All Stars
Hall of Fame

Founded in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, Erebor was built by a group of operators and investors who saw that no bank truly understood how to serve AI, crypto, defense, and deep-tech companies. Backed by Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, and Palmer Luckey, Erebor is building a regulated, FDIC-insured bank purpose-built for the innovation economy, choosing Columbus, Ohio as its home base.

Mike Zelkind and Patricia Livingston founded 80 Acres Farms in Hamilton, Ohio with a conviction that the way produce gets grown and distributed in America is fundamentally broken. The team built indoor vertical farms that use 95 percent less water, zero pesticides, and 100 percent renewable electricity to grow produce that lasts longer and tastes better. General Atlantic backed the vision and 80 Acres has since become one of the largest indoor farming operations in the United States.

Matt Scantland founded AndHealth in Columbus after watching patients with chronic conditions cycle through a healthcare system that treated their symptoms in isolation rather than managing the whole person. AndHealth built a care model that wraps specialty care, behavioral health, and pharmacy into a single coordinated program, delivered in partnership with health systems. The company has raised $72M and is expanding its footprint across the country.

James Stoffer built Abre in Cincinnati out of a frustration that had been building inside every K-12 school district for years. The data that could transform how schools served students was scattered across dozens of disconnected systems. Stoffer and his co-founders built Abre as the operating layer that connects those systems into a single modern data platform.

Dr. Kimberly Langdon founded Coologics in Cleveland after spending years as a practicing OB-GYN and watching patients cycle through antibiotic and antifungal treatments that worked inconsistently. Langdon invented a patented, drug-free treatment approach built around proprietary cooling technology. Coologics is commercializing that technology from Cleveland with backing from Dream Ventures and Bold Ventures.

Beth Flippo founded DEXA Drone Express in Dayton because she saw a gap between what drone technology could do and what the regulatory framework allowed. Flippo built a company that engaged the FAA directly and earned one of the country's first Part 135 Air Carrier Certifications for beyond-visual-line-of-sight drone operations. DEXA is now building the operational infrastructure for nationwide autonomous drone delivery.

Bruce Halpryn and Samuel Lee co-founded Eikonoklastes Therapeutics in Cincinnati to build treatments for neurological conditions where patients have run out of options. The company's lead program is a first-in-class gene therapy for ALS. Eikonoklastes is building the clinical and regulatory path from Cincinnati with support from CincyTech and JobsOhio.

John Walsh founded Endera in Ottawa, Ohio to solve a problem that every fleet operator saw coming: how do you electrify a commercial fleet without rebuilding your entire operations infrastructure? Walsh built Endera to be vertically integrated from day one — vehicles, charging hardware, AI dispatch software, and the fleet management platform.

Stephen McHale sold Explorys to IBM in 2015 and then watched the healthcare system continue to fail the populations that needed it most. McHale founded Graici in Cleveland to build the data infrastructure layer that could change that, using secure consent-based data wallets to match individuals with benefits they were already entitled to receive.

Ray Shealy, Eric Parker, and Jim Mazotas founded InnerActiv in Columbus around a gap they kept seeing in enterprise security: organizations were spending heavily on perimeter defense while the most costly breaches kept coming from inside. InnerActiv built a behavioral analytics platform that monitors data activity in real time.

Ben Madick co-founded Matic in Columbus after recognizing that the moment of a home purchase was the worst possible moment to shop for insurance. Madick built Matic to embed a marketplace of over 40 carriers directly into the mortgage origination process so buyers could compare and bind coverage in minutes.

Adam Rakestraw co-founded MediView in Cleveland after watching interventional procedures repeatedly limited by the 2D nature of available imaging data. MediView built an AR platform that overlays 3D patient data directly in the surgeon's field of view during the procedure. Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and GE HealthCare all backed the vision.

Katie Trauth Taylor founded Narratize in Cincinnati after a career at the intersection of research, writing, and organizational intelligence. Narratize built an AI platform that reads across patents, research publications, and internal documents to surface innovation intelligence for product and R&D teams.

Kevin Yoder and David Archer founded Niobium Microsystems in Dayton because they saw a gap at the heart of American defense infrastructure: critical chips were increasingly designed or manufactured abroad. Niobium builds high-performance secure microelectronic components domestically, with NASA as a key partner.

Joshua Lau and Chad Feinberg built Nymbl in Columbus after spending time inside physical and occupational therapy practices and realizing that the software these clinics depended on had been designed for billing departments, not the people running the business.

Shashank Saxena and his co-founders built Pantomath in Cincinnati because they had lived the problem from the inside at large enterprises: data pipelines fail silently and business decisions get made on broken data. Pantomath built the category they called Data Operations.

Kent Thoelke and Jonathan Hirsch founded Paradigm Health in Columbus because they saw clinical research operating with a fundamental structural problem: the patients who needed access to trials most were least likely to get it. Arch Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Google Ventures, Lux Capital, and DFJ Growth have collectively invested $281M.

Nabeel Kaukab and the Phamily team built the company in Cincinnati around a problem they had watched physicians struggle with: chronic disease patients needed consistent proactive outreach, but practices had no scalable way to provide it without burying staff in paperwork.

The company that became Rivera started as HealthPlan Data Solutions, built to solve a problem costing health plans hundreds of millions of dollars they could not see. Ron Hamm and Michael Blevins built a platform around continuous monitoring, evaluating every pharmacy claim against contract terms in real time. The platform rebranded as Rivera in late 2025.

George Shaw, Opeoluo Adeoye, and Matthew Flaherty co-founded Sense Neuro Diagnostics because they kept encountering the same clinical gap: brain bleeds and strokes are time-critical emergencies but getting a definitive diagnosis required a CT scanner that might be an hour away. The team built the NeuroHawk system, a non-invasive device detecting hemorrhage in under four minutes.

Geoffrey Bruder and Michael Thomas co-founded Sonic Fire Tech in Cleveland after identifying a problem with fire suppression that had existed for over a century: the cure was nearly as destructive as the fire itself. The team built an acoustic wave suppression system that extinguishes fires using targeted sound energy, leaving no residue or chemicals.

Steven Muszynski founded Splash Financial in Cleveland after personally experiencing how opaque and inefficient student loan refinancing was. He discovered that credit unions consistently offered better rates than the fintechs getting all the attention but lacked the technology to attract borrowers online — so Muszynski built Splash to give them digital distribution.

David Llewellyn founded Trailhead Biosystems in Beachwood because he saw regenerative medicine stuck at a manufacturing bottleneck: cell therapies were being produced inconsistently, at small scale, and at costs that made commercial viability impossible. Llewellyn built Trailhead around treating cell manufacturing as an engineering problem.

Chad Reynolds and Keith Brown built Vurvey Labs in Cincinnati around a conviction that the AI industry was making a fundamental mistake: training models on historical data and calling it intelligence. Reynolds built Vurvey to create a data collection and AI training platform powered by real-time human input at scale.

The problem Robert Lento was solving had been hiding in plain sight at every sporting event for decades: fans in the stands get the worst possible angle of the action they paid to see. Lento built ActionStreamer in Cincinnati to put a broadcast-quality camera on the athletes themselves, streaming live first-person footage directly to viewers through patented ultra-lightweight hardware.

Mark Day watched healthcare and medical device training struggle with the same constraint that had plagued it for generations: you could not safely practice the rarest and most critical procedures without access to real patients. Day founded AlensiaXR in the Cleveland suburbs to change that equation with extended reality, building immersive simulation environments.

Palmer Luckey sold Oculus to Facebook and then watched defense procurement move at a pace that no longer matched the speed of emerging threats. Luckey co-founded Anduril in 2017 with a conviction that the defense industrial base needed a technology-first company willing to build at the pace of software. The company chose Columbus as a key base of operations.

Will Zell and Brian Campbell watched manufacturers bleed money from equipment failures they could have predicted. The pair built AssetWatch in Columbus around a simple bet: attach a sensor to industrial equipment, run machine learning on vibration and temperature data, and tell a plant manager which machine will fail before it does.

Archie Scott had spent enough time around highway construction zones to know that temporary concrete barriers were one of the most inefficient tools in the industry: heavy, slow to install, expensive to move. Scott founded Asynt Solutions in Columbus to engineer a better barrier from composite materials, 80 percent lighter than concrete.

Jason Whiting saw a fundamental mismatch at the center of neuromodulation: the clinical evidence for nerve stimulation was compelling, but delivery systems were either too invasive or too limited to personalize treatment. Avation Medical builds wearable, non-implantable nerve modulation systems in Columbus.

Sasha Gainullin built Battleface around a traveler no one else was building for: the journalist going into a conflict zone, the aid worker headed to a remote region. Traditional travel insurance was designed for beach vacations and rejected coverage for anyone going somewhere interesting. Battleface underwrites risk legacy insurers won't touch.

Alex Frommeyer started with a bet that most people in insurance thought was absurd: what if your dental premium actually reflected whether you brush your teeth? Frommeyer built Beam Benefits in Columbus around a connected toothbrush tied directly to premium pricing.

Lynn Frick founded Cell X Technologies in Cleveland around a bottleneck every cell therapy and biomanufacturing company was quietly struggling with: the inability to scale cell culture processes efficiently without compromising cell quality.

Shane Bigelow looked at the vehicle titling process and saw a system that had not changed meaningfully since the 1970s. Bigelow built Champ Titles in Cleveland to digitize the entire vehicle title process, connecting state DMVs, insurance carriers, lenders, dealerships, and consumers in a single electronic workflow.

Derek Lewis built CheckPoint Surgical around a risk surgeons face on almost every procedure: accidental nerve damage. Lewis and the CheckPoint team built intraoperative nerve monitoring devices from Independence, Ohio that give surgeons real-time confidence about where nerves are.

Jonathan Isaacsohn, MD spent his career watching promising science fail to reach patients because of bad business structures that forced every asset to compete for the same resources. Isaacsohn built CinRx Pharma in Cincinnati on a hub-and-spoke model: a central platform incubating subsidiary companies called CinCos.

Dave Richards and the Clarametyx team started with the insight that bacterial biofilm is an active participant in how infections persist and resist treatment. Clarametyx was founded in Columbus to develop precision therapies that target the protective biofilm barrier directly.

Arnon Chait founded Cleveland Diagnostics on a diagnosis that the industry had been approaching cancer detection incorrectly. Chait's team developed technology measuring how proteins are modified in cancer cells rather than just their presence, dramatically reducing unnecessary biopsies.

Darrin Murriner started Cloverleaf in Cincinnati after watching well-intentioned teams underperform because people did not understand how their natural working styles fit together. Cloverleaf makes that understanding persistent and actionable, surfacing coaching insights at the moment of collaboration.

David McFarland watched small business owners go through the same painful ritual every year getting commercial insurance. McFarland built Coterie Insurance in Cincinnati to replace the manual process with real-time data underwriting that produces accurate quotes and issues policies instantly.

Teri Sirset and the DASI team were working on a problem with major consequences for structural heart procedures: even experienced cardiologists make implant decisions based on imaging that can't fully represent 3D complexity. DASI built a computational modeling platform that simulates how a valve will behave in a patient's anatomy before the catheter enters the body.

Ryan Lunka built Doohickey AI in Columbus around a bet that most enterprise AI implementations were too complicated because vendors were trying to do too much at once. Doohickey focuses on targeted, high-value process automation deployed faster than any enterprise platform can get through the kickoff call.

TJ Dembinski and the Eagle Wireless team saw the same gap appear everywhere in industrial connectivity: wireless infrastructure built for simpler times could not keep up with the data demands of modern automation. Eagle Wireless built next-generation wireless technology in Solon, Ohio designed for industrial throughput and reliability requirements.

Dr. Emre Koksal approached data security as an engineer, not a compliance officer: most tools protect the perimeter but do nothing once someone is inside. FenixPyre builds a data protection layer that travels with files across clouds and devices, enforcing policy at the data level while remaining invisible to end users.

Kiran Jain built FinOpsly in Cincinnati after watching engineering and finance teams argue about cloud spend rather than managing it. FinOpsly bridges that communication gap with a platform giving both teams a shared, actionable view of cloud costs.

Pavel Shcherbakov built FuseBase, originally known as Nimbus, to solve a problem every client-facing service business runs into: internal project tools are completely disconnected from how you communicate with clients. FuseBase brings project management, file sharing, wikis, and communication into a single client-facing space.

Priyang Shah built Healia Health in Columbus to solve a core healthcare frustration: you have insurance and still cannot figure out which doctors take your plan, are accepting new patients, and are close enough to visit. Healia translates the chaos of insurance networks into a simple, personalized search.

Joshua Reed founded Lunch Table in Cincinnati with a simple premise: the best professional conversations happen over food. Lunch Table matches professionals for real meals at real restaurants, facilitating relationship-building conversation without a video-call agenda.

Kenny Morand and the Neucore Bio team built the company in Columbus around a targeting approach in neuroscience that had been underexplored despite compelling early evidence, developing therapeutics that address the molecular mechanisms driving neurodegenerative diseases.

Anthony Giordano founded NeuroTherapia in Gates Mills, Ohio with the conviction that certain neurological conditions were being dramatically undertreated not because the science was absent but because the clinical path to commercialization had not been properly designed.

Patrick Russo built OnStation in Cleveland after watching construction teams waste hours every day on a problem that seemed obvious once you saw it: workers cannot easily answer where they are relative to the plans. OnStation overlays construction plans on a live GPS map.

Andrew Lonsberry and the Path Robotics team started from a recognition that robotic welding had a fundamental problem: every new part required weeks of manual programming. Path built autonomous welding cells in Columbus that use computer vision and machine learning to weld without manual programming.

Tsavo Knott built Pieces for Developers in Cincinnati around the recognition that developers spend a significant portion of their working lives recreating context they have already built. Pieces captures and resurfaces developer workflow context across every tool in the stack.

Dr. Paul Matter and his team started from an engineering insight: AEM electrolyzers, known in the lab for decades, could produce clean hydrogen at lower cost than PEM technology if built correctly. Power to Hydrogen engineered around durability limitations that had kept AEM from commercial viability.

Brock Leonti built PrescribeFit in Columbus after watching healthcare pour resources into treating chronic diseases that were fundamentally lifestyle-driven while investing almost nothing in structured intervention. PrescribeFit delivers remote monitoring and biometric feedback to orthopedic practices.

Luke Buchanan built Redi.Health in Columbus to address a consistent failure point in chronic disease management: patients leaving the clinic with a plan they are not equipped to follow. Redi.Health supports patients between visits through reminders, adherence tools, and real-time communication.

Tommy Graves and Dan Manges built RWX in Columbus around a conviction that 3D and spatial computing would become fundamental to the web, and that production-ready infrastructure for it did not yet exist. RWX lets developers build and stream 3D environments on the web without installation.

Maddie and Mike Bell built Scheduler AI in Cincinnati to solve the meeting coordination problem that sales and recruiting teams spend enormous time on. An AI agent manages the entire scheduling workflow end-to-end without human intervention after setup.

Jeff Schaeffer founded Seam Technologies in Cincinnati to address a gap in surgical sealing where existing solutions created unnecessary risk or added procedural complexity. Seam is developing novel sealing devices with a rigorous clinical focus on producing measurably better outcomes.

Joe Brown built SMB in Cincinnati to serve small and medium-sized businesses that need substantive business intelligence and content but have never had a publication built specifically for them at scale.

Joe Bagan and the STAQ Pharma team saw inefficiency baked into specialty pharmacy: compounding pharmacies still ran on manual workflows in a regulatory environment demanding precision documentation. STAQ brought modern software infrastructure to compounding pharmacy operations.

Ry Walker and the Tembo team built the company in Cincinnati around a conviction that running and scaling Postgres in production was still far more complicated than it needed to be. Tembo offers a fully managed Postgres platform with pre-built extensions and application-specific stacks.

Greg Tran built Trace 3D in Columbus at the intersection of additive manufacturing maturing into a viable production technology and industrial companies needing a guide to adopt it. Trace 3D helps clients design for additive and integrate 3D printing into production workflows.

Gerald Hetrick built Used Docket in Cleveland to solve a shop floor problem hiding in plain sight: information scattered across clipboards, whiteboards, and tribal knowledge. Used Docket digitizes work instructions and creates personalized dashboards for each role.

Aaron Chow founded Vixiv in Cincinnati at the frontier of advanced materials, building composite solutions for industrial applications where conventional materials could no longer meet performance, weight, or durability requirements.