Big news in the past two weeks- after some fierce competition and harrowing interviews, I have been named as Scale Well’s first grant recipient.

Scale Well is a Chicago-based consortium of entreprenuers who’ve all pitched in to start a fund for helping small businesses level-up. The organization was just founded a few months ago, but they plan to award these grants on a quarterly basis. In addition to the $1000 grant, Scale Well provides office space in downtown Chicago and mentoring from successful businesspeople specific to the needs of the recipient.

I’m really frickin’ excited about this and am very honored to have been chosen. To me, the grant is a serious vote of confidence that I’ve got some good ideas and solid plans for bringing those ideas to market.

I’ve got very detailed plans that I’m keeping confidential for now, but suffice to say that the grant is going towards funding a production run of the sequencer synthesizer I’ve been designing. The design is about 98% finished and you can expect to see a big announcement in about three months.

If you’ve been following my work at all you’ll have seen videos of a few different prototypes over the past year. As a teaser for what’s to come, here’s a little jam with the latest prototype- the finished product will be different in form but similar in sound and control to this:

Bleep-it prototype version 4 from Michael Una on Vimeo.