Faculty Startups

startup

Purdue Engineering is a thriving launch pad for entrepreneurship. Collaborating with industry partners, we offer mutually beneficial opportunities for students, faculty and alumni to turn laboratory innovations into high-impact business ventures.

The Purdue Foundry exists to help Purdue students, faculty and local alumni move ideas to the marketplace more quickly. It is a place to transform innovators into entrepreneurs by providing advice on entity formation, ideation, market analysis and business model development. We are focused on helping individuals at Purdue who have business or product ideas and want to turn them into a company. The process and passion for the success of each company is driven by the entrepreneur and while the Foundry provides support, education and additional tools to help each client reach success.

AccuPS

Founder & COO: Byunghoo Jung

“Easy-to-use Virtual Reality for Everyone!” AccuPS is a tech startup providing a high definition 3D interaction solutions. The first product, AeroWand, is a 3D controller for virtual reality (VR) applications. The easy-to-use yet powerful 3D controller will make VR available to everyone at low cost.

Bionode

Co-Founder & CTO: Pedro Irazoqui

Bionode is innovating bioelectronic medical devices. The company’s primary focus is on delivering a device with the potential for regulating elevated intraocular pressure (IOP) in glaucoma. Glaucoma is the second leading cause of irreversible blindness, worldwide. The use of “electroceuticals” offers a higher degree of control over biological functions and disease states than pharmaceuticals, while avoiding unwanted side effects. It represents the ultimate in personalized medicine. Bionode has secured rights to a rich intellectual property portfolio, licensed out of the Purdue Research Foundation’s Office of Technology Commercialization. These underlying technologies, comprising the bionode platform, were invented by the company’s co-founder, Prof. Pedro Irazoqui and his team at the Center for Implantable Devices at Purdue University’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. The IP of the company can be repurposed to address a range of other pathological conditions.

DaVista Technologies, LLC

Co-Founder: David Ebert

Davista Technologies is a leader in visual analytics products that enables companies to make better decisions from large, disparate and complex datasets. Our company was spawned out of a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence and we have established relationships with several government and corporate entities that use our products every day. 

DFTx

Co-Founder & CIO: Pedro Irazoqui

We are a medical device software company headquartered in Indianapolis, IN. We have specific expertise in developing and deploying closed-loop control solutions for 3rd-party implantable and over-the-counter neurostimulators. Our EXACT™ therapy solutions transform an arduous device-programming interface from a complicated set of adjustable stimulus parameters to a simple set of dials that directly control nerve activity. EXACT™ automatically selects the optimal stimulus waveform to ensure a constant physiological response, eliminating uncertainty for physicians and end users. EXACT™ unlocks the potential of neurostimulators that have remained virtually unchanged for well over a decade and opens new markets for disease management tools that may be purchased without a prescription. DFTx targets chronic pain, urinary incontinence, inflammation, autonomic imbalance, heart failure, high blood pressure and bronchospasm.

MedNoxa LLC

Chief Technology Officer: Babak Ziaie

In 2016, over $82B was spent on wound care in the United States and $15B of direct spending on treating diabetic ulcers alone. Significantly, over-the-counter wound care is a $6B+ market. While, MedNoxa is initially positioned for use on diabetic ulcers, the broader wound markets of acute, chronic and surgical wounds are also relevant. These markets generated revenues in excess of $50B. The initial addressable market for MedNoxa is estimated at well over $1B and expands to over $6B with follow-on expansion into additional market segments. 

Mobile Enerlytics

Co-Founder & CEO: Y. Charlie Hu

Leveraging nearly a decade’s worth of research into smart phone energy management, Mobile Enerlytics is a leader in mobile application testing solutions that lead to better app performance, user experience, and potentially billions of dollars in additional captured revenue. Today, the company works with some of the world’s leading app marketers, enhancing the performance of their apps through more efficient management of energy consumption. Mobile Enerlytics’ core technologies are protected by three patents.  

MR-Link

Co-Founder & President: Zhongming Liu

MR-Link aims to deliver novel medical devices for physiological recording and stimulation during concurrent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) based on technologies developed at Purdue University. Imaging, recording, and stimulation are complementary ways to study the structures, functions, and pathologies of the brain. Our products are unique, affordable, and offer a scalable solution to integrate multiple diagnostic imaging techniques and their respective benefits. The company’s long-term goal is developing its technology to deliver an affordable and MRI-compatible EEG system to the clinical human market. The path the company will take to reach this goal is to primarily cater its products to the animal research market to refine the technology for clinical trials, FDA approval process, and ultimately meet the standard required in the clinical setting for human subjects. We at MR-Link believe that our technology will accelerate the progress in the understanding, diagnosis, and prevention of various brain disorders and enable researchers and clinicians to develop novel treatment plans with improved success rates and a better quality of care for patients. Recently, MR-Link received a Federal grant from NIH, an STTR for $230K, to develop their technology.

Nano-Meta Technologies, Inc.

Co-Founder & Scientific Director: Vladimir Shalaev
Co-Founder & Scientific Advisor: Alexandra Boltasseva
VP for Research: Alexander Kildishev

Nano-Meta Technologies, Inc. develops and commercializes intellectual property. It focuses on plasmonics, nanophotonics, and metamaterials for optical and quantum technologies. The company offers nanoantennas for heat-assisted magnetic data recording, ultra-thin optical elements, metasurfaces, and chemical/bio/medical sensing and probing applications; hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) and HMM-based metasurfaces for various applications, including enhanced light emission from light-emitting diodes and organic LEDs, HMM-enhanced photolithography, and HMM-enhanced sensing, as well as beam steering, pulse shaping, and spatial light modulation; CMOS-compatible plasmonic materials for various applications, which include chip-integrated high-density optical interconnects, absorbers and energy concentrators, thermal radiation control, omni-directional light absorbers, and in-water absorbers/light-absorbing particles; and single-photon light sources for optical computing, quantum, communications, cryptography, and computing applications. Its products are used in LED/OLED displays and lighting, data storage, renewable energy, digital imaging and optics, quantum information processing, sensors, and other markets. The company was incorporated in 2010 and is based in West Lafayette, Indiana.

QURA

Co-Founder: Pedro Irazoqui

The ability to constantly collect long-term physiological data without disturbing experimental animals remains a challenge. Additionally, the ability to collect such data in human patients in their normal lives is difficult. Collecting this long term data in very small compartments within an animal or human is an added challenge and is often impossible. QURA is developing a series of ultra-miniature implantable devices/tools that will overcome these challenges and allow long term monitoring within very small spaces. These miniaturized tools will have potential to transform physiologic monitoring in biomedicine and other applications. In the long term, we envision networks of smart, miniaturized tools that communicate and respond to each other in real time. Networked devices will interact to both monitor disease and administer timely treatments. The development of these devices has great potential to revolutionize both research abilities and human clinical treatment.

SmartGait LLC

Co-Founder & CEO: Babak Ziaie

SmartGait LLC (established 2015) markets portable and reliable technologies for evaluating fall-risk in older adults and other balance-compromised individuals. The company is based in West Lafayette, Indiana and is a spin-off of interdisciplinary research conducted at Purdue University by Professors Shirley Rietdyk (Health and Kinesiology) and Babak Ziaie (Electrical and Computer Engineering).
 
Falls adversely impact health, result in substantive medical costs, and are the leading cause of accidental death in older adults. Falls result in chronic pain, functional impairment, disability, and nursing home admission. Identifying fall risk before a fall occurs is critical for timely deployment of preventive measures and to ensure that limited resources are allocated to the appropriate patients. To aid with this, SmartGait LLC is developing a portable system for gait and balance (sway) assessment. We are currently beta testing its flagship products, SmartGaitTM and SwayWatchTM in the local community. The systems provide quick and easy balance and gait assessments to large cohorts to alert users or caregivers about fall-risk and changing health, to take preventive action. The data collected is processed by the system to provide immediate feedback; additionally, the data is stored online on a HIPAA protected system, where it can be accessed by clients for detailed health reports and analysis.

VinSense

Co-Founder: David Ebert

VinSense is an Indiana LLC formed in March 2015 by three Purdue University professors to offer an innovative decision support software system that allows high value perennial crop growers to make better crop management decisions during the growing season. The first component generates a low-cost, high precision soil map that enables the collection of high resolution information about moisture in soil profiles across the landscape. The second component harnesses the information collected by the precision 3D soil map and creates visual analytic tools to transform massive volume environmental sensor data into crop management decisions. Together, the integrated system will help producers make data-driven decisions based on real-time sensed data to improve their water management, crop management, and economic and ecological sustainability.