The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is overtaking the world — and Northeast Ohio — if Cleveland Inno's 2024 list of Startups to Watch is any indication.
Of the eight companies featured on our 2024 list, half of them use AI to do everything from optimizing a commercial building's energy usage to identifying a cancer patient's best treatments.
These young companies in Cleveland and Youngstown are getting traction from academic collaborations, pitch contest wins and capital raises to develop solutions for the world's pressing problems. We anticipate that these companies will leave an outsized mark on Northeast Ohio.
Without further ado, here are our Startups to Watch in 2024:
CleanR
Max Pennington, Chip Miller and David Dillman were students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland when they started prototyping a filter that would eliminate microplastics in washing machine water.
The co-founders wanted to keep small plastic particles shed by garments made from synthetic materials from getting into our waterways and bodies, so they came up with a filter that uses a vortex filtration process to capture and eliminate microplastics from washing machine water, launching CleanR in 2020.
CleanR has won multiple awards, including MAGNET's Mspire pitch competition in 2022 and six Best of IFA 2023 awards at IFA Berlin, the world’s largest appliance industry conference, in September 2023.
The co-founders plan to collaborate with washing machine manufacturers to take a version of their filter to market in the European Union in the fourth quarter of this year. CleanR also is working with a German mesh filtration maker to find companies that could use CleanR’s VorTX technology to add value to their products.
Droxi AI
Droxi is an AI-based optimization tool designed to help primary care physicians save time on non-patient-facing tasks while also improving the quality of care.
Gadi Shenhar, Droxi's CEO, was inspired to co-found the software company in Haifa, Israel, in 2021 after an exhausted physician prescribed the wrong medication to Shenhar's grandmother, leading to her death.
Shenhar connected with the Youngstown Business Incubator and opened a Youngstown office for his company in 2023 just before the start of Israel’s war with Hamas, according to the Youngstown Business Journal.
Shenhar wants to scale Droxi in the U.S. health care market, which is much larger than Israel's.
Morgen Technology
Morgen Technology is a subscription-based software system that uses wireless sensors and patent-pending radio technology to gather and transmit data about older commercial buildings to provide operational insights that can reduce energy usage.
Morgen uses AI algorithms to process and interpret data on energy use, air quality, occupancy and equipment performance to detect anomalies and predict potential service or repair issues before they become major problems, as well as to optimize energy use.
Co-founded in the Cleveland area in 2021 by Michael Smith, Morgen Technology was a winner in Youngstown Business Incubator's 'Shark Tank'-like pitch competition in October 2022.
Notus Labs
Evan Davies and Tim Walker got the idea for their athlete-safety technology while working in a biomedical engineering lab at Case Western Reserve University, starting Cleveland-based Notus Labs in 2019.
Their technology, called Notus Team, uses wearable sensors each about the size of a thick quarter to monitor athletes' vital signs. The sensors wirelessly transmit the data to a dashboard monitored by coaches, trainers and medical staff who watch for signs that athletes may be approaching physical danger, such as heat stroke.
Last fall, Davies, Walker and their colleagues rolled out their technology to development partners — mostly local high school football coaches — to get feedback so they could complete their product development and start selling their technology this year.
Picture Health
The Cleveland-based startup Picture Health, which provides oncologists with AI-powered diagnostics tools, was co-founded in Cleveland by Anant Madabhushi, a longtime biomedical engineering professor at Case Western Reserve and entrepreneur at the university's Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics.
Picture Health's experts have created interpretable AI biomarkers that can be used to help make decisions about a patient's cancer treatments. These tools are accessed through a cloud-based platform or a health system as part of a doctor’s clinical workflow.
Picture Health has received venture funding from University Hospitals Ventures and Refinery Ventures, according to Pitchbook. It also has received funding from the Case Western Reserve University Alumni Venture Fund.
Quovis
Cleveland-based Quovis is a decentralized health information exchange. It provides patients' health information — such as blood pressure readings and lab results — to health care professionals through an electronic exchange.
Brian Fairless, co-founder and CEO of Quovis, is a former staff attorney for Medical Mutual of Ohio, the Cleveland-area health insurer. Fairless gelled with his company's first institutional investor last year over a common desire to end data fragmentation in long-term care.
Unlike a traditional health information exchange that relies on brokers or electronic medical record platforms, Quovis has developed smart contract technology that enables coordination among care teams and reduces the friction caused by health care IT systems that can't communicate with each other.
Founded in 2019, Quovis landed a $1 million investment in May 2023.
SupplyNow
Aaron George founded a precursor to SupplyNow as a service that delivered baked goods to college students at Case Western Reserve University. Then the pandemic hit, sending all of George's customers home.
Conversations with restaurant owners, chefs and managers revealed that food service professionals needed help with food procurement. So in 2021, George, SupplyNow's CEO, and his colleagues created SupplyNow as a subscription-based marketplace app.
Cleveland-based SupplyNow uses an AI-powered platform to detect the best combination of local, regional and national food distributors, given real-time constraints such as the size of an order, and then shops and delivers the orders to customers within two or three hours.
A Youngstown Business Incubator company, SupplyNow has raised $840,000 since 2021, according to Crunchbase. The company counts Comeback Capital, Rightside Capital Management, EVPI, Skypoint Ventures and the Jolly Scholar Restaurant Group among its investors.
Xploro
Dom Raban started Xploro in 2019 after watching his 13-year-old daughter struggle with her cancer treatment because nobody told her what to expect.
Xploro is a patient education platform that uses augmented reality, gameplay and an artificially intelligent avatar guide to deliver health information to young patients via a mobile application. The platform aims at reducing the stress and anxiety associated with hospitalization, improving health literacy and fostering better engagement with health services.
The British startup moved its headquarters to Cleveland's Ohio City neighborhood from Manchester, Essex, in January 2023, just in time to land its first funding from U.S. investors, including Comeback Capital, JumpStart Ventures and UH Ventures in Cleveland.
In December, Xploro raised $1.7 million from Indianapolis-based Boomerang Ventures.
"Following our recent seed funding round, led by Boomerang Ventures, we plan to strengthen our base in Ohio with a number of new hires," Raban said in an email. "This will support our expanding US customer base and help us extend into new verticals."
