Event

Mark Allen and Boon Loo will discuss their experiences as founders of university startup companies—their role as founder, motivations, challenges and successes, and what they know now that they wish they knew then.

Mark co-founded three companies, Redeon, CardioMEMS, and Axion Biosystems while at Georgia Tech. Redeon commercialized microfabrication-based approaches to transdermal delivery of drugs such as insulin, was sold to Biovalve, Inc., in 2001. CardioMEMS, founded in 2001, developed endovascularly-implantable wireless MEMS sensors for monitoring physiological conditions within the body. It recently received FDA approval for its sensors and was acquired by St. Jude Medical, Inc., for $375 million, which followed a previous $60 million investment. Axion Biosystems was founded in 2008, and is commercializing interfaces to electrogenic cells in-vitro. It currently employs 35 people and is privately held in Atlanta.

Boon co-founded Gencore Systems, LLC, based in Philadelphia, PA, in 2013. Gencore Systems, LLC provides a suite of Software Defined Network (SDN) applications in traffic analysis, network optimizations, and network security. Gencore Systems spun off from the NetDB@Penn (netdb.cis.upenn.edu) research group from the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. The company received a NSF SBIR award in January 2014, and an additional supplemental award in April 2014, and raised a round of seed funding. The company is currently engaging early pilot customers in using Gencore's platform to solve network performance and security problems in network infrastructures.