Even in a year where many startups struggled to survive, funding dried up and technology stocks plunged, Baltimore companies still managed to grow and create new innovations.
That's not likely to change in 2023 and this list seeks to highlight local startups worth keeping an eye on this year. The list ranges from startups hoping to change luxury travel, to companies focused on the nascent sports betting industry. Greater Baltimore is primarily known as a health care technology hub and this list is no exception to that rule, with several diagnostic companies that have raised huge rounds earning a spot. Other companies are looking beyond new treatments and diagnostic tools and are instead focusing on making it easier for people to gain access to care.
Read on to learn why each of these startups is set for a big year in 2023.
Aerovanti
Annapolis-based Aerovanti is bringing luxury chartered aircraft to the masses with a unique air club model.
"It opens up a new class of customer that would be flying first class with a family for business travels to then get into the private aviation sector at a very palatable rate," CEO Patrick Britton-Harr said to the BBJ in July.
The company is expanding rapidly through large capital raises. In July, the company raised $9.75 million in funding. Aerovanti quickly followed that up with a $100 million deal for new financing in October. The company also has several high-profile customers, including the University of Maryland, College Park athletics department, which named Aerovanti the school’s private aviation partner.
Britton-Harr has big ambitions for the young company. He hopes to use the extra $100 million in financing to purchase large aircraft to compete with commercial airlines for big-name clients such as NFL teams. He plans to go public, possibly through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), and expand the company’s customer base by adding a yacht club. AeroVanti is planning to have a fleet of over 20 planes once it completes its purchases with the most recent financing vehicle.
Delfi Diagnostics
Delfi Diagnostics made a huge splash in July with the largest venture capital deal in the Baltimore region in 2022 with a $225 million series B funding round.
The company plans to use that funding to conduct a 15,000-person trial focused on the early detection of lung cancer and other cancers. Delfi plans to create a blood test that can detect multiple forms of cancer to improve cancer treatment across the world. The funding round has fueled massive growth at the Canton company. In 2021, Delfi had 15 employees; now the company employs over 150 people.
The standard screening for lung cancer is an expensive low-dose CT scan. Delfi's test would be a cheaper option. The test could also be administered frequently for regular smokers at yearly physicals to catch early-stage cases of cancer.
CEO Victor Velculescu has led other Baltimore startups to big paydays in the past. He was among the founders of Personal Genome Diagnostics, a company acquired in 2021 in a deal worth up to $575 million.
Enveil
Enveil is bringing a taste of the technology that powers the National Security Agency to the business world.
Founder and CEO Ellison Anne Williams spent 12 years at the NSA before founding Enveil in 2016. The company raised $25 million in a series B round in 2022, following up on a $10 million series A round in 2020.
The Baltimore region is a hub for cybersecurity. Two new public companies, BigBear.ai in Columbia and ZeroFox Holding Corp. in Baltimore have sprouted from the region's cyber infrastructure in the past two years. Enveil is a graduate of DataTribe, an incubator that commercializes innovations from the intelligence community. Fulton-based Enveil is aimed at protecting and encrypting data while it is being used, with a focus on enhancing privacy in the financial services and health care industries.
Enveil could follow in the footsteps of other DataTribe alums that have raised notable megadeals, such as Dragos, which raised $200 million in 2021. Williams said she plans to become a serial entrepreneur in Baltimore after winning the BBJ's Tech 10 award in 2018.
"Starting my own company is something I always wanted to do as long as I can remember," Williams said. "It was something I wanted to do when I was a little girl."
Galen Robotics
If Baltimore company Galen Robotics is successful, surgeons across the country will have a robotic helper.
The Pigtown company is planning to put its robots in operating rooms in 2023. The technology is akin to the power steering in a car as the robot helps steady the hands of a surgeon conducting delicate tissue surgery. The company is based on research from Johns Hopkins University. One of the most promising parts of the model is data collection. CEO Bruce Lichorowic eventually hopes to collect data on the movements of the robot during surgery to build teaching tools for medical students.
“We're really a software company that just happens to be selling a robot,” Lichorowic said.
The company relocated from Silicon Valley to Baltimore, finding a home at the FastForward U incubator. The company then moved to the LaunchPort in City Garage before settling at a home in Pigtown. The company has some funding to back up its expansion plans, raising an over-subscribed $15 million series A round in 2022.
Haystack Oncology
Haystack Oncology stands out among the many medical technology companies in Baltimore in part because of its founders. The company is led by serial entrepreneurs and Johns Hopkins scientists Bert Vogelstein, Ken Kinzler and Nick Papadopoulos. The trio founded two of Baltimore's biggest success stories in the medtech space: Thrive Earlier Detection was acquired by Exact Sciences for over $2 billion in 2020 while Personal Genome Diagnostics, was acquired by Lab Corp. in a deal worth up to $575 million.
Haystack Oncology raised one of the largest venture capital rounds in Baltimore in 2022, bringing in $56 million. The 50-person company is using the round in part to upgrade its office space from space at the Hopkins FastForward U incubator to a large lab inside of City Garage. CEO Dan Edelstein hopes for a commercial launch for its cancer diagnostic tool to come in 2023.
Haystack CEO Dan Edelstein said the company's test looks for a byproduct of tumors, called circulating tumor DNA, after a patient has received initial treatment for cancer, such as surgery. Patients with relatively early-stage forms of cancer can often be treated through surgery alone without the need for additional treatments. However, follow-up diagnostic tools such as MRIs can often miss small tumors. The company hopes its test can be used to find those tumors, leading to better follow-up treatments for patients.
Live Chair Health
Live Chair Health is asking people to view community institutions like barbershops and community center differently. Instead of being a place to unwind after a long day of work with a haircut, CEO Andrew Suggs hopes to turn the barbershop into a health care resource.
Live Chair Health partners with Black barbershops to engage Medicaid patients with their doctors and insurance plans. The company offers a basic health screening in a barbershop or other community center. After assessing the individual’s basic health needs, Live Chair helps patients connect with health care providers and other community resources. Suggs pivoted to the health care industry after witnessing his father's declining health from heart disease, and the overall health disparities in the United States.
Live Chair Health is one of the first graduates of the 1501 Health incubator, a partnership between LifeBridge Health and Healthworx, the innovation arm of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. The company has raised $4.8 million in a seed round and seed extension round. Live Chair Health plans to move into new markets, focusing on the southeastern United States. The company already has a presence in Maryland and Los Angeles but plans to expand into two new states in 2022. The company has also begun making inroads into the Hispanic community with a Spanish-language version of the Live Chair application.
Minnowtech
For decades, one question has troubled shrimp farmers across the world. How many shrimp can I actually expect to fish out from my pond this year?
Baltimore’s Minnowtech uses a fire hydrant-sized device to count the thousands of tiny crustaceans in a farm. Farmers can use the data to determine how much feed to give their shrimp, or if a disease is starting to spread among the animals.
CEO and co-founder Suzan Shahrestani first came up with the idea of using technology to count marine life while pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. She used sonar to count jellyfish in the Chesapeake Bay and Minnowtech takes advantage of similar technology for the shrimp counting device. After entering the Ratcliffe Environmental Entrepreneur Fellowship in Annapolis, Shahrestani met Early Charm Ventures CEO Ken Malone and the two went on to co-found the shrimp technology company.
The company raised $1M in 2022. Minnowtech is starting to sell its technology after a commercial launch in 2022. The company has sold and installed units in Ecuador, Australia and Vietnam.
“It’s a brand new product for an industry that has historically not seen much technology,” said Malone, who is also a managing director at startup studio Early Charm Ventures.
SharpRank
One Maryland startup is ready to take advantage of the rapidly growing sports betting industry.
Timonium-based SharpRank evaluates and compares sports betting experts known as sharps. As the industry continues to explode and more states like Maryland legalize mobile sports betting, the appetite for experts and the social media platform SharpRank provides for sports betting fanatics may increase as well.
CEO Chris Adams views himself as a watchdog for the growing industry by preventing fraudulent “sharps” from feeding consumers bad information.
“Without proper oversight, industries collapse on themselves (i.e. 1929 stock market crash, housing crisis, etc.) — SharpRank exists to stabilize the industry’s growth/maturity and prevent such a collapse,” Adams told the BBJ after being recognized as one of its 40 Under 40 honorees last year.
The company can compare analysts within a sports betting company to help them make better hiring decisions and already has deals with two of the largest sports media companies in the country, USA Today and Sports Illustrated. SharpRank also works with sports books, like Draft Kings and BetMGM.
SharpRank is more than a business-to-business company though. The 10-person startup also has a consumer app for amateur bettors with 15,000 active users. The app creates profiles detailing the picking habits of both sports betting experts and regular sports fans. SharpRank earned $2.5 million in a seed round in 2022, drawing investment from the Maryland Technology Development Corp. (TEDCO), Old Line Capital, Sharp Alpha Advisors, Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, and other independent investors.
Vita Therapeutics
Baltimore is seeing a wave of growth in the cell therapy industry. The state government is ramping up investment as part of an effort to speed up cancer research, more than doubling the budget of the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund, and a Germantown biotech has created a new subsidiary based in Baltimore that will focus on manufacturing cell therapies. One of the local players who can benefit from the influx of attention is Vita Therapeutics.
Vita is pushing toward a human trial for a drug that helps treat a rare form of muscular dystrophy. The company is coming off a $32 million funding round, led by Cambrian BioPharma and Solve FSHD, a muscular dystrophy research funder led by Lululemon founder Chip Wilson. Muscular dystrophy weakens the muscles of the human body, making everyday tasks difficult. Unlike other treatments for the disease that help with the symptoms of weakening muscles, CEO Douglas Falk, hopes to regenerate human muscle tissue to give patients a chance to complete everyday activities. To develop the new treatment, the company recently moved to a new 10,000-square-foot space at the University of Maryland BioPark.
"Instead of just working towards diminishing symptoms like the majority of treatments, we want to take things a step further and deliver cells that actually replace the function the [diseased] cells should have," Falk said.
WeSolar
President Joe Biden hopes to grow the community solar field by over 700% by 2025. Baltimore company WeSolar is poised to take advantage of that increased federal investment.
CEO Kristal Hansley, one of the few Black women leading a solar company, hopes to create a more equitable solar energy ecosystem by providing solar power to minority and low-income people.
"Our main focus around WeSolar is to bridge the cultural competency," Hansley said in a conversation with U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in November. "And to demystify some of the technical terms."
"That means more solar for low-income families," Hansley said, referring to the Biden tax breaks, "that means supporting more small farms, that means underrepresented groups have access to this industry when they didn't have access before."
Community solar is different from conventional solar since it allows people to buy into part of a solar farm to power their home, instead of installing solar panels on their houses. Since community solar does not require customers to change anything about their home, it is accessible to people who rent an apartment.
Hansley's company is already building a $25 million solar farm in partnership with the University of Maryland Medical System. The company currently has 30 solar projects around the Northeast.
