The Federal Mashup Lab, in partnership with the Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC), hosted its highly anticipated Closeout Event at Osborn370, marking the culmination of a program designed to bridge innovators, entrepreneurs, and federal research resources from across the nation.
The evening brought together an inspiring mix of leaders from government, industry, and the Midwest startup community to celebrate the achievements of the 2025 cohort with visionary teams working in fintech, medtech, and cleantech.
Evening Highlights
The event opened with a warm welcome and remarks from Dr. Paul Campbell, Executive Director of the Federal Mashup Lab and Managing Partner of Brown Venture Group, followed by reflections and a forward-looking vision shared by Paul Zielinski, Executive Director of the FLC; Dr. Whitney Hastings, FLC Chair and Senior Technology Transfer Manager at NIH; and Federal Mashup Lab Program Directors Tammie Bennett and Lara Dreier.
From there, the spotlight turned to the heart of the program: the Cohort Presentations. Guided by Entrepreneur-in-Residence Mary MacCarthy and a team of seasoned coaches, each group showcased their innovative solutions addressing critical challenges in their respective sectors.
Celebrating the Cohort
This year’s program featured three dynamic teams:
- Fintech, coached by an expert group from Bank of America, including Yetunde Ekunwe Agada, Seth Frank, Linda Haddad, Michael Horstman, Kashif Saddiqui, Param Thind, and Alex Yang.
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- ForensAI is leveraging a suite of patents from NSA, ForensAI is an adaptive compliance engine that leverages generative AI to identify, assess, and respond to financial identity risks with greater nuance and speed. Their work addresses the growing challenges of ambiguous identity signals, cross-border onboarding, and AI-generated fraud, where traditional systems often fail. With a strong commitment to ethical AI and regulatory transparency, ForensAI is not just building a product, they are laying the foundation for more secure, inclusive, and responsive global financial systems.
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- Marc Alexander, Jonathan Banks, Teron Carter, Daniel Easterly, Farai Gundan, Julien Mourou, and Silas Wellington
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- Medtech, coached by Himanshu Laiker from the University of Minnesota’s Technology Commercialization team.
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- CradleCOM (TM) is a wearable maternal health system that uses NIH Patented Tissue Oxygen Sensor (StO₂) to monitor realtime oxygen trends along with other key metrics with a simple, user-friendly experience. Alerts escalate from coaching the mother to engaging the provider network for real-time support and LUMAvoice provides a DocBOT for boundary-protected discussion joining mom’s journey.
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- Michael Bilcher, Ahmed Hassan, William Lash, Ivan Spector, and Aria Yang
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- Cleantech, coached by Nina Axelson and Cameron Popp from Grid Catalyst.
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- Seprovia is a mission-driven team redefining CO₂ capture for the clean fuels economy, focused on hydrogen. Their mission is to deliver a scalable, solvent-free membrane platform that dramatically lowers the cost, footprint, and environmental impact of industrial energy production—unlocking a faster, cleaner path to renewable energy in the US. Backed by DOE technology validation and guided by advisors from leading energy, policy, and procurement networks, Seprovia is building the BILP-101 membrane platform to outperform legacy amine and polyamide solutions on cost, selectivity, and sustainability. Our work directly addresses the high-cost, high-waste limitations of traditional separation systems, offering operators a drop-in, modular alternative that supports both compliance and carbon credit generation.
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- Katie Youtsos, Amanveer Gadiya, Jesse Hipps, Justin Turk, Michael Ward, and Mathew Woodlee
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While learning about promising federal research and technology, these innovators not only developed business concepts but also gained access to federal research assets, strategic mentorship, and real-world commercialization insights.
Looking Ahead
Following the presentations, attendees celebrated the cohort’s accomplishments with certificate presentations and closing remarks, before transitioning into a lively networking session over hors d’oeuvres.
Dr. Campbell reflected on the program’s impact: “Our mission is to break down the silos at the intersection of government, industry, finance and startups to unlock the full innovative capacity of our nation. This cohort has demonstrated that when federal innovation meets entrepreneurial drive, extraordinary things can happen.”
The Federal Mashup Lab expressed its deep gratitude to the Federal Laboratory Consortium, the dedicated coaching team, and the distinguished guest speakers whose contributions made this year’s program a success.
About the Federal Mashup Lab
The Federal Mashup Lab is a unique lean commercialization bootcamp designed to help entrepreneurs harness the power of federal research and development to bring groundbreaking innovations to market. Through strategic partnerships, mentorship, and access to specialized resources, the Lab empowers innovators to solve real-world problems with scalable, impactful solutions.