalberth wanted to “tie into the best people down here,” along with making cold calls and knocking on doors.

They started efforts to raise this funding back in April and closed the process in the beginning of June, says Drake. He called raising seed funding “a pretty time-intensive thing” that requires “a lot of focus.” 

Drake declined to disclose the amount of funding raised.

“As a former Division I athlete and a person that still enjoys competition, I find you are always looking for a competitive edge. When the founders of Enduraphin reached out to me for some input on their product, I shared it with my family and it was a big hit. It was easy storage, tasted significantly better, and seemed like a great product to support. So much so, my family decided to invest as well and help promote this as an alternative to other products that were out in the market. The team is energetic and passionate about athletes seeing results. I hope everyone gives this Binghamton-born product a try,” said Ty Muse, president and CEO of Endwell–based Visions Federal Credit Union.

Enduraphin has since started a new round of funding that will continue through October to provide working capital, accelerate production, and focus on market penetration, according to Drake.

Pursuing solution

Drake is a 2012 graduate of C-NS and December 2016 graduate of Clarkson University for engineering and management with a concentration in global supply-chain management. He played golf, wrestled at C-NS, and played basketball and baseball outside of school. 

Dalberth graduated from C-NS in 2013. He later enrolled in classes at Onondaga Community College but didn’t finish a degree there. He played basketball and baseball outside school. 

Dalberth describes Drake as “my best friend’s older brother.” He spoke from Cicero in the same July 19 phone interview.

Both played sports while students at C-NS but Dalberth says he was “smaller,” and eventually stopped playing to focus more on exercising and weight training.

“I started asking a lot of the guys at the gym that were bigger than me what I could do to really start to improve,” says Dalberth. He added that they emphasized the importance of “post-workout nutrition.”

He bought protein to mix with a beverage in a bottle to drink but said the process was “extremely inconvenient,” considering the scooping, mixing, and bottle cleaning involved.

He reached out to Drake at Clarkson and started working on a solution to the problem. “Eventually we came up with what we have now after speaking with Division I strength coaches.” The strength coaches they spoke with worked with Clarkson University’s hockey program and at other Division I programs in the upstate region, according to Drake.

They discovered that the use of whey protein in bottles was also a problem for those involved in Division I athletics. Drake describes it as a “dairy product,” which means anyone consuming it from a bottle should clean the bottle afterward, especially a reusable bottle. 

“We realized that they ended up migrating to a more convenient option … schools consuming ready-to-drink protein shakes. It’s more convenient, but in making it more convenient, they’re packing it full of preservatives, additives, and ingredients that the athlete shouldn’t be consuming after a workout,” says Drake.

The strength coach and athletic department at Clarkson wanted to find a “high quality, convenient product,” but Drake says when they sought a product with those characteristics, officials could only find “one or the other.”

Drake and Dalberth started working with the Shipley Center for Innovation at Clarkson and eventually developed a “single-use” bottle.

“Mike and I developed the bottle ourselves but we had guidance from Clarkson University,” according to Drake.

It has an agitation system that will blend up whey-protein powder in the bottle when the user adds water or any desired liquid.

“They shake it [and the] system blends up the powder and the liquid. They drink it, and then they recycle the container,” says Drake.

When they hit the market, interested universities will have the opportunity to buy the bottles in large quantities and consumers will buy the bottles in cases of 12, according to Drake.

Getting to Binghamton

Drake graduated from Clarkson in December 2016 when the partners had to decide if they wanted to pursue their company full time, or pursue other jobs. 

“We really wanted to give this thing full-time effort because we knew from pitching at all these competitions and talking to these coaches that there was real demand for the product,” he says. 

They started looking for space and spoke with Clarkson, but “from a distribution standpoint, Potsdam isn’t really a prime location,” Drake noted.

They also checked with the Tech Garden in Syracuse, but noting all the companies focused on unmanned aerial systems and high technology, the Enduraphin co-founders “didn’t really feel like our business would fit in too well there.” 

They then checked with Binghamton University in early 2017 and figured that the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator would be a “fantastic opportunity” as “you can reach about 25 percent of the population within a day’s trip in terms of logistics … to open a warehouse product down here is a pretty sound business decision.”

They started operations in June 2017 as one of the first accelerator companies after Dan Mori recruited them there.

Their company started as Powder Partner LLC but eventually decided to rebrand to “be relevant in sports.” 

They renamed the company Enduraphin not long after starting operations in the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator and started raising capital and seeking investors.

They applied for the bottle patent in June 2017 and expect to hear back before the end of the year. Enduraphin has forged “strategic relationships” with five upstate manufacturers for the whey protein, but Drake declined to name any of the manufacturers involved. 

They’re hoping to sell the product to professional, collegiate, and private-training facilities.