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Technical.ly
5 days ago
- Business
- Technical.ly
Inside Philadelphia's startup surge: 16 ventures to watch right now
After years of developing a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem, Philadelphia is getting some recognition as a top startup community. 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.
Axios
11-04-2025
- Business
- Axios
These are the Philadelphia region's newest billionaires
Half of the Philadelphia region's newest billionaires are making a fortune in real estate, per Forbes' annual list. Why it matters: The region minted at least four new billionaires from last year. State of play: Twenty-five entrepreneurs, investors and heirs out of the more than 3,000 on this year's list live in Pennsylvania, per Forbes. Meanwhile, at least 16 billionaires live in the Philly region or founded companies with headquarters here. 💰 Top dog: Jeffrey Yass, the co-founder of trading firm Susquehanna International Group, was the region's highest-ranked billionaire. The Haverford resident's net worth more than doubled over the past year to reach $59 billion, good enough for 25th on this year's list. Newcomers: The latest billionaires from or linked to the region to land on the list include: 🏠 Mitchell Morgan (net worth of $5.5 billion) is the founder and CEO of Conshohocken-based Morgan Properties, the third-largest owner of apartments in the U.S. 🏗️ Real magnate Bruce E. Toll ($1.9 billion), the co-founder of Fort Washington-based Toll Brothers. 🎤 Plus: Reading-native and global pop superstar Taylor Swift made the cut again this year, ranking 2,110th with a net worth of $1.6 billion.
Technical.ly
05-03-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
This Philly-area startup aims to be ‘Uber for truck drivers'
They say how you finish matters more than how you start. In freight management technology, there's no success on one end without the other. 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. After eight years in business, the company is still logging firsts, including recently expanding into the international shipping market. 'We've been able to steadily grow over the last two years by focusing on service and alignment with our customers,' said Dugas. Drayage for the 21st Century DrayNow gets its name from the logistics term drayage, a word that is a throwback to the days when goods were transported to and from the railroad by draft horses. Today, of course, that kind of transport is done by container trucks, though they still often pick up and deliver freight to and from freight trains, as well as from ports. The shipping containers are intermodal, meaning they can move seamlessly from ship to rail to truck. Intermodal freight takes the best of both worlds of trains, which are cost effective and comparatively environmentally sustainable and trucks, which have the advantage of being able to go directly to the destination's door. The jobs independent truckers find on the DrayNow app aren't long-haul jobs, but rather picking up shipping containers from manufacturers on the first leg of their journey or dropping off freight to a warehouse or other end destination. Dugas joined the team in 2021 to grow the company's app usership, just a few years after it transported its first load in 2017 after its founding by current CEO Mike Albert and two partners. Albert, says Dugas, saw an opportunity to help drive efficiencies in the space with technology: 'He set forth with that vision, and we're really seeing it through now.' What app users gain when they sign up with DrayNow is access to its intermodal routes that are normally only available to full-scale logistics companies. That, Dugas says, is how it's shaking up the industry, by providing opportunities for people to start and grow their own trucking companies. 'A bit of a unicorn in our staying power' As the company closes in on a decade in business with over 20 markets across the country, Dugas credits its slow-and-steady approach during uncertain times. 'If you look at tech startups in the logistics space, we're a bit of a unicorn in our staying power,' Dugas said. 'A lot of the companies in the space burnt out really fast. They got a bunch of funding and spent it all too fast. We were a little more slow, a little more deliberate.' DrayNow's careful strategy helped it to ride out the ebb and flow of the COVID pandemic, which included a rate surge with a huge surplus, then a collapse. 'Most people are still feeling that collapse,' he said. 'We've been able to steadily grow over the last two years by focusing on service and alignment with our customers.' Expanding technology across the industry One of the company's more recent projects is an application called ModalView, part of a joint venture with freight railway company Norfolk Southern. Similar to DrayNow's app, ModalView will expand access to the technology to other drayage companies so they can work through one technology system for tracking and document management. 'We're basically taking the technology that DrayNow has been able to differentiate its service with and are now creating a product that's a neutral drayage execution platform where people can bring in their own fleets or drainage companies.' While the company is dipping its toes into international drayage shipping, it continues to focus on its primary wheelhouse, domestic shipping. It's no accident that it took years before making a move beyond domestic. 'We wanted to master it,' Dugas said. 'To feel like our team was able to scale at any rate we needed to. What we've realized is we can better serve our customers by being a one-stop shop provider. That, I think, is the end goal.'
