Cornell Tech Welcomes 13 Startups Changing How We Live, Work, and Heal

By Douae Maarouf

Cornell Tech is welcoming 13 startups to its Roosevelt Island campus this fall through three Runway Startup Program at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech: the Runway Startup Postdoc Program, the Spinouts Program, and the new Runway Pilot Program for Technology Founders.

The cohort includes five ventures led by Ph.D. founders, two companies participating in the inaugural Technology Founders Pilot, and six startups founded by former Cornell Tech master’s students. Their work spans accessible communication, clinical education, robotics, life sciences, financial technology, and artificial intelligence.

The Runway Startup Postdoc Program helps founders from leading universities and research institutions turn technical research into scalable companies. Participants receive up to $325,000 in support over two years, which includes a salary, research funding, campus workspace, intellectual property registration and use, and mentorship from Cornell Tech faculty and industry advisers.

The Spinouts Program supports companies founded by Cornell Tech graduates who developed their ventures through the campus’s Studio curriculum. The teams joining this year’s cohort were recognized through the 2026 Startup Awards and will continue building their companies with support from the Runway team.

The 2026 cohort also marks the launch of the Runway Pilot Program for Technology Founders, a university-wide effort designed to connect Cornell’s startup incubation and acceleration programs. Sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and External Engagement, the pilot brings together the Runway Startup Program and the Cornell Center for Technology Licensing’sIgnite program; with connection and support from the Center for Regional Economic Advancement; Weill Cornell Medicine and BioVenture eLab; and the Center for Life Science Ventures, Praxis Center for Venture Development and Rev: Ithaca Startup Works in Ithaca.

Through the pilot, participating programs will share best practices, expand mentoring and training for founders, and create more opportunities for Cornell technologies to reach the market. The effort is also intended to strengthen connections among Cornell’s entrepreneurship communities in New York City and Ithaca.

“This year’s cohort is among our most diverse yet, underscoring AI’s potential to transform industries across the board. It also marks an important milestone for our program as we deepen our collaboration with colleagues in Ithaca and Weill Cornell, further establishing Runway as a unifying force for entrepreneurship across Cornell,” said Fernando Gómez-Baquero, director of Runway and Spinouts.

Meet the New Teams

Runway Startup Postdocs

• Understood — Builds personalized AI speech models for people with speech impairments. The technology can be trained in less than 30 minutes and adapts as a user’s voice changes, while clinical assessment and progress-tracking tools help clinicians monitor improvement. Founder: Pehuén Moure
• Cool Labs Inc. — Develops an AI workflow that analyzes real-time clinical trial data and helps biotechnology teams interpret results, build projections, and communicate a trial asset’s value to stakeholders. Founder: Dawei Liang
• Instant Bio Inc. — Develops patient-derived cell models for preclinical drug research. Its organoid-on-chip platform is designed for automated laboratories and aims to help researchers better predict how potential medicines will perform in patients. Founder: Louis Paone
• Wrench Robotics — Creates evaluation and benchmarking tools that help robotics teams measure what their systems can do and compare their performance with other leading approaches. Founder: Kwesi Rutledge
• Venture name to be determined — Develops technology that helps computers recognize and interpret the structure of charts, diagrams and other complex visuals. The venture is beginning with accessibility tools that convert visual content into accessible formats and structured data for publishing and AI applications. Founder: Brianna Wimer

Runway Pilot Program for Technology Founders Founders

• MedSimAI — Makes clinical practice and assessment more scalable for health professions schools. Faculty design learning experiences and evaluation criteria, while students practice with AI-simulated patients, receive immediate feedback from AI preceptors and complete assessments without requiring a faculty member or standardized patient for every encounter. Founder: Yann Hicke
• Cradle — Builds predictive AI for autonomous robots to anticipate and recover from failures before they interrupt operations. Its long-term goal is to help robots adapt to unfamiliar real-world conditions with less human intervention and less retraining. Founder: Mehranz Sabet

Spinouts

• Custos — Develops tools that allow companies to manage business-to-business payments made through AI agents with greater security and control. Founders: Carlos Guerrero and Chloe Wang
• Lola — Builds an AI decision engine that turns employees’ expertise into consistent, traceable workflows. The company is beginning with legal operations and plans to expand across other business functions. Founders: Bjorn Langer, Zane Mroue and Andrea Solano Abello
• Aiseptor — Develops a temporary zero-trust security layer for remote technical assessments. The software is designed to block unauthorized AI tools and proxy access during interviews and exams, then remove itself from the candidate’s device when the assessment ends. Founders: Sanjay Ram, Akshay Aggarwal and Divya Bhanushali
• Kindred Intelligence Inc. — Creates a collaborative regulatory workspace for life sciences companies. The platform guides teams as they identify regulatory pathways and traces each fact to its original source. Founder: Julia Klingberg
• MedComm Health Inc. — Develops an AI-powered follow-up platform for heart failure patients after discharge. Its AI agent, Heather, communicates by voice and text message in more than 15 languages and alerts clinicians through a dashboard when a patient may need attention. Founders: Royi Rozen, Rishabh Patel and Brock Daniels
• CoagHealth — Develops an AI-powered clinical decision support platform that uses routine blood tests and proprietary coagulation signals to identify patients at risk of life-threatening blood clots. Developed in collaboration with Weill Cornell Medicine, the platform is being evaluated in an institutional review board-approved clinical study and is designed to integrate with hospital electronic health record systems. Founders: Medi Tolou and Cara Shi

For more information about the Runway Startup Postdoc Program, visit tech.cornell.edu/programs/phd/startup-postdocs.

Douae Maarouf is the student writer for Cornell Tech.