News

Large animal veterinarians – who trek to muddy barns and fields each day to work with their patients – face challenges when it comes to keeping records.

Teams from eLab, Cornell’s student accelerator, and Cornell Tech’s Runway Startups program will pitch their ideas to the West Coast Cornell community at Cornell Silicon Valley Presents: Student Startup Showcase March 30 at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco.

After receiving a historic number of applications, the Kessler Fellows program has welcomed a record 20 students to its 2023 fellowship cohort.

Bank of America, in partnership with Seneca Women, has launched a new online marketplace for women entrepreneurs, providing them access to new markets and opportunities for consumers to shop and support their businesses.

Director's Note: Two Plugs Hi there Cornell eship community!  Still looking like winter in Ithaca despite the relatively mild season. Two plugs for this month’s newsletter.  Number one:  if you are interested in meaningful connections, then you should definitely consider joining Cayuga Forum, our virtual, facilitated peer-to-peer coaching and networking program, exclusively for Cornell alumni.  [...]

The 19th episode of Startup Cornell features Trishala Dessai ’17 MBA ‘23, founder of Gig-Up, a , a startup that matches gig-economy workers to consumers to complete the consumer’s to-do-lists.

A Cornell alumnus and his wife recently sold their healthtech company to a national neonatal manufacturer, meaning their breastfeeding supplementation device will now be available to new moms around the world.

It was a gray April in the spring of 2022. My friends and I, sick of dining hall food and paltry collegetown offerings, were itching for something different. Everyone was raving about this niche noodle shop in collegetown, Bool Street Noods, but no one seemed to be able to get on the list.

A new event seeking producers of value-added dairy products is accepting applications.

Scott Belsky has a kaleidoscopic outlook on the tech industry. The creative, entrepreneur, and author has touched nearly every aspect of the ecosystem. He’s been a startup founder and CEO, an executive at a household brand, and an investor and advisor to companies like Pinterest, Uber, Sweetgreen, and Periscope.

The newest member of the Cornell’s entrepreneurial community is already working with students to expand opportunities for involvement.

The 18th episode of a podcast hosted by Entrepreneurship at Cornell, Startup Cornell, features Natalie Egan ’02 (she/her), founder of Translator Inc., a startup that builds diversity, equity and inclusion software for corporations, schools and nonprofits.

A venture capitalist who relishes helping entrepreneurs and invests in late seed stage companies, a U.S. Marine Corps reservist and Iraq war veteran who commanded a Marine Recon company, and a strong believer in paying it forward for Cornell and Johnson, Patrick George, MBA ’13 (Two-Year MBA), is one of the 2022 10 Under 10 Notable Alumni honored by the Johnson Recent Alumni Council (JRAC).

The future of creating animal protein won’t need a drafty barn, but instead may reside in a toasty greenhouse: Forte Protein – a new startup that grows commercial animal proteins inside agricultural plants – has joined Cornell’s Center for Life Science Ventures business incubator.

The New York State Center of Excellence for Food and Agriculture at Cornell AgriTech (CoE), in collaboration with the Cornell Agriculture and Food Technology Park (Tech Farm), is pleased to offer Food Spark, a scholarship program available to qualified candidates to participate in the virtual eCornell Food Product Development Certificate program.

In 2014, Charles K. Whitehead ’83, the Myron C. Taylor Alumni Professor of Business Law, was invited to lecture at a premier university in Ukraine – a country that many in the U.S., at that time, might not have been able to locate on a map.

Entrepreneurship allows biotechnology researchers to help people by bringing their innovations out of the lab and into the market.

Recognizing design’s integral role in the development of technologies reshaping the built environment and how we live and work, Cornell has established the multicollege and transdisciplinary Department of Design Tech.

Big Red Ventures (BRV), Cornell’s early-stage venture capital fund, is excited to announce its investment in Assistive Technology Development, Inc. (ATDev), a medical device company focused on mobility, marking BRV’s first investment of 2022-23. “ATDev is incredibly excited to join Big Red Ventures’ world class portfolio,” said Todd Roberts, ATDev Co-Founder and CEO. “Access to the team’s expertise and Cornell’s vast resources will accelerate our mission of launching scalable physical therapy to patients across the US and globally.” Co-founded by Roberts and Owen Kent, ATDev is reimagining physical therapy through robotics to transform access to care and tracking of patient outcomes. Through their novel knee brace, Rehab Robo, ATDev is on a mission to reduce barriers to physical therapy and improve the quality of care for individuals who have undergone knee surgery. Rehab Robo is the first device that can support the entire rehabilitation pathway in the comfort of a patient’s home. “We are delighted to back Todd and Owen on their exciting journey to disrupt the physical therapy market,” said Sam Evans, BRV Fund Manager. “ATDev has the potential to transform recovery for millions that experience knee surgery each year. Their affordable solution significantly improves access to care, and we […]

For more than 30 years, the Cornell Food Venture Center (CFVC) has helped entrepreneurs transform family recipes and homemade eats into successful commercial food products.

Michael Madon ’94 likes to say he grew up on an island: the island of Manhattan.

Imagine an eco-friendly hotel room that not only has great views but also brings you to your next destination – by hot-air balloon.

ProAgni, a startup hailing from Lavington, Australia that creates supplements and feeds for livestock to lower methane emissions, has been named the $1 million grand prize winner of the fourth annual Grow-NY Food and Agriculture competition.

It’s time for the real world: Three brand new robust companies – one turning carbon dioxide into jet fuel, another enabling a green hydrogen economy and a group creating next-generation microbial imaging technology – graduated Nov. 16 from Cornell’s Center for Life Science Ventures business incubator.

A pair of lost tweezers in her dorm helped Caroline Zhu ’26 come up with the idea for her business, LAFT, which helps connect people to things they lost.

Exotanium, an Ithaca-based startup offering a cloud resource optimization and management platform, announced today that the company has secured $12 million in series A funding.

Director's Note: Happy Halloween! The semester is literally flying by!  We just held our annual Eclectic Convergence at Cornell Tech on October 21st.  It was a fantastic conference with our guest speakers going into details on their entrepreneurial journeys.  If interested, you can view the entire event here:  https://live.alumni.cornell.edu/summit.  And we also just held our [...]

Among the promising group of life science researchers and business students in the inaugural cohort of the BioEntrepreneurship Initiative is Anthony D’Amato, a postdoctoral fellow in biomedical engineering at Cornell. D’Amato is taking advantage of several of Cornell’s resources for entrepreneurs as he translates his research into a new venture that hopes to significantly improve the quality of care in vascular health.  D’Amato earned his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2018, focusing his research on regenerating the injured spinal cord during his time as a doctoral student. As a postdoc at Cornell, he has shifted his attention to the development of biomaterials to treat vascular disease.  D’Amato’s most recent innovation comes in the form of grafts that aid in the regeneration of blood vessels. Instead of using a permanent structure like a stent or having to harvest veins from other parts of the body, the graft is introduced to encourage cells to regrow and rebuild the functional artery. Like dissolvable sutures, it eventually degrades, leaving no foreign material in the body. A portion of the research is being done in conjunction with the College of Veterinary Medicine.  “There is just a wealth of knowledge,” D’Amato said […]

An Oct. 20 pitch event in New York City offered a good sampling of the kinds of entrepreneurial ideas brewing among Cornell students

“If I told you ten years ago that you’d be swiping, flicking, and zooming your way through the day, you’d have rolled your eyes and dismissed this as nonsense,” observes Josh Wolfe ’99.

Alexa Schmitz Ph.D ’18, co-founder and CEO of REEgen, and Austin Hickman Ph.D. ’21, co-founder and CEO of Soctera, have turned their Cornell-based research into ventures that could transform sustainable energy infrastructure and next-generation communications, respectively

The 12 teams that made up the 2022 Johnson Summer Startup Accelerator (JSSA) cohort devoted themselves to working on a vast array of startups, but shared one big similarity: the progress they made on their businesses, which was displayed at Demo Day in early September in Ithaca, N.Y.  Supported by the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, the program is designed to help students take the first step toward launching a startup. After spending the summer completing three phases of programming, including customer discovery, developing solutions, and testing, program participants leave with the tools to continue on their entrepreneurial journeys.  “JSSA helped take something from an idea, to a more refined idea,” said Steven Zychowski, Executive MBA/MS in Healthcare Leadership ‘23 and founder of CheckOnMe. “I felt like I did a mountain’s-worth of work, but I took only one step, and that’s ok, because up until that point, I had only been thinking about it. It forced me to put that thought into action.”  The program, which kicked off in early May and spanned the duration of the summer, included weekly content sessions with industry experts and mentors, matched participants with a dedicated Entrepreneur-in-Residence who provided weekly mentorship and […]

Two Cornell startup companies – Halomine, Inc. and Inso Biosciences, Inc. – have received nearly $3 million in New York state grants to thwart future outbreaks of infectious disease, including COVID-19 and its variants, and to help fortify the state’s expanding life science industries.

The 14th episode of a podcast hosted by Entrepreneurship at Cornell, Startup Cornell, features David Stein MBA ‘20, co-founder and CEO of Ash Wellness, a company that makes healthcare more accessible and inclusive by offering at-home testing kits.

Lypid, a vegan fat startup co-founded by Cornell alumni Jen-Yu Huang and Michelle Lee, has partnered with Louisa Coffee, Taiwan’s largest coffeehouse company. The collaboration will bring Lypid’s flagship product, PhytoFat™, to six menu items at the coffeehouse’s 500+ locations.  PhytoFat improves upon existing plant-based fats by providing similar textures and melting behaviors to meat, tastier flavors, and better nutrition. And while most plant-based proteins currently rely on palm oil and coconut oil for ingredients, Lypid’s product contains no artificial additives or trans fats.   “In the current market, ‘fat’ is the missing ingredient in the majority of plant-based meats,” said Lee, who serves as the CTO of the company. “Vegan oils used today simply melt and leak out of the food matrices due to lower melting points. With our PhytoFat, we are bringing the secret sauce back.”  By improving the taste and texture of plant-based meat, Lypid aims to bring meat alternatives into the mainstream. Louisa Coffee will offer sandwiches, rice burgers, muffins, and bagels containing PhytoFat to millions of consumers — perhaps some who haven’t yet tried plant-based proteins.   The startup has raised a total of $5 million dollars to bring their vegan fat to market, including a $4 […]

Embark, a canine DNA testing company founded in 2015 by brothers Ryan and Adam Bokyo in Cornell’s Incubator for Life Science Companies, is now taking strides in studies of the canine genome

Cornell has been awarded a $15 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to lead a newly established Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Hub that will support science and technology entrepreneurship in rural regions.

The startups vying for $3 million in prize money at this year’s Grow-NY Food and Agriculture Competition aren’t just bringing revolutionary innovations to market, and working to solve the problems confronting agri-food systems – winners are required to make a positive impact on the region, too.

“I am a culinary professional determined to solve the complex problems surrounding our food system.”

The 13th episode of a podcast hosted by Entrepreneurship at Cornell, Startup Cornell, features Aziza Glass D.V.M. ‘15, owner of Personal Touch Veterinary Clinic and a star on the Disney XD and Hulu show “Roman to the Rescue.”

Director's Note: Save the Date and Register Happy Summer Everyone!  Ithaca has been in a bit of a weather drought lately, but I am literally looking out my window now and it is raining.  Hey, it is Ithaca, and it will be sunny in like 10 minutes and then rain again later!  On the eship [...]

Cornell researchers have developed a wearable earphone device – or “earable” – that bounces sound off the cheeks and transforms the echoes into an avatar of a person’s entire moving face.

In February, the National Science Foundation awarded Antithesis Foods —a Cornell startup that began in 2017 with the purpose of improving the nutrition factor of snacks— one million dollars in grant funding.

Applications are being accepted through Aug. 1 for the inaugural New York Concord Grape Innovation Award

Entrepreneurship at Cornell is excited to introduce the inaugural cohort of PhD students and postdocs who have been selected to participate in the BioEntrepreneurship Initiative. Over the course of a year, the BioEntrepreneurship Fellows will take part in a series of workshops and projects bridging Cornell’s campuses in Ithaca and New York City that will prepare them to lead New York State’s next generation of life science startups.   Life science researchers (specifically doctoral candidates and postdocs) were recruited from across Cornell’s colleges, including Weill Cornell Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine, College of Engineering, and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, as well as Cornell’s Tri-Institutional partner, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. As participants in the initiative, Fellows will complement the workshops and projects with other entrepreneurship, leadership, and business courses, earning them a certificate from the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management. The program is funded through Empire State Development and administered by JGSM and the Center for Regional Economic Advancement.  A key feature of the initiative is the pairing of these fellows with members of the MBA BioEntrepreneurship Fellow cohort to create teams to immerse themselves in real-world startup design. Fellows will gain experience in venture design, industry structure, regulation, […]

Three Cornell scientists were honored during a June 1 ceremony promoting women’s engagement in innovation and commercialization

United Airlines will fly greener through its friendly blue skies one day, as the airline group agreed June 15 to purchase at least 300 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel from Cornell startup Dimensional Energy, a company that turns captured carbon dioxide into liquid fuel with renewable energy.

As the pandemic pomp and COVID circumstances dissipate, Cornell’s business incubators officially graduated five startup companies – formally known as the Class of 2021 – on June 7 and helped to put them on the fleet highway to success.

The 2022 cohort of the College of Engineering’s Kessler Fellows program has successfully accepted internship offers at startups around the country, doing innovative work from modern beekeeping to designer jewelry subscriptions.