By Sarah Marquart
Cornell Tech welcomes 11 new startups to its campus this September through its Runway Startups Program — with ventures tackling challenges that range from agricultural robotics and energy systems to fertility care, global trade compliance, and AI safety.
To date, more than 120 companies have launched from the Runway program — run by the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute — and together have a combined valuation of more than $1 billion and have created over 700 jobs in New York City. This year’s cohort builds on that momentum with founders who pair deep technical expertise with a drive to translate research into real-world impact.
The Runway Startup Postdoc Program supports Ph.D. founders from leading universities and research institutions worldwide. The Spinouts Program comprises teams of former Cornell Tech master’s students, with each team receiving a $100,000 Startup Award at the end of each academic year through the Studio program. This year, a runner-up, Reforma, was also recognized with in-kind support — office space and Runway mentorship. Founders in these tracks accelerate their companies with expert guidance from Cornell Tech faculty and industry advisors led by the Runway team.
Runway Startup Postdoc participants receive a package valued at up to $325,000 over two years — including a salary, research budget, campus workspace, intellectual property registration and use, and mentorship from experts in areas such as health technology, security, computer vision, and connective media. The program helps tech founders translate academic skills into entrepreneurial practice and company growth.
“For more than a decade, the Runway Program has been a leader in helping scientists become entrepreneurs. With 11 new ventures this year, our portfolio grows to 128 startups created from scratch at Cornell Tech. This cohort demonstrates how applying digital technologies can solve some of the most critical problems in areas as diverse as agriculture, misinformation, neurology, fertility, logistics, and more,” said Fernando Gómez-Baquero, director of Runway and Spinouts at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech.
Meet the New Teams
Runway Startup Postdocs
- L2 Labs (Andrew Bell) — Combines advanced AI and machine learning research with real-world implementation, developing breakthrough technologies in areas like task-specific language modeling, data mapping, and information reliability for enterprise clients.
- Enhansys (Andrea Fusco and Domenico Gioffrè) — A unified digital platform that integrates energy professionals’ software tools with an intelligent co-pilot, using advanced optimization, energy modeling, and machine learning to streamline and enhance energy system design and operation.
- [Venture in formation] (Ming-Chang Chiu) — A blockchain-based auditing protocol and platform that gives autonomous agents from different parties a secure, decentralized network to interact, enabling verifiable transactions and provable trust across systems.
- Budbreak Innovations (Ertai Liu) — Develops and operates vineyard management robots, starting with scouting for tasks like disease detection and yield estimation, with a long-term vision of achieving fully autonomous vineyard operations from perception to actuation.
- Néa Fertility (Olivia Mendivil Ramos) — A next-generation health platform for reproductive medicine that ingests multimodal patient data — omics, clinical history, and lifestyle — to train foundational AI models tailored to reproductive biology and personalize fertility care.
- RemNeuro (Nikolay Lukyanchikov) — An integrated hardware-and-software solution that modernizes and standardizes neurological exams, combining a compact chair-based system with workflow-integrated software to automate data collection and track objective patient progress over time.
- Moon Wave (Yiran Zhao) — Creator of CalmingBeats, a wearable software that detects user anxiety via mobile sensing and delivers subtle, biofeedback-based wrist vibrations to promote calm, leveraging neuromodulation research developed at Cornell Tech.
Spinouts
- SAIL (Chansam Kim, Olivia Mei, William J. Reid, Salik Tehami, Ali Raza) — An AI-native compliance platform that transforms global trade into a strategic advantage, automating classification, tariff optimization, and regulatory risk mitigation for heavy industry importers, and turning weeks of manual work into actionable decisions in seconds.
- gymii.ai (Selina Li, Zach Zhong, Alex Taic) — An AI-powered nutrition tracking app that turns meal logging into a fast, social, and delightful experience by using instant photo/video analysis to provide calorie and nutrient breakdowns, integrated goals tracking, and community sharing.
- CreditQuant AI (Adam Liu) — Automates commercial credit underwriting by parsing financials, calculating risk ratios, and drafting credit memos so lenders can close deals in minutes, not hours.
- Reforma (Courtney Clapper) — Uses computer vision AI to deliver personalized exercise form feedback that improves technique, reduces injury risk, and maximizes performance, empowering users from beginners to athletes in boutique studios, luxury gyms, and rehab facilities without the need for an in-person trainer.
Weill Cornell Innovation Fellow
Also joining the community is Weill Cornell Medicine emergency medicine physician Dr. Zev Blumenkrantz. He will serve as this year’s Weill Cornell Innovation Fellow, a one-year appointment delivered in partnership between the Weill Cornell Emergency Medicine Innovation Fellowship and Runway. In this program, an emergency medicine resident clinician completes Runway’s entrepreneurial training and then returns to Weill Cornell to champion innovation within the health system. The Fellow acts as a two-way bridge: introducing Runway startups to clinicians, while also surfacing collaboration opportunities for founders.
Applications for the next cohort of the Runway Startup Postdoc Program, to begin in September 2026, will open on Oct. 15, 2025, and close on Feb. 15, 2026. For more information, visit: https://tech.cornell.edu/programs/phd/startup-postdocs/
Sarah Marquart is a freelance writer for Cornell Tech.
