Alumnus Lands Top Prize at eMerge Americas

FIU Business alumnus Charles Masters Rodriguez (MBA '23) won the university track at the 2024 eMerge Americas Global Startup Accelerator + Showcase and earned a $30,000 grant to scale his venture, Autoket, an online auto parts marketplace.

A global technology conference and expo held annually in Miami Beach, eMerge showcases the latest in tech trends and connects startups with investors.

"I still feel like it's a dream," said Masters. "I had a lot of sleepless nights preparing for four minutes that would hopefully change my life, and it all paid off."

Autoket is an evolution of Masters' first venture, MK3 Industries, which he launched while attending FIU Business in the Professional MBA program. The venture is a B2B marketplace for everything automotive, connecting to a vast database of reputable auto parts suppliers and streamlining the purchasing experience for customers all over the world. Masters, a veteran of the U.S. Army, who has a military-family legacy with relatives in the armed forces dating back to the Civil War, formed his new venture with another veteran from the U.S. Navy, and plans to continue recruiting talented veterans for his team.

"I still feel like it's a dream. I had a lot of sleepless nights preparing for four minutes that would hopefully change my life, and it all paid off."

– Charles Masters Rodriguez

"MK3 Industries was my first company, and as I was building it, I was noticing a huge gap in the market for both auto parts suppliers like me and the auto shop customers that I so dearly love," said Masters. "I really wanted a marketplace that could connect us where both of us could increase our sales and then decrease all the problems that we had, and then that's when the Autoket idea was born."

Masters looked back at his time at FIU, where he took advantage of resources for entrepreneurs.

"It's literally a crawl, walk, run," he said. "And FIU helped me throughout the entire process, from StartUp FIU Local, StartUp FIU doing my Lean Canvas business model, and then the Florida SBDC at FIU Business along with the Apex Accelerator for the government side. It's been astronomical."