Made in Hawaiʻi. Scaling Globally with Mana Up.
The islands have long exported talent – young entrepreneurs who leave for San Francisco, New York or Seattle in search of capital, mentorship and scale. Meli James and Brittany Heyd decided to reverse that trend.
In founding Mana Up, they weren’t just building an accelerator. They were making an argument: that world-class brands could be born here, grown here and sent out to the world from here.
About a decade later, that argument is winning.
Now entering its 11th cohort, Mana Up received more than 250 applications this year — a record — drawn from across the islands by a program that has quietly become one of the most consequential economic engines in the state. Hawaii Business Magazine has the exclusive on the founders who made the cut.
James brought Silicon Valley fluency to the mission. A Cornell-trained entrepreneur who built Nirvino into an Apple Top 100 app, she was twice named by Entrepreneur Magazine as a woman reshaping entrepreneurship — and she brought that restless, systems-level thinking home to Hawaiʻi. Heyd arrived with a different kind of firepower: a Georgetown-trained attorney and policy mind who co-founded 1776, one of the country’s most prominent startup hubs, and worked on economic development inside the Obama White House. Together, they form an unusually complete founding team – one fluent in both the language of venture capital and the levers of public policy.
What they’ve built reflects that range. Mana Up’s six-month accelerator pairs founders with mentors, executive training and pathways to global distribution and funding. Its retail arm, House of Mana Up, places island-made products on shelves at Royal Hawaiian Center, Ward Village and Kahului Airport, and ships them nationwide online. Its Aloha Markets have taken local makers to New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, which is proof that the appetite for Hawaiʻi’s brands extends far beyond the islands.
The mission underneath all of it is unambiguous: strengthen the local economy, create well-paying jobs and push back against the cost of living that forces too many Island families to make impossible choices. More than 105 companies have come through the program. This year, a record-breaking 250-plus founders applied to join them.
Meet the 11 recipients this week. We’ll introduce two recipients each day, except on Friday, when we’ll feature three.
