Twenty-six student ventures have been chosen for the spring 2026 cohort of the E-Team Program. Selected teams emerged from a competitive pool of applicants, distinguished by their innovative thinking, clear vision for meaningful change, and commitment to confronting unmet challenges in healthcare, information technology, infrastructure, and other essential sectors through science- and technology-enabled solutions.
Eighteen teams will kick off their entrepreneurship journey in Pioneer, the first stage of the E-Team Program, where they’ll receive $5,000 in grant funding and intensive entrepreneurship training to help identify the right market for their products. Eight teams will advance to Propel, receiving an additional $20,000 in funding and three months of expert-led training to fine-tune their business models and validate their business hypotheses.
“These early-stage innovators have ideated promising solutions that have the potential to transform their fields,” said VentureWell Program Officer Katie Solley. “The E-Team Program will equip these teams with the tools and expertise to identify their pathways to practical impact and test their business models.”
This cohort encompasses innovative solutions spanning diverse focus areas, including healthcare and sustainability. Gorginea Care, selected for Pioneer, is redesigning the Pap smear device to make cervical cancer screening more comfortable, less invasive, and more accessible. Curbon, selected for Propel, is developing a software platform that conducts product-level environmental assessments to enable companies to optimize the cost and sustainability of products through data-driven design decisions.
Learn more about the latest cohort of Pioneer and Propel teams and the challenges they are addressing:
Agriculture
Featherweight Devices | Tufts University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Samer Sonkusale
Team Members: Rachel Riccio, Surya Varchasvi Devaraj
Featherweight Devices is developing a wearable platform to continuously and non-invasively detect and quantify stress in animals to inform impacts of climate change and improve management of livestock.
Energy/Materials
ACC Industries | Loyola University Maryland
Principal Investigator: Jonathan Weinstein
Team Members: Carlos Cardoza, Connor Pavlik
ACC Industries is developing a modular electric vehicle (EV) battery and AI-enabled management system to replace and recycle single cells, eliminating hazardous waste as a result of destroying the entire battery pack.
BluCore Minerals | California State University, San Bernardino
Principal Investigator: Dr. Kimberly Cousins
Team Members: Jacob Estrada, Raymond Moorehead Jr.
BluCore Minerals decentralizes lithium extraction by recovering critical minerals from industrial wastewater using a patented liquid-to-liquid process.
Elyton | University of Connecticut
Principal Investigator: Dr. Alexander Dupuy
Team Members: Krish Bhuva, Colin Sheardwright
Elyton is building a cost-effective, automated, universal, non-contact finishing solution initially targeted at shops that work with metal additive manufacturing and hard-to-machine metals.
MicroHues | Missouri University of Science and Technology
Principal Investigator: Dr. Julie Semon
Team Members: Karley Butts, Adrianna Sasser
MicroHues is developing a water-based paint made from microalgal pigments to replace traditional acrylic paints that is safe for the environment and people, biodegradable, and non-toxic.
Environment
CapCycle Creations | University of South Florida
Principal Investigator: Dr. Thomas Henry Culhane
Team Members: Melina Korovessi, Rachel Tang
CapCycle Creations is upcycling plastic waste into higher-quality products to create a circular system of waste management.
Healthcare/Medical
Colvida | North Carolina State University, Raleigh
Principal Investigator: Matthew Penny
Team Members: Jonathan Badillo, Casey Byrne
Colvida is developing an innovative fecal management system integrating automated pressure control, layered retention, and adhesive sealing to prevent complications such as hospital-acquired pressure injuries and infections, and incontinence-associated dermatitis.
Gorginea Care | Georgia Institute of Technology, Main Campus
Principal Investigator: Yolanda Payne
Team Members: Sophia Bereket, Shalom Ejiwunmi
Gorginea Care is redesigning the Pap smear device to make cervical cancer screening more comfortable, less invasive, and more accessible.
IV-Safe Passive Alarm | University of Washington, Seattle
Principal Investigator: Dr. Gregory Valentine
Team Members: Surbhi Kakar, Wren Kitchings
The IV-Safe Passive Alarm is a low-cost, non-electric IV securement patch that passively signals for signs of IV failure: swelling and leakage around the insertion site.
Locus | Washington University in St. Louis
Principal Investigator: Dr. Joe Klaesner
Team Members: Guarish Agrawal, Jacqueline Chuang
Locus Suit is a sensory wearable that restores spatial awareness for people with visual impairment through intuitive haptic feedback, supporting safe and independent mobility.
Lumenate Medical | Johns Hopkins University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Youseph Yazdi
Team Members: Jack Darbonne, Haley Slosberg
Lumenate Medical is developing an AI-assisted, catheter-based bladder imaging tool enabling non-urologists to capture diagnostic cystoscopy images for asynchronous urologist review, expanding access to care and accelerating bladder screening.
MedIQ Health LLC | Rice University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Bilal Ghosn
Team Members: Patrick Bednarz, Suran Somawardana
MedIQ Health is developing a smart inhaler clip-on and mobile platform that measures airway inflammation and inhaler adherence to predict asthma exacerbations and enable proactive, personalized care.
Menopatch | Carle Illinois College of Medicine
Principal Investigator: Dr. Beverly London
Team Members: Logan Carlson, Tanisha Kaur
Menopatch is a customizable transdermal patch using a syringe port and hydrogel to deliver personalized, 30-day hormone therapy, replacing fixed-dose patches with a long-acting, precise solution.
Motilix | Texas A&M University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Saurabh Biswas
Team Members: Parth Baware, Marie Strittmatter
Motilix delivers a novel wearable that detects and treats post-operative ileus (a temporary suspension of normal bowel function following surgery) through real-time sensing and neurostimulation, shortening recovery time and lowering hospital costs.
PADÍ | University of California, Los Angeles
Principal Investigator: Dr. Ketema Paul
Team Members: Favour Adesoye, Titilope Olotu
PADÍ is a sustainable, disposable, bio-sensing menstruation pad paired with a data-tracking app that provides actionable reproductive health insights.
SonoSim BioModel | Texas A&M University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Rick Silva
Team Members: Joshua Norton, Joshua Robert
SonoSim BioModel is a next-generation ultrasound testing platform designed to accelerate development and validation of wearable and point-of-care ultrasound technologies by integrating tissue-mimicking materials, anatomically accurate vascular channels, and programmable flow profiles to re-create human-like Doppler waveforms across a range of physiologic and disease states, including portal hypertension.
Infrastructure/Building
Aerogen Systems | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Principal Investigator: Nilton De Oliveira Renno
Team Members: Grace Pizzini, Noah Vogel
Aerogen Systems develops sustainable air-quality solutions that break down harmful air pollutants into safer compounds using photocatalytic oxidation, eliminating the need for disposable air filters.
Sanitation/Water
CRIO Systems | Illinois Institute of Technology
Principal Investigator: Dr. David Lampert
Team Members: Trevin Cox, Michael Sansone
CRIO Systems’ DrainWatch is a modular system for monitoring water levels in urban drainage infrastructure, informing its operation and forecasting flooding risk to protect human and ecological health.
Environment
Curbon | Princeton University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Chris Greig
Team Members: Joe Wahba, Alan Zhang
The rise of “fast fashion” has transformed the textile industry into one of the largest polluters, releasing more greenhouse gas emissions than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Curbon is a software platform that conducts product-level environmental assessments, enabling companies to optimize the cost and sustainability of consumer products through data-driven design decisions. Users will be able to make more informed decisions and better understand their contribution to climate change.
Healthcare/Medical
BlueHealer | Johns Hopkins University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Youseph Yazdi
Team Members: Mitchell Lipke, Santiago Sanchez Renteria, Jay Tailor
Roughly 150,000 patients lose a limb every year due to the failure of current revascularization procedures. BlueHealer is a breakthrough orthovascular implant for limb salvage late-stage peripheral vascular disease patients. This novel solution harnesses the body’s natural healing response to grow new blood vessels, restore blood flow, heal chronic wounds, and ultimately save limbs.
Capicú Technologies | University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
Principal Investigator: Dr. Wilfredo Lugo
Team Members: Sebastian Cruz Romero, Luis Luna-Betancourt, Shenied Maldonado Guerra
Capicú Technologies’ innovation, CareOutpost, empowers nurses in remote clinics to convert scattered event and device data into structured health records without depending on the internet or infrastructure. This solution will help to streamline medical documentation and enhance medical care in rural areas.
CuffWay | University of South Carolina, Columbia
Principal Investigator: Dr. Jeff Savage
Team Members: Shrihan Ganesh Babu, Jordan Lisnow
It’s estimated that up to 20 million endotracheal intubations are performed in U.S. hospitals each year, but the procedure can result in significant tracheal injuries, aspiration, and ventilator-associated pneumonia, due to poor cuff pressure management. CuffWay is a smart medical device designed to increase respiratory safety by effectively regulating cuff pressures of endotracheal tubes.
Malleous | University of Pittsburgh
Principal Investigator: Dr. Harvey Borovetz
Team Members: Amna Imran, Benjamin Leslie
Malleous is developing a novel surgical instrument that combines suction and retraction tools into one device while maintaining the retractor’s malleable and bendable properties. This innovation aims to increase surgeon efficiency and effectiveness by reducing surgical duration and patient risk.
Vitalis | New York University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Richard Stein
Team Members: Raynard Abdullai, Rayan Bargouth, Asser Elashwah
In an effort to amplify the healing process, Vitalis is developing BioBlend—a point-of-care injectable scaffold device that converts autologous platelet-rich plasma (PRP) into a localized, bioresorbable, implantable gel for early-stage tendon preservation in orthopedic care.
Information Technology/Communication
Ascend Quantum | Fordham University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Ying Mao
Team Members: Zefan Du, Shuwen Kan
Quantum computers have the potential to generate high-quality solutions to societal and environmental challenges, but they’re expensive and primarily used by large corporations. Ascend Quantum is developing a vendor-neutral workflow optimization platform to accelerate quantum applications—such as AI, climate modeling, and drug discovery—for energy-efficient computing.
Manufacturing
SafePlate Technologies Inc. | California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Principal Investigator: Dr. Thomas Katona
Team Members: Nahal Sadeghian, Avery Taylor
According to the Food Institute, food recalls surged in 2025, with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issuing more than 570 recalls—a 15.4% increase from the year prior. SafePlate brings lab-grade food contaminant testing directly to manufacturers with a reusable device delivering rapid, reliable, and quantitative results, reducing recalls and improving safety.
Meet the Spring 2026 E-Team Program Partners and Sponsors
We are thankful to the dedicated partners that work with us to support these ventures, including The Lemelson Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the power of invention to improve lives; Qualcomm, a leading wireless tech innovator; Cooley LLP, an international law firm spurring the power of innovation through working with clients in the technology, life sciences, and high-growth industries. We share an additional thank you to Cooley LLP for hosting our spring 2026 training workshops.
The E-Team Program Entrepreneurial Journey
Our spring 2026 cohort teams will begin rigorous entrepreneurship training to advance their innovations. During Pioneer, teams will identify the ideal market for their invention, understand potential venture pathways, and define their unique value within the industry landscape. Teams that move on to Propel will form and test their business model hypotheses, fleshing out their business model canvases and verifying them through customer interviews, and working on building their intellectual property portfolios. Participants in our spring workshops will convene in Boston, Massachusetts, at the Cooley LLP office, April 22-23 (Pioneer) and May 13-14 (Propel).
About the E-Team Program
Through the E-Team Program, we have trained 630+ student teams and 2,200+ early-stage innovators. The teams have raised more than $623 million in follow-on funding and launched over 270 ventures since participating in our program.
Learn more about VentureWell’s E-Team Program, which supports student-led science- and engineering-based teams from across the nation in bringing their high-impact innovations out of the lab and into the market.