Inside Philadelphia's startup surge: 16 ventures to watch right now
A recent report from Startup Genome and the Global Entrepreneurship Network ranked Philly as the 13th best place in the world to start a company. The report called out the region's focus on life sciences, AI, big data, robotics and advanced manufacturing.
Longtime ecosystem supporters like Ben Franklin Technology Partners know there's no shortage of promising new companies emerging from the Philadelphia scene, and they deserve attention for both the innovative solutions they're creating and the value they're adding to the local community. Explore the roundup below for a sampling of these notable startups, and check out the full articles to learn more about the companies and their stories.
CollX
CollX's app uses AI to scan, identify and price trading cards. The platform also has a marketplace, where users can buy and sell cards.
CollX launched in 2021 as a tool to help trading card collectors understand the value of their cards. The platform has a visual search function that scrapes pricing data from other websites to estimate how much cards are worth.
AmorSui, a sustainable personal protective equipment (PPE) company founded in Philadelphia by Beau Wangtrakuldee in 2018, was created to solve several problems with PPE, not least of which is the fact that it often doesn't fit all body types or protect from lab accidents.
Finding a better lab coat — one that was designed for a smaller-framed woman rather than an average-sized man, made of material that protected the skin — turned out to be a fruitless endeavor. By 2015, when Wangtrakuldee was doing her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, she realized while taking a course on entrepreneurship that the business potential for higher quality, better-fitting lab coats was there.
DrayNow
Conshohocken-based DrayNow uses tech to move shipping containers on the first and last mile of their shipping journeys with a namesake app that Michael Dugas, director of business enablement for DrayNow describes as 'Uber for truck drivers.' Independent container truck drivers with their own vehicles use the DrayNow app to find jobs transporting freight.
SFA Therapeutics
The venture-backed SFA Therapeutics is developing multiple autoimmune disease-treating drugs, all based on a platform technology called SFA that was discovered by Mark Feitelson of Temple University, the startup's chief scientific officer.
Keriton
In 2016, Laura Carpenter, a lactation consultant with the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania, set out to find a better way to manage breast milk feeding in the NICU. She wasn't a technologist herself, so she brought the challenge to Penn Engineering's PennApps hackathon, with support from the Penn Center for Innovation.
The topic struck a chord with Vidur Bhatnagar, a hackathon participant who had personal experience with the NICU from the patient side. Bhatnagar would become the founder of Keriton, a NICU feeding technology app now used in dozens of hospitals across the country.
Bainbridge Health
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) spinout Bainbridge Health has been collecting and analyzing medical data since 2016. It has a goal of streamlining the hospital data aggregation and analysis process to give clinicians the information they need to make their work both safer for the patients and more efficient, with less wasted medicine.
Strados Labs
Strados developed the RESP Biosensor, an FDA 510(k)-cleared wearable device that allows researchers and clinicians to remotely capture lung sounds between in-person clinical visits.
The product is a wearable device that adheres to the chest. In real time, it records lung sound data and securely transfers it to a mobile app and the Strados cloud, where the sound data can be remotely identified by machine learning algorithms. The reports it generates show every cough, wheeze and crackle of the lungs, with timestamps.
American Treatment Network
American Treatment Network CEO Matthew Sullivan founded the Havertown, Pennsylvania-based company in 2018 to address the opioid and mental health crises by emphasizing treatment that integrates treating both addiction and mental illness by prioritizing the inpatient care that may follow an emergency room visit with accessible, ongoing outpatient care.
AnaOno
At the age of 27, Dana Donofree was diagnosed with breast cancer.
She took her experience in fashion design and created AnaOno in 2014, a startup that makes bras designed for multiple breast cancer surgery outcomes. The name is a play on her own — it's Dana Donofree, 'DD free.'
GoWell
When Holly Adams worked as a benefits consultant helping businesses navigate health insurance enrollment, she knew there had to be a better way.
For more than a decade, she watched as employers and employees struggled with complicated enrollment processes, long questionnaires and tech that wasn't as accessible as she knew it could be.
She took what she'd learned and came up with GoWell Benefits, a platform launched in 2021 that simplifies the enrollment process for employers with an easy and accessible way to insure employees.
Atalan
When healthcare employees are overworked, they're likely to leave — and that can be a serious problem for the health system.
Hiring is expensive. Workplaces with high turnover rates tend to have less employee satisfaction, but when employers ask their employees if they're satisfied, they don't always get straightforward answers that show what the risk of burnout really is.
To address these issues, startup founders Tiffany Chan and Sisi Hu, an engineer and a postdoc labor economist who met doing climate change work at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, cofounded Atalan, a mission-oriented company with a platform that uses machine learning to help healthcare systems identify workplace risk factors that drive healthcare professionals to leave, in 2022.
Yellowdig
Yellowdig, a community-focused learning platform, was founded in 2015 by Shaunak Roy. At the time, highly collaborative experiential learning was an impactful trend in education — one that took a hit when the pandemic moved students out of classrooms and into virtual meetings.
That shift was an opportunity for Yellowdig.
Yellowdig uses technology to foster a more experiential learning environment with engagement and collaboration that enhances what students learn in the classroom.
Lithero
In life sciences, everything takes longer.
Nyron Burke, cofounder and CEO of the Philadelphia-based AI for life sciences company Lithero, learned that through years of working as a consultant with pharmaceutical companies that were always looking for ways to speed up the process of creating marketing materials.
What may seem relatively simple, like a pharmaceutical pamphlet for a doctor's office, can take months to finalize due to compliance issues. The final draft, with its medical language and side effects disclosures, has to be just right, requiring multiple reviews by medical lawyers before it goes to print.
Burke founded Lithero in 2015, years before AI became a common part of everyday life. He knew that machine learning could make the process considerably faster by screening for compliance issues before a medical lawyer reviews it, cutting down on the number of reviews — and, crucially, time.
Tolerance Bio
Tolerance Bio focuses on preserving the body's immune system by restoring the function of an organ called the thymus. The organ, long believed to be as useful in adults as the appendix (that is, not at all), may actually be the key to slower aging and prolonged life spans.
Now, Tolerance Bio is moving toward the first trials of its proprietary stem cell therapy, focusing first on children born without a thymus.
Audigent
Audigent's framework for advertisers and publishers allows customers to target their key demographics, as all adtech tools do. The difference with Audigent, now headquartered in NYC, is that it prioritizes the privacy of its potential customers by never using cookies (those small files that websites use to track users' online behavior). Instead, it uses data from partners, like music streamers, media companies and sports sites.
Lula Commerce
Lula Commerce provides a platform for small retailers to offer online shopping and delivery to their customers using popular apps like DoorDash, UberEats and GrubHub, making it easy for their customers to do business with them online.
With Lula, stores that may not have the resources to hire their own team of developers can have a site that integrates multiple ecommerce channels, direct customer service, inventory and returns. In the four years since its founding, the company has rapidly expanded to serve thousands of locations across 44 states.
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