Midwest Moxie

Zhen Xu knew that most people thought it was impossible to use an ultrasound machine to destroy tumors inside the body. But Zhen was still a University of Michigan Ph. D. student; she decided she could afford to try. After years of testing how to control the high-intensity sound waves, that decision paid off and a new, non-invasive medical procedure was born. In 2009, Zhen co- founded HistoSonics,...

Omar Farha discovered in graduate school at UCLA that he was wowed by Metal-Organic Frameworks – MOFs as they’re called by chemists. MOFs were like sponges that could soak up toxic gases and other health hazards -- one of the most exciting and oft cited areas of chemistry.  So when Omar arrived at Northwestern University in 2007 it took him just four years to find two like-minded co-founders and s...

Graham Colditz is an internationally known breast cancer prediction expert. Joy Jiang is a young biostatistician. ​​Together they created Prognosia’s cutting edge software. Graham Colditz is an internationally recognized scientist who’s written more than one thousand research papers and created several award-winning models for predicting women’s breast cancer risk. But it wasn’t until a young bios...

John Rinaldi started Real Time Automation in 1988 to make products that help the factory floor run more smoothly. It had a slow start. No matter how much time John and his team put into engineering the products, RTA sunk further into debt. Then, after attending a seminar run by a famous business expert, everything changed. John re-organized the entire office around his new-found insight: He needed...

Steven Quiring knew his technology solved a problem for utilities. And based on projects he’d been involved in, he knew they’d pay for it. But it wasn’t until a student brought it up, that the idea took hold. This was a viable business. It could be a startup. So, in 2022, Steven co-founded StormImpact, whose predictive analytics helped electric utilities forecast weather-related damage and service...

Mike Schultz had spent more than a decade in his lab at the University of Iowa discovering a pair of radioactive substances that could detect and destroy cancer cells. Fran Johnson, his wife, had spent just as much time running the university medical center’s heart disease treatment program. So, when they launched a startup in 2015, the division of work was obvious. Mike stayed at the university t...

Ben Ivers was four years old when he cut up some carrots and tried to sell them from a table in front of his house at the far end of the cul de sac. Fast forward a few decades and Ben is having much greater success selling marketing automation software. After a decade working at three companies in the industry, Ben co-founded Tenon, an Indianapolis company that helps teams collaborate on marketing...

Chris Fernandez could have continued to grow his t-shirt company, which had more than $50,000 of sales in its first year. But he sold it, got a graduate degree in biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in 2015 co-founded a completely different type of company. EnsoData pioneered the use of AI and machine learning to analyze medical tests like EKGs and pulse oximeters. T...

Linda Kinkel spent more than three decades studying the tiny microbes that live in soil and on plants. Over the years, as the University of Minnesota researcher’s insight into these microbes’ function and benefits grew, companies tried to license her discoveries. But Linda was never satisfied with their plans. Finally, in 2019, she took matters into her own hands and founded Jord Bioscience. The c...

David Bromberg didn’t want to start a company, and he didn’t want to work at a big one. So after completing his Ph. D. at Carnegie Mellon, he left for California and a job at a solar energy startup. Two years later, though, David returned to Pittsburgh to co-found a company with his Ph. D. advisor – an international expert in integrated circuit design -- and another colleague. Pearl Street Technol...

Dan Schaefer didn’t know it at the time, but the idea for his startup company began to take shape on the day he and his wife adopted a dog. A 10-week-old Labrador retriever named Louie to be exact. Louie was in bad shape, so Dan and his wife turned to specialty pet nutrition to improve his health. And Dan found a great startup idea. In 2017, Dan and his childhood friend Pat Barron co-founded Nativ...

Cale Johnston knew what startup success looked like. ClickSwitch, his first company, had a software platform that simplified the process of moving consumer accounts from one financial institution to another. It grew to more than 100 employees and was acquired in 2021 by a publicly traded company. So when the time came to launch a second startup, Cale knew just what to do. He’d made it easier to mo...

Mike Fern started at Baxter Healthcare as a chemist, then got an MBA, but saw no clear path to the type of jobs he wanted. So he responded to a newspaper ad – this was 1990 after all – and became the first employee at Eichrom Technologies, which was commercializing some Argonne National Lab discoveries in an Evanston, Illinois incubator. Fifteen years later Mike was named President. Today Eichrom...

Nina Jenkins’ insect-killing fungal spores eliminate the need to fumigate, clean out cabinets and drawers. Nina Jenkins didn’t start out thinking about bedbugs. The Penn State researcher was studying how insect-killing fungal spores could combat locusts, houseflies and Asian long-horned beetles. But that all changed when a graduate student asked Nina if her fungal spores would work on bedbugs. Sur...

After stints at the White House, Air Force Academy and Amazon, Nick Mastronardi set out to help the public sector make data-driven decisions and improve performance. Nick Mastronardi had the realization while writing his dissertation about applying game theory to public finance. In game theory, each person’s outcome depends upon all the participants’ strategies and decisions. It was the fact that...

Louisville-based GoodMaps, hatched at the American Printing House for the Blind, provides turn-by-turn directions in train stations, airports and other indoor spaces.  Theresa Reno-Weber saw right away that GoodMaps, which had been developed to help blind and low sighted people navigate indoor spaces, had enormous potential for sighted people as well. So, she jumped in, first as Chief Operating Of...

Johnny Park has been an academic, startup founder and now non-profit CEO.

KaliVir Immunotherapeutics is developing immunotherapy programs for treating cancer.

EmpowerU's online program delivers resilience training with 1on1 counseling support.

BiomeSense's technology platform enables at-home monitoring of the human microbiome.

UpDown nightlife app helped users find events and deals and provided consumer data insights to entertainment venues.

Gentel Biosciences and Millipore Sigma both provide life science products.

Capita3 invests in women-led startups operating in the health sector.

7SIGNAL helps customers monitor and optimize their Wi-Fi network performance.

Hummingbirds connects brands with hyperlocal content creators and influencers.