Twenty-seven student teams have been chosen for the E-Team Program summer 2026 cohort. These teams were selected from a competitive pool of applicants, distinguished by their innovative thinking, potential to make a positive impact with novel science- and technology-enabled solutions, and commitment to confronting unmet challenges in healthcare, information technology, infrastructure, and other important sectors.
Twenty 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. Seven 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.
“These early-stage innovators are developing novel solutions that address persistent social, health, and environmental challenges,” said VentureWell Program Officer Sarah Wharmby. “The E-Team Program will equip students with the tools, resources, and guidance from expert mentors to explore commercialization pathways and opportunities to test their assumptions.”
This cohort encompasses innovative solutions spanning a broad range of focus areas. Coincident Systems STAT, selected for Pioneer, is transforming medical emergency response coordination with technology that routes patients to care facilities based on personalized inputs like injury severity, on-duty surgical teams, and specialist availability. Aerogen Systems, selected for Propel, is developing sustainable air quality solutions that break down harmful pollutants into safer compounds, eliminating the need for disposable air filters.
Learn more about the latest cohort of Pioneer and Propel teams and the challenges they are addressing:
Agriculture
SmartCompost | Grambling State University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Jeewan Pokhrel
Team Members: Romeo Appiah Adu, Ernest Pae
SmartCompost is a sensor-equipped probe and app that tracks herbicide breakdown in compost, giving farmers a clear signal when their soil is safe and ready for their crops.
Energy/Materials
Thermal Charge | Texas A&M University
Principal Investigator: Patrick Shamberger
Team Members: Bryn Jenkins, Lucas Oelkers
Thermal Charge’s venture uses advanced, patent-pending phase change materials to build low-cost thermal batteries that make home heating and cooling more efficient, reducing homeowner electricity costs, improving heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) efficiency, and easing strain on the electric grid.
Environment
Reespire | Babson College
Principal Investigator: Andrew Corbett
Team Members: Tavishi Chaturvedi, Yashwanth KV
Reespire is building a compact, patent-pending carbon-capture device—the size of a mini-fridge—that connects to any boiler, exhaust pipe, installs in hours, and removes up to 70% of emissions using the boiler’s own waste heat at almost no added energy cost.
Wildfire Edge AI Camera Systems | University of Nevada, Reno
Principal Investigator: Lei Yang
Team Members: Hossein Jamali, Tina Samavat
Wildfire Edge AI Camera Systems is developing an AI-powered camera system that enables real-time, early-stage wildfire detection and actionable alerts for rapid response and risk mitigation, enhancing climate resilience by reducing wildfire impacts on communities, ecosystems, and critical infrastructure.
Healthcare/Medical
Aegis Medical | North Carolina State University
Principal Investigator: Matthew Penny
Team Members: Katherine McCormack, Yashica Paramkusham
Aegis Medical is developing a mesh-integrated specimen retrieval bag that uniformly compresses specimens during surgical extraction, enabling removal through smaller incisions while maintaining tissue integrity and workflow compatibility.
Auxetica | Northwestern University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Christopher Ahuja
Team Members: Sepehr Khavari, Batool Salman
Auxetica is developing smart-material auxetic orthopedic implants—including bone plates, screws, hip replacement stems, and rods—that expand when stretched to maintain mechanical support while enabling more natural load transfer to bone. Unlike common titanium orthopedic implants, which can prevent healthy regeneration, Auxetica’s implants aim to accelerate bone healing, strengthen regeneration, and reduce recovery times.
BioProbe | Vanderbilt University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Anita Mahadevan-Jansen
Team Members: Han Dong, Parker Willmon
BioProbe is developing a handheld, multimodal, label-free surgical probe that helps surgeons identify parathyroid glands, assess blood flow, and detect nerves in real time to reduce post-surgical complications, improve patient outcomes, and lower healthcare costs.
CaroRhythm | New York University
Principal Investigator: Stephen Kim
Team Members: Aryan Miyani, Lokesh Sharma
CaroRhythm is building CaroSense, a wearable device to continuously monitor the carotid artery—the primary conduit for clots reaching the brain—to detect recurrent ischemic stroke, notifying patients to seek care early and capturing their last known well state for physicians.
Clearview-Jaw | University of Pittsburgh
Principal Investigator: Dr. Anish Ghodadra
Team Members: William McKay, Amogh Vellore
Clearview-Jaw is a 3D-printed, personalized jaw reconstruction plate made with radiation-compatible materials that eliminates intraoperative bending and improves imaging during post-op care for head and neck cancer patients.
Coincident Systems STAT | Montana State University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Bernadette McCrory
Team Members: Michael Poplin, Alexander Westlund
Coincident Systems STAT transforms fragmented emergency coordination into an integrated decision-support platform that helps transfer coordinators route patients faster and more reliably. Their technology provides emergency responders with current information on hospital availability and capabilities, on-duty surgical teams and specialist availability, weather conditions, and terrain-adjusted transport times to recommend optimal destinations so patients can receive care more quickly.
DepoNeedle Therapeutics | University of Connecticut
Principal Investigator: Dr. Ali Tamayol
Team Members: Reinier Gonzalez Heredia, Steven Toro
DepoNeedle Therapeutics is developing a handheld mechanical device that creates spatially controlled microchannels directly in the wound bed at the point of care, improving uptake of skin substitutes and biologic dressings.
DermaMech | New Jersey Institute of Technology
Principal Investigator: Farid Alisafaei
Team Members: Mohammad Jafari, Aditya Sharma
DermaMech is developing an AI-powered medical device platform that transforms skin grafting by enabling precise, patient-specific design of meshed grafts to improve healing outcomes, reduce complications, and lower healthcare costs.
Elevair | Johns Hopkins University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Youseph Yazdi
Team Members: Nishtaa Modi, Sanjana Ramanathan
Elevair is a wearable neural interface that relieves chronic shortness of breath on demand by modifying the brain’s processing of the symptom, offering patients an opioid-free symptom-relief paradigm.
NeurElectrum | The Pennsylvania State University
Principal Investigator: Tao Zhou
Team Members: Luyi Feng, Marzia Momin
NeurElectrum is addressing the urgent need for more accessible neural implants for patients with severe neurological disorders by developing scalable, patient-specific devices that enable safer, more precise brain-computer interfaces and neuromodulation therapies.
OptiMargin | Stony Brook University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Louis Pena
Team Members: Zachery Harris, Aaron Park
OptiMargin is developing a robotically mounted Spatial Frequency Domain Imaging (SFDI) system—a non-contact, wide-field modality that uses structured light to derive tissue optical properties—for real-time assessment during minimally invasive procedures, providing surgeons with dynamic control over scanning and the ability to overcome white-light limitations without extensive training.
PosTrue | University of California, Merced
Principal Investigator: Dr. Shijia Pan
Team Members: Dong Yoon Lee, Shubham Rohal
PosTrue is a muscle health monitoring device that measures muscle stiffness to provide athletes and trainers with objective muscle readings to make informed training decisions and avoid injuries.
PURA | University of North Dakota
Principal Investigator: Dr. Pantea Tavakolian
Team Members: Lina Bouakkaz, Mina Molani
PURA is a handheld, noninvasive, AI-powered device that integrates multimodal spectroscopy with thermal and color imaging to detect early tissue changes before pressure injuries develop, providing objective, real-time, operator-independent risk assessment across all skin tones while reducing patient costs and improving equitable care.
SparkHeal | University of California, Los Angeles
Principal Investigator: Jun Chen
Team Members: Sujit Silas Armstrong Suthahar, Kanishk Rai
SparkHeal is developing a self-powered wound dressing that delivers continuous electrical stimulation using body motion—which has already demonstrated accelerated wound closure in preclinical studies—eliminating the need for external devices and improving healing outcomes.
Infrastructure/Building
AeroCem | Stevens Institute of Technology
Principal Investigator: Weina Meng
Team Members: Nusrath Jaha, Zhan Jiang
AeroCem is a cement-based aerogel composite that combines insulation, fire resistance, and structural strength into a single, scalable material for safer, more efficient building envelopes that create a barrier between interior and external environments.
Sanitation/Water
CureXco | University of Washington, Seattle
Principal Investigator: Dr. Igor Novosselov
Team Members: Anmol Purohit, Ria Purohit
CureXco regenerates per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)–contaminated water treatment media using a proprietary, supercritical carbon dioxide (CO2) process that achieves over 97% PFAS removal in under one hour with no secondary wastewater, eliminating landfill waste and enabling repeated media use.
Agriculture
Verdura Automations | New Jersey Institute of Technology
Principal Investigator: Oksana Manzhura
Team Members: Kermina David, Santiago Garcia
For small, commercial greenhouses with limited labor and capital, missed irrigation or unstable climate can quickly lead to crop loss and inefficiency. Verdura Automations is a smart, plug-and-play system that connects to existing greenhouse equipment to automate irrigation, ventilation, and climate control through modular hardware and intelligent software, helping growers manage operations more easily and improve efficiency without replacing their infrastructure.
Energy/Materials
BluCore Minerals | California State University, San Bernardino
Principal Investigator: Dr. Kimberly Cousins
Team Members: Jacob Estrada, Raymond Moorehead Jr.
The U.S. currently faces a major shortage of lithium and other critical minerals essential for maintaining clean energy and national security. To solve this issue, BluCore Minerals is developing and commercializing a modular system using patented technology to transform industrial brine wastewater into a domestic source of valuable resources, which could improve industrial efficiency, create new revenue pathways for operators, and strengthen U.S. critical mineral supply chains.
Healthcare/Medical
IV-Safe Passive Alarm | University of Washington, Seattle
Principal Investigator: Dr. Gregory Valentine
Team Members: Surbhi Kakar, Wren Kitchings
Although over one billion peripheral intravenous (IV) catheters are placed worldwide each year, catheter failure continues to pose a significant healthcare challenge, especially in neonatal populations, where failure rates can reach 78%. Current diagnostic methods rely on inconsistent, unreliable visual cues. IV-Safe Passive Alarm is a low-cost, non-electric IV securement patch that passively detects signs of IV failure, such as swelling and leakage around the insertion site. By enabling earlier intervention, it has the potential to prevent thousands of severe IV failure events each year, improving patient outcomes, reducing hospital costs, and decreasing stress on burdened clinicians.
Lumenate Medical | Johns Hopkins University
Principal Investigator: Dr. Youseph Yazdi
Team Members: Jack Darbonne, Haley Slosberg
Bladder cancer is frequently diagnosed at advanced stages because a cystoscopy—a procedure in which a thin camera is inserted through the urethra to examine the bladder—requires a urologist to perform and interpret the procedure in real time. A growing shortage of urologists and increasing patient demand have created significant bottlenecks. As a result, more than 20,000 cases are missed annually, and five-year survival rates drop from 98% for early-stage disease to only 9% for late-stage diagnoses. Lumenate Medical is building an AI-enabled bladder imaging device that decouples image capture from interpretation, enabling non-urologist providers such as nurse practitioners and primary care providers to capture cystoscopic images independently, which are then routed to a urologist for asynchronous review, minimizing demand on a strained specialist workforce.
Nooriva | Stevens Institute of Technology
Principal Investigator: Dr. Jennifer Kang-Mieler
Team Members: Evan Peneiras, Sarah Peneiras
The gold standard for measuring intraocular pressure (IOP), Goldmann Applanation Tonometry, provides single in-office snapshots and often misses dynamic IOP spikes that contribute to the progression of glaucoma, a series of diseases that damage the optic nerve, affecting over 80 million people worldwide. Nooriva Smart Glasses deliver non-contact, bilateral IOP monitoring for 12 hours on a single charge, helping glaucoma specialists track disease progression and personalize care. Unlike costly, contact-based alternatives that carry the risk of corneal infection, Nooriva’s non-contact design avoids complications and is priced at less than half the cost of competing products.
Infrastructure/Building
Aerogen Systems | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Principal Investigator: Nilton De Oliveira Renno
Team Members: Jonathan Rinke, Andrew Salisbury
Aerogen Systems was established following a two-year NASA-inspired research project focused on improving air quality in spacecraft cabins. The team is developing sustainable air quality solutions that break down harmful air pollutants into safer compounds using photocatalytic oxidation, eliminating the need for disposable air filters, which trap pollutants and require frequent replacement. Aerogen Systems’ reactor offers a 3-5 year low-maintenance alternative that converts harmful volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into simpler byproducts such as carbon dioxide and water, reducing waste and breakthrough risk.
Sanitation/Water
CRIO Systems | Illinois Institute of Technology
Principal Investigator: Dr. David Lampert
Team Members: Trevin Cox, Beth Martini, Michael Sansone
Climate-Resilient Infrastructure Operation (CRIO) Systems is a hard-tech venture developing tools to help municipalities—particularly disinvested communities—operate critical infrastructure more effectively in a changing climate. Most cities manage drainage with complaint-driven maintenance, and heavier storms and limited budgets are making it more difficult for public works teams to proactively oversee operations. CRIO’s first product, DrainWatch, is a real-time sewer monitoring platform that integrates inexpensive sensors with physics-informed, machine learning–guided models. By providing continuous insight into sewer performance, DrainWatch enables public works teams to shift from reactive response toward preventive maintenance, improve early flood detection, and make more targeted capital investment decisions. The system also supports the operations of state-based infrastructure, including gates, valves, and pumps.
Meet the Summer 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; and Cooley LLP, an international law firm spurring the power of innovation through working with clients in the technology, life sciences, and high-growth industries. Thank you to Ashurst Perkins Coie for hosting our summer 2026 training workshops in Seattle, Washington.
The E-Team Program Entrepreneurial Journey
Our summer 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 canvas, verifying it through customer interviews, and working on building their intellectual property portfolio. Participants in our summer workshops will convene in Seattle at Perkins Coie July 22-23 (Pioneer) and August 5-6 (Propel).
About the E-Team Program
Through the E-Team Program, we have trained 650+ student teams and 2,300+ early-stage innovators. The teams have raised more than $639 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.