Alumni Entrepreneurs

Fifteen student-led teams competed for more than $45,000 in prizes across three tracks

A conversation with Ozan Akkus, PhD, engineering professor and entrepreneur, CWRU alum, and co-founder of CollaMedix

As he reaches the end of his educational journey, Reid Tileston reflects on his view from the mountaintop—and aims impossibly higher.“I want to be the world’s best teacher of Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA),” he said. “And I want to inspire my students to have the confidence to do hard…

Every time a software team releases an update, there’s a new risk of something else breaking. CWRU alum and entrepreneur Michael Rosenfield (CWR ’17), saw the problem firsthand at Google—and watched engineering teams manually check that nothing had gone wrong after every change.His San…

After studying the limits of blood cultures, Pavan Kota (CWR ’17) built a company designed to deliver results in hours instead of days

Millions of students use digital flashcards to prepare for exams. Satya Moolani (CWR ’22, MGT ’22) has built a better way to flip through them. A handheld Bluetooth device designed to work with the popular digital flashcard platform Anki and others, StudyRemote lets students review study…

A conversation with alumni entrepreneur Brandon Mark, DMD (DEN ’21)

Emily Dickens (CWR ’19, MGT ’20, GRS ’20, engineering) has built her career around a central question: how can engineering innovation accelerate the transition to a more sustainable energy system—and reach the market at scale? As chief commercial officer of Octet Scientific, a Cleveland-based…

Halle Tecco (CWR ’06) is the co-founder of Cofertility, a startup working to make egg freezing and fertility care more accessible. Earlier in her career, Tecco launched Natalist, a women’s health products company that was acquired in 2021, broadening the availability of at-home fertility and…

How hands-on learning shaped a founder’s approach