It’s That Time Again…

Have you always wanted to build your own business and your own legacy? Now is the chance to lay the foundation for your journey:

Our collaboration with gener8tor means that anyone and everyone throughout the Greater Peoria Region has access to incredible programming and learning opportunities to conceive, plan, build, launch, scale, and succeed as a startup founder. Applications are now open for gALPHA, a FREE four-week venture-creation workshop to help entrepreneurially minded students and technologists create high-growth startups.

Why should you apply to gALPHA in Greater Peoria?

gALPHA is a free four-week workshop that will help you get product ideas, connect you with mentors and one-on-one coaching to develop a high-growth startup company.

What does gALPHA look like?

• Product Development: Ideate, validate, and build minimum viable products (MVPs)

• Culture: Experience first-hand the challenges, but also tremendous benefit, of iterating quickly with minimal resources in solving business problems

• Methodology: Come away with a roadmap for testing new ideas through the design of an MVP

• Next Steps: Understand what you need to do to continue growing your company, and access other resources within gener8tor’s network to help

Four Weeks of growth, fun and success

The gALPHA program strives to remain as flexible as possible to accomodate the needs of each individual participant. Generally, the four weeks consists of a weekly team meeting and a weekly group meeting, multiple workshops per program, and a showcase to celebrate the program completion.

Come prepared to learn about building a startup, collaborate on innovative ideas, meet other participants, or even join a new team. You’ll have the opportunity to participate in interactive workshops, master your pitch, and gain exposure to a number of mentors in the gener8tor network. At the end of the program, you’ll be considered an official gALPHA graduate! To celebrate, we’ll host a showcase to wrap it all up.

Four weeks is short, and we know it! That’s why gALPHA graduates gain access to additional resources and support across gener8tors network, including the opportunity to move their company forward through the gener8tor gBETA program, which is a free seven-week accelerator to continue working on building your company, gaining customer traction, meeting mentors, and pitching investors.

So, don’t wait another moment, tap the button above or the graphic below to complete your application today.

Do you still need to be convinced to join the upcoming galpha cohort?

Since this is a collaboration between gener8tor and Distillery Labs, along with support from multiple community stakeholders, we offer a few great perks to those who apply and are accepted into the gALPHA cohort:

• Free Coworking Access: You’ll receive free co-working access at Distillery Labs during the month of October while you complete the program, and gALPHA graduates get a special promo code to reduce co-working costs even further once the program is wrapped

• Access to the Greater Peoria Regional Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: including opportunities to connect and find mentorship and support through the Small Business Development Center, Women’s Business Development Center, Minority Business Development Center, OSF Innovation, and more

• Access to Distillery Labs Programming: you’ll already be in the building, so join our free recurring workshops like Winning Wednesday Workshops, Fail Club, Ideator’s Club, The AI Consortium, and Vibe Code Lounge

• Access to DeSilo: a proprietary app developed internally to help founders connect with the exact resources they need exactly when they need them, hyper-localized specifically for founders like you who are launching in Greater Peoria

• Access to Great Perks: Join as a Distilery Labs virtual member on Proximity or as a member of Illinois’ #1 Network of Innovative Communities & Ecosystems and you’ll uncover a trove of perks useful for any fledgling founder including free access and credits for software and tools like AWS, Google Cloud, Stripe, Notion, Perplexity AI, Claude, and much, much more

• Access to Venture Capital: You’ll have opportunities to share your fledgling idea with potential future investors who can help you shape your vision from the start to be attractive to venture capital investors, and you’ll be able to connect with local investors at Distillery Labs with Central Illinois Angels being in the building and regularly hosting open office hours

Want to see where your idea could go?

Join us on Wednesday, August 19 at 5:00pm for the 2026 gBETA showcase and meet the five teams who made the cut to be a part of the latest gBETA Peoria cohorts. See pitches from the founders and mix and mingle and meet the visionaries behind Aegis Adaptive, Arphion, SuDe, Opensurg, and Symbio Bioculinary.

This event is free and open to the public, so pop in at 5:00pm to check it out!

Distillery Labs is your front door to the entrepreneurial ecosystem of greater peoria

Stay in the know of what’s happening at the labs:

Join Proximity today as a virtual member for free, or sign up for a monthly coworking space starting at just $100 monthly.

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