Success Stories from the IQSS Startup Foundry
Success Stories from the IQSS Startup Foundry
The IQSS Startup Foundry empowers Harvard social science innovations with the business and technical expertise needed to commercialize into new ventures.
TeamBirth's Journey from Research to New Venture
Despite medical advances, childbirth remains high-risk: globally, over 800 women and 7,000 babies die daily during or after birth, while 80% of U.S. births involve unexpected events, including death and severe injury. Many complications stem from communication failures and poor teamwork rather than medical issues.
Researchers at Ariadne Labs, a joint Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) and Brigham and Women's Hospital innovation center, redesigned the care process to enhance communication, teamwork, and shared decision-making throughout prenatal, delivery, and postpartum care.
MorphoAI: Breakthrough Academic Work Leads to Industry Impact
MorphoAI emerged from over a decade of research into digital twins and simulations that Dr. Andy Spielberg had conducted throughout his academic career. As a postdoctoral fellow in The Lewis Lab, within the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard, Andy found the time and intellectual environment to synthesize his years of research into a revolutionary approach to computer-aided design and develop it into a viable commercial platform. His work focused on a critical bottleneck in modern engineering: the lengthy, expensive cycles required to design and deploy robots, medical devices, and industrial machinery. What typically takes weeks, months, or even years could be dramatically accelerated using AI-driven digital twins that combine analytical and learned models.
Building terraFlow: How an Idea in the Lab Grew Into a Venture-Backed Startup
Dan Freeman, a Harvard PhD student in Biology and Biomedical Sciences, had worked with single-cell technology and pharma trials before and knew there had to be a better way. Fluent in technology development and fascinated with the power of artificial intelligence (AI), Dan started experimenting when he hit his aha moment. His vision for using AI to accelerate drug discovery had an early prototype and a powerful idea. Now what he needed was clarity about how to take this research and find the commercializing path—his customers, his pitch, and his business plan forward. That’s where the Startup Foundry came in.
terraFlow was born from a simple but ambitious premise: combine pharmaceutical companies’ internal data with the vast ocean of scientific literature to uncover biologically meaningful biomarkers. In drug development, these signals can mean the difference between a failed trial and a life-saving therapy. Freeman’s technology promised to speed up that process by mining millions of research papers and linking them to patient outcomes.
Memorious: Building Infinite Memory with AI
Forgetting is a universally human experience—whether it’s conversations, names, or moments—we all forget. But what if forgetting were optional, and humans could have perfect, infinite memory? This might sound like science fiction, but that’s the bold vision behind Memorious, a company founded by Spandan Madan and Gabriel Kreiman at Harvard. Their mission is to reinvent human memory with AI, creating tools that let people recall experiences, conversations, and information instantly—without searching or prompting.
From Harvard Research to National Security Innovation: The Story of Thresher
In 2015, Weatherhead University Professor Gary King co-founded a company that would bridge the worlds of academia and industry. That company was Thresher, a venture born out of his academic research at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS).
The origins of Thresher trace back to two groundbreaking research programs. The first focused on censorship and fabrication of Chinese social media posts, conducted with then graduate students Patrick Lam (now at Airbnb), Jennifer Pan (now professor at Stanford), and Molly Roberts (now professor at UCSD). In the process of analyzing data from an earlier startup, Crimson Hexagon (now Brandwatch), King and his collaborators discovered a way to download Chinese social media content before it could be censored by the government. This serendipitous finding, giving them access to the entire corpus of posts the Chinese people could not read because they were not allowed to, became the foundation for deeper analysis of how information was manipulated online. It also enabled Thresher to understand the interests and accurately predict the actions of the Chinese leaders before anyone else.
Neru Health – From Sleep Challenges to Scaling Chronic Care with AI
When Neru Health first came to the IQSS Startup Foundry, they had a big idea: transform the way people solve sleep problems. Millions struggle with conditions like sleep apnea, and while treatments exist, staying consistent with therapy is notoriously difficult. Neru’s early vision centered on improving patient engagement and adherence to sleep therapy.