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Technical.ly
07-08-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
Robotics company Sojo Industries expands presence in PA with new production site
Power Moves is a recurring series where we chart the comings and goings of talent across the region. Got a new hire, gig or promotion? Email us at philly@ Several Southeastern Pennsylvania companies made mid-summer announcements about changes to their physical presence in the region. One of the bigger moves: Robotics company Sojo Industries is opening a new, 215k-sq.-ft. production facility in Langhorne Pennsylvania. And Ben Franklin Technology Partners is shifting its HQ from longtime home the Navy Yard to a new space in Center City. Plus, the University City Science Center announced its annual Nucleus Awards recipients, who will be honored this fall. Check out all the details and more power moves below the chart, where we look at the top 10 desirable skills for jobs right now and how many job postings request each skill. Sojo Industries expands PA footprint with new production facility Robotics company Sojo Industries announced the opening of a new production facility in Langhorne Pennsylvania. The 215,000-square-foot space will store products, put together product variety packs and assemble Sojo Flight 'rovers,' which are robotic platform conveyors that Sojo sends out to third-party facilities. The space will also be home to the company's customer success, product management and commercial departments. The company also has production facilities across the country in Texas, Indiana and California. This new space triples its footprint in Pennsylvania, as its headquarters is based in Bristol, PA. 'We're committed to growing here and we're also investing in the local economy by adding jobs in assembly, shipping and receiving, and automation technology,' founder and CEO Barak Bar-Cohen told 'This facility deepens our roots in Pennsylvania and reinforces our commitment to making it a long-term hub for our operations, innovation, and customer partnerships.' The four year old company has raised about $63 million to date, including a $40 million Series B earlier this summer. Ben Franklin Technology Partners leaving the Navy Yard after 25 years Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania will be moving this winter from its longtime office at the Navy Yard to a new space in Center City. The original vision for BFTP's Navy Yard space was to build an innovation hub for local companies, Scott Nissenbaum, president and CEO of Ben Franklin, told But the building didn't have much functional space to host those activities. The location was also inconvenient for a lot of the founders BFTP works with. The Navy Yard is difficult to access by public transportation and generally far from the action of the rest of the startup community, he said. BFTP's new office at 1600 Market Street is a more central location and has plenty of space to host, including a large classroom and board room. BFTP is hoping to expand programming for founders and invite more partners to come visit, Nissenbaum said. 'The goal would be to help reinforce the collaboration, the meeting and convening,' he said. The Navy Yard has been in the spotlight over the last few years as more development plans are announced, including millions of dollars invested from the state to expand manufacturing capabilities. 'What they're building down there, it can easily become a city within a city,' Nissenbaum said. 'But it wasn't about startups. The startup community from the Science Center down Market Street. There's much more activity there.' University City Science Center announces 2025 Nucleus Award Winners University City Science Center selected the four winners of its annual Nucleus Awards, recognizing leaders in Philly's innovation ecosystem. Nicholas A. Siciliano, CEO and cofounder of Vittoria Biotherapeutics, won the commercialization award. Investment firm 1315 Capital will take home the capital award. The cultivator award goes to Steven Hess, data analytics manager for PECO. The winner of this year's convener award is Donna Frisby-Greenwood, SVP of Philadelphia scientific advancement at Pew Charitable Trusts. 'Our 2025 Nucleus honorees are driving real change – bringing groundbreaking technologies to market, fueling investment, building and convening communities, and preparing the next generation of STEM leaders,' Tiffany Wilson, President and CEO of the Science Center, said. 'Their work reflects the values at the heart of the Science Center: innovation and impact.' More Power Moves: Biotech company Radiant Biotherapeutics announced Deborah Geraghty as its new CEO and president. The company is headquartered in both Chester County and Toronto. Serpent Robotics, which is developing a robotic system to assist tree cutters, was the overall winner of the Pennovation Accelerator's annual pitch day. Earable Intelligence, which is developing a wearable device that can detect seizures, won best pitch. Venture studio United Effects Ventures announced Paula Fontana as its new chief marketing officer. Global financial services company SEI chose Amy Sliwinski as the company's new executive vice president and chief people officer. Laurel Miller is the new executive director of Temple University's Institute of Business and Information Technology, taking over from founding executive director Munir Mandviwalla. Malvern-based marketing-as-a-service firm 2X appointed Amber Tobias as SVP of Corporate Development. The Science Center announced four new board members, Joseph G. Cacchione, Edward A. Chiosso, Anthony Lowman and Carol Lee Mitchell. The org's busy summer also includes partnerships with Oribiotech, bioMerieux and Pristinology to provide youth micro internships through its FirstHand educational program. Gene therapy company GemmaBio Therapeutics is partnering with the Department of Health in Abu Dhabi to establish manufacturing and research centers in the Middle East. The Chamber of Commerce of Greater Philadelphia selected Christopher Franklin as the new chair of its board of directors.
Technical.ly
03-07-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
How On the Goga is reimagining corporate employee wellness programs
Startup profile: On the Goga Founded by: Anna Greenwald Year founded: 2015 Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA Sector: Healthcare Funding and valuation: $1.3 million in funding, according to the company Key ecosystem partners: PIDC, Ben Franklin Technology Partners, University of Pennsylvania Anna Greenwald didn't dream of being a wellness entrepreneur. She came to Philadelphia from Madison, Wisconsin, in 2011 as an aspiring opera singer with an interest in entrepreneurship, attending Drexel University's music industry program. When a vocal cord injury derailed her plans, leaving her emotionally devastated, Greenwald's physician insisted she start taking yoga. 'My first thought was, absolutely not,' Greenwald, now the founder and CEO of the corporate wellness platform On the Goga, told 'I'm not a hippie, and I hate exercise, so why would I try yoga?' On the Goga — the name a mashup of 'on the go' and 'yoga' — is now a national employee wellness platform serving a diverse array of clients, from small companies to large enterprises. With a recent $300,000 seed extension and a mission to transform corporate wellness, the company is leveraging technology, AI and a pre-clinical approach to employee well-being. While employee behavior tracking is becoming increasingly popular with corporations, On the Goga doesn't incorporate individual monitoring into its platform, instead collecting the broader organizational data, aggregating it and shares findings with clients that they can act on. 'We can share insights to employers to say, hey, the top driver of burnout for your employees is meeting schedules,' Greenwald said. While the platform doesn't flag clients when employees may need clinical intervention, it acts as an integrator, making clinical employee resources, such as therapy benefits offered by the company, visible on the platform. A decade and two business models in, the company continues to evolve and grow. Yoga proved life-changing in more ways than one Greenwald, as you may have guessed, took her doctor's advice and made what would become the life-altering decision to try yoga. 'I happened to have this amazing yoga teacher in West Philly who was very mindfulness-based,' Greenwald said. 'No one was talking to me about anything that would have put me off — she just was like, 'this is what happens in your body when you breathe.'' Over the course of a year, she said, yoga changed her life, physically and cognitively. 'I was just a happier, healthier person because of this simple practice of breathing,' she said. Greenwald knew it wasn't some kind of magic. There was science behind it, and she dove into the research. She wanted other people — especially 'wellness skeptics' like her, who had preconceived notions of yoga and thought it wasn't for them — to transform themselves, too. The in-person early days She started On the Goga in 2015 as a sort of special-order yoga instructor who would come to clients' homes, workplaces and events. Clients included an Eagles player, bachelorette parties, and eventually, company HR directors looking to add yoga to their employee offerings. Very quickly, Greenwald saw the potential in employee yoga training. People who didn't 'get' yoga weren't likely to hire her, but through their employers, she could reach some of her fellow skeptics. 'I wanted to help other people realize that they already had all of the tools in themselves to change their lives,' she said. 'If I could deliver that through organizations that paid for this, for folks who would not otherwise be able to have access to these tools, that was the ultimate goal.' As the business grew from a solopreneurship venture to a small team in the late 2010s, On the Goga established itself as a local wellness company that brought yoga and mindfulness to the boardrooms of Philly companies in the never-ending battle against employee burnout. Greenwald led many classes herself, in person on site or at company retreats. It was about more than giving employees a break to center themselves. Greenwald recognized the potential of yoga and mindfulness to help companies thrive. 'Mindfulness is the foundation for all of the skills that help people to be leaders — empathy, perspective, foresight, objective thinking, boundary setting,' she said. 'We started doing leadership training, cooking, physical fitness, financial prosperity.' There was no tech platform in the early days, but the small team thought about the possibilities of making one. Meditation apps were growing in popularity, but there wasn't an app out there that did what On the Goga did for employees. Still, the in-person business model was working. That would all change in 2020, when the COVID pandemic hit. A costly but high-potential shift The in-person model of On the Goga didn't have much overhead, making it possible to bootstrap. When the company had to go virtual during the COVID lockdowns in 2020, it became clear that to shift toward being a tech platform, it was going to need outside funding. The first funding it received was a capital loan from the PIDC, a Philadelphia-based Community Development Financial Institution that helped the On the Goga team build the beta version of the tech platform. 'From that, it took off,' Greenwald said. 'We scaled with some incredible local partners.' By 2022 — which Greenwald considers to be the founding of the new On the Goga — it had become clear that the platform had legs. She applied to the national Techstars accelerator, and On the Goga was accepted. In 2023, it had its initial pre-seed. Its first seed round raised just under a million dollars from local investors, including Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Penn's Wharton Fund for Health and local angels. This year, it closed a $300,000 seed extension round in just three weeks. 'I think Philadelphia is one of the best cities in the world to start a business,' Greenwald said. 'We used the amazing Philadelphia network and community and some really fun, scrappy, guerrilla marketing tactics to get this thing off the ground.' Preventing burnout and maintaining a healthy workplace The On the Goga platform puts a wellness tool into the pockets of employees, with an app that can call up resources, wellness strategies and breathing exercises on demand, and allow them to attend live virtual workshops with coworkers. The idea is not to treat burnout, but to prevent everyday stresses from snowballing into a mental health crisis. 'We call it 'pre-clinical,'' Greenwald said. 'What we found through our years of experience is that if you wait to solve people's problems reactively after they're already experiencing them, you're waiting too long when it comes to organizational intervention.' More than anything, Greenwald seeks to redefine 'wellness' — a term that turns off a lot of people for a lot of reasons, from its 'hippie' associations to toxic workplace wellness programs that focus more on penalizing employees based on body mass index than on emotional safety. 'We want people to think of corporate wellness as, 'this is the best place to work,'' she said, noting that every expectation On the Goga places on its clients, it places on itself. As the client platform incorporates more AI (among other things, Greenwald has given talks on 'AI for emotionally intelligent leadership'), much of it starts at home base, with AI tools helping with productivity. A big focus right now, she said, is using AI to improve the bandwidth and burnout of On the Goga's own internal team. 'We're heavily leaning into developing workplace best practices around AI that are ethical, secure and supporting metrics on our team,' she said. 'Do you have enough time in the week to get things done? Do you have enough time in the week for creativity? And how is AI impacting these metrics that we know drive engagement and productivity over time?' It's all part of the reimagining. 'Our mission statement,' Greenwald said, 'is to make the future of work more human.'
Technical.ly
03-06-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
This startup's mission to extend human life sounds like sci-fi, and investors are betting $20M on it
Startup profile: Tolerance Bio Founded by: Francisco Leon Year founded: 2023 Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA Sector: Life sciences Funding and valuation: $20.2 million raised at an undisclosed valuation, according to the company Key ecosystem partners: Columbus Venture Partners, Ben Franklin Technology Partners When Francisco Leon talks about the medical science behind the biotech company he founded in 2023, it sounds like something out of a movie. The company, 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. 'Immune tolerance is at the core of almost all medical needs,' Leon told Now, Tolerance Bio is moving toward the first trials of its proprietary stem cell therapy, focusing first on children born without a thymus. The thymus, a small gland located behind the breastbone in the upper chest, controls immune tolerance by creating T-cells, white blood cells that fight infections and cancerous cells, and can also prevent the body from attacking healthy cells. It's a vital organ, but even in a perfectly healthy person, it only functions at 100% for the first two years of life, and then, Leon said, it starts to shrink. By adulthood, the thymus functions at just 10%, which is why the medical community didn't think it was needed in adults. That changed in 2023, when an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that the surgical removal of the residue of the thymus in adults led to an increase in the five-year mortality rates due to cancer and autoimmunity. Subsequent research in nursing homes, Leon said, found that the better the thymic function, the lower the incidence of cancer, autoimmunity and infection. 'That's why we started the company,' Leon said, 'we are trying to restore thymic function.' From genetic diseases to anti-aging One of the main focuses of Tolerance Bio's research and development is using its cell implantation therapy to cure DiGeorge syndrome, also known as 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, a genetic condition where a baby is born without a thymus, or with one that is underdeveloped. Children with this condition struggle to fight infections and often have heart problems or other serious medical issues. Restoring the thymus has the potential to save babies who, with cases of complete DiGeorge syndrome, have a life expectancy of two to three years without medical intervention. Since the thymus naturally loses functionality as a person ages, Leon and his team also aim to develop treatments for adults, including a drug for healthy people that could potentially delay aging and increase longevity. 'We can regenerate the thymus by implanting cells intramuscularly; it's a new science,' Leon said. It's yet to be proven in humans, but if they can show the principle in human patients, he said, they can potentially apply it to other conditions, including Type 1 diabetes, cancer, organ diseases, other immune deficiencies, and, potentially, Alzheimer's disease. A $20 million seed round Leon, who leads a hybrid team of 10 from Tolerance Bio headquarters at the B+labs incubator at the Cira Centre in Philadelphia, is an immunologist who came to the US from Spain 25 years ago. After starting out working for pharmaceutical companies, including helping to develop drugs in immunology and oncology, he became an entrepreneur, cofounding the drug development companies Celimmune (acquired by Amgen in 2017) and Provention (acquired by Sanofi in 2023). Provention developed the drug Tzield, which can delay the onset of Type 1 diabetes in at-risk patients. 'It was the first drug ever to delay the onset of an autoimmune disease,' Leon said. 'You give it to children that show signs of being about to become diabetic, but still don't need insulin.' By the time Sanofi acquired Provention, Leon was ready to turn his focus to preventing and regenerating the thymus. He started Tolerance Bio, initially as a concept, bringing two members of the Provention team with him and partnering with University of Florida academic Holger Russ as Tolerance Bio's scientific cofounder. Tolerance Bio closed a $20.2 million seed round in December 2024. Led by Columbus Venture Partners, it included Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Criteria Bio Ventures, Sessa Capital, BioAdvance, Pacific 8 Ventures and individual biotechnology investors with an interest in thymus regeneration. 'We now know that thymic evolution is the main limiter of human life — it is the beginning of aging,' Leon said. 'There is a strong correlation between thymic function and longevity in humans and animals.' 'This almost sounds like science fiction' Even the Tolerance Bio team is amazed at the potential. 'This almost sounds like science fiction, in some respects,' said Phil Ball, Tolerance Bio's SVP and head of business development and operations, who previously worked with Leon at Provention. 'The technology that science needed to get to this point is, even for me, who's worked in the industry for so long, is absolutely amazing.' Translating that technology into actual products that reach as many patients as possible is a priority for the team. 'Ultimately, if we don't have approved products, it's been wasted time,' said Ball, who has spent 25 years in the industry, starting in the UK, where he worked for small biotech companies before moving to the US and eventually settling in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The team's expert on scaling up clinical manufacturing, Poh Yeh-Chuin, is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He previously worked for Beam Therapeutics, where he led a cell process development group that developed products currently being manufactured — one, a stem cell program for sickle cell disease, the other a CAR-T therapy program for cancer treatment. Prior to that, he was part of the startup Semma Therapeutics (since acquired by Vertex), helping to develop a Type 1 diabetes treatment using pancreatic stem cells. 'It's very related to the work that we're doing here at Tolerance,' Poh said. 'Especially the cell therapy part, because both the pancreas as well as the thymus are derived from what we call the endoderm lineage.' Simply put, the endocrine system — including the pancreas, the thymus and the thyroid — comes from the same type of embryonic cells, which can be used in the treatment of endocrine disorders. Justin Vogel, Tolerance's chief financial officer and the other former Provention team member, grew up at the Jersey Shore and still lives in New Jersey. While the team is spread out, Vogel frequently comes to work at the Philadelphia office. While much of what they do at Tolerance Bio is focused on complex biotechnology, Vogel also stressed the importance of getting involved with the people and organizations they are trying to help. Members of the team attended the recent 22q at The Zoo event in Philadelphia, part of a global awareness event held at zoos around the world led by the International 22q11.2 Foundation. 'We're a very patient-focused organization,' Vogel said. 'It's so important to hear all the stories and meet the families, and it really resonates with us and gives meaning to what we try to do for these kids.'
Technical.ly
30-05-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
How Lithero is using AI to speed up pharma marketing compliance
Startup profile: Lithero Founded by: Nyron Burke Year founded: 2015 Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA Sector: Life sciences, AI Funding and valuation: $0.68 million raised as of May 2022, according to PitchBook Key ecosystem partners: Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Morgan Lewis, Drexel University, University City Science Center, Broad Street Angels, Ic@3401 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. It's a stark contrast to consumer marketing, where a marketing professional might be able to create a one-pager in a day. 'With life sciences, that just wasn't possible,' Burke told noting that the extra time it takes to make biotech marketing materials compliant also increases the cost tenfold. 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. 'Divine intervention' led to the development of the engine Before Lithero, Burke spent eight years working for the global professional services company Accenture, with a focus on pharma and biotech companies. 'The three things I spent my consulting career on were speed, cost and compliance in pharma marketing specifically,' he said. 'But with the aspirations that my clients had, I had to not just do a good job, but to fundamentally do something that was transformative.' The speed he wanted for his clients was impossible in the 2010s — each human review for compliance was necessary, but time-consuming. AI, Burke said, had no hype around it in 2015 when he had the idea to use it to help achieve the speed he was looking for. The one thing holding him back was that he didn't know enough about AI to build an engine that could do what he needed to do. Then he met Brandon Morton, an AI researcher at Drexel who was working on his doctorate at the time. 'We met at church randomly,' Burke said. 'It was like divine intervention … His research is really what powered our ability to actually do what we're doing.' Morton effectively became a cofounder of Lithero. Even with his leadership, Burke said, it was a challenge. 'AI is very, very difficult,' Burke said. 'People don't appreciate the beauty and the power of the human mind and how hard it is to get machines to simulate what we do.' An AI assistant that doesn't hallucinate The technology Lithero created is called LARA, Lithero Artificial Review Assistant. 'You could think of it sort of like an artificial lawyer,' Burke said. Once LARA has all of a client's necessary information, it essentially pre-screens the content. It's not meant to replace the client's human lawyer, just to make it so that the lawyer has less to do on each individual piece of marketing. Then, he said, LARA will understand the client-specific content well enough that the client can use the tool for other things as well, such as creating annotations and comparing content to customer behavioral data. While today people tend to think of large language model generative AI like ChatGPT when they think of AI, LARA still isn't generative — it doesn't generate content based on prompts, it is a screening and correlation tool that can be trained to know everything about a specific brand. As such, it is not susceptible to drawbacks like hallucinations, when an AI model randomly answers with false information presented as fact, often a result of insufficient data or bias. The public launch of generative AI did help the company, though, by making the concept of an AI tool less obscure. 'It has normalized what we're doing,' Burke said. 'We're in a very conservative, cautious, slow industry — it changed the conversations that I was having.' Now, he says, there is a lot of demand, and a lot of clients bringing them new ideas on how the company can continue to grow. 'Our future is not just compliance, it's also creative,' Burke said. 'We recently launched some creative assistants, and are seeing this amazing amount of excitement.' From one to ten To get to where Lithero is today, with a team of ten and a growing roster of clients, it spent years based at Ic@3401, a University City coworking and incubation space sponsored by Drexel University and the University City Science Center that closed in 2024. One of its earliest investors, apart from friends and family, was Ben Franklin Technology Partners. Burke also credits its law firm Morgan Lewis as a big supporter, as well as angel investment group Broad Street Angels.
Technical.ly
08-05-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
GoWell Benefits aims to take the stress out of employee health plans
Startup profile: GoWell Founded by: Holly Adams Year founded: 2021 Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA Sector: Insurance Funding and valuation: $2.83 million, according to PitchBook Key ecosystem partners: Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Naples Technology Ventures, Chloe Capital 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. 'I tried different things, even sending iPads to stores to see if they made it easier, but it just was a little bit too complicated for the average consumer,' Adams told 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. 'We work with brokers and we work with employers, insurance carriers, and employees,' Adams said. 'All those entities touch our system to make insurance more transparent and a little bit easier to understand.' From early adoption to tech startup Adams started her career at the end of the 1990s, when tech was just starting to enter the workplace. Working for GlaxoSmithKline, she helped the company get its compliance data warehouse set up. Her job back then was to meet with developers to make sure that prescription data could be analyzed. While she would shift away from a technical job when she went into benefits consulting, that experience would come in handy when she decided to create GoWell. 'I had the opportunity to work with programmers and work towards realizing a dream,' Adams said, 'then I took that experience and used it to build my own dream.' The biggest hurdle, she said, is getting the enrollment process started. An employee who feels overwhelmed by enrolling before it even starts isn't going to be focused on what matters, like which deductibles meet their needs, which prescriptions are covered, co-pays and whether their chosen doctors are covered. 'Until you get that piece in, it's hard to try to make insurance more transparent, because people are trying to figure out how to do it, as opposed to what they should be focusing on, which is what they're getting,' she said. It's a holistic approach, she said, that meets employees where they are, engaging them and ultimately making it easier for the employer to track benefits. One of the 2% of VC-funded ventures Today, GoWell has about 10,000 users on its platform, a staff of 10 employees and has reached profitability. In the beginning, Adams used her own funds to support the startup, but funding eventually started coming in, including from its lead investors Ben Franklin Technology Partners and Naples Technology Ventures, as well as Chloe Capital, a VC firm that focuses on investing in women. 'They've been very supportive in helping us build out the technology and make it as a startup,' Adams said. 'We're really lucky because we're one of 2% of women [owned startups] that are funded.' So far GoWell has raised $2.85 million, according to Pitchbook. There are more funding rounds to come for GoWell, she said, with plans to use future investments to add more components to the platform, including AI. 'That's what we're developing now,' Adams said. 'Making our software more intuitive.'
