When brilliant people get an idea, big things happen
This past year, the University launched 25 new startups—12 from our college alone—and invested seed funding in bold ideas with the power to grow far beyond campus. One such idea is Omni AgRobot, better known as the “robot dog.”
Its mission: transform how farmers detect and respond to crop stress.
Developed by Associate Professor of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering Ce Yang with three M.S. in Robotics students Abhishek Chaudhari, David Aviles Hinostroza, and Swapnil Puranik, the robot recently won competitive funding from both the UMN Technology Commercialization Office and Minnesota Innovation Corps.
Yang, whose earlier invention was licensed by a startup, is aiming to form a company around this invention too. It's just a matter of time—and the right people to run it, she said.
Yang has long explored drone remote sensing and hyperspectral imaging to spot early signs of disease.
“My lab is a playground for agricultural engineers,” she said.
But in 2021, her team began tackling a thornier challenge—how to traverse rough, uneven fields for real-time wheat phenotyping. A four-legged design offered the solution.
Equipped with cameras and sensors, robot dog can patrol rows of crops and collect vital data to detect disease and stress early. Yang envisions affordable, scaled-up versions giving farmers tools to act quickly. The team is already refining it to navigate fields autonomously and developing “manipulators” that could pluck weeds or deliver targeted doses of nitrogen directly where plants need it.
“This work has not only pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in agricultural robotics,” Yang said. “It is a testament to the creativity, technical expertise, and dedication of our robotics students.”
Where ideas take off
Since 2006, the University of Minnesota has launched nearly 300 startups based on faculty and student discoveries—three out of four of them right here in Minnesota.
On the following pages, meet a few standouts that began in our college—Evia Bio, Convergent Bioscience, Fasikl, Innotronics, Niron Magnetics, and Q-rounds—that are fueling the state’s innovation economy. See the full list from this illustration.
In the Startups & Innovation section
Read how these startups are making an impact:
FasiklConvergent BioscienceEvia BioInnotronicsQ-rounds
Refr SportsEcho Data AnalyticsNiron Magnetics
Restoring steadiness to those living with essential tremor
Imagine struggling to lift a glass of water or button a shirt because your hands won’t stop shaking. For millions living with movement disorders such as essential tremor, this is daily life.
Now, a University of Minnesota spinoff company, Fasikl, has received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a simple yet high-tech wristband—the world’s first and only approved AI therapeutic—providing relief without drugs or surgery.
Fasikl was founded on the multidisciplinary research of Biomedical Engineering Associate Professor Zhi Yang and his lifelong passion for video games. What began as curiosity and imagination grew into an entrepreneurial vision. He often reminds his team of a simple principle: science must serve people and make their lives better.
The Felix™ NeuroAI™ Wristband integrates cutting-edge artificial intelligence with a smart-watch-looking neuromedical device to treat essential tremor. It has undergone three stages of clinical studies, including a pivotal, double-blind, randomized, sham-controlled multi-site trial, in which the treatment group showed clear superiority over placebo. Few medical devices are tested to such rigorous standards.
“This is the beginning of AI therapeutics in healthcare,” said Yang. “Felix offers patients a new choice that is safer, more effective, and easier to access.”
Based in Bloomington, Minnesota, Fasikl has licensed a total of five University of Minnesota inventions and sponsored multiple campus research projects. These include Yang’s breakthrough that enables people to play video games without a keyboard or mouse—a natural passion for a lifelong StarCraft fan.
Fasikl has raised over $60 million to accelerate its research and commercial-ization efforts. Its ongoing phase I rollout over the first 6 months is centered in Minnesota. The company’s mission is to advance “type II artificial intelligence,” in which the brain and machine co-adapt to create therapies that are more effective, safe, and reliable. Fasikl is introducing AI to heal and to improve people’s lives.
Battling food insecurity
Convergent Bioscience is transforming years of nanomaterials research into scalable solutions for global food security. The startup sprang from several studies by Chemistry Professor Christy Haynes and her frequent collaborator Jason White, who leads the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, to explore the impact of engineered nanoparticles on plants.
In 2019, Haynes and two students—Joseph Buchman (M.S. ’15, Ph.D. ’19), now a senior chemist at Medtronic, and Kaitlin Landy (B.S. ’18), a postdoc in Chicago—found that silica nanoparticles coated with chitosan, a naturally occurring polysaccharide, suppressed fusarium wilt disease when applied to the leaves of watermelon plants.
The more startling discovery: it enhanced the fruit yield of healthy watermelon by more than 70 percent.
“Plants contain silicic acid, which they use to construct their cell walls,” Haynes noted. “We want to deliver an extra boost of it, so the plants will build stronger cell walls and gain an elevated immune response.”
Since that initial work, her lab has shown a similar impact on soybeans, wheat, and barley.
Transforming Cell Therapy
University of Minnesota startup Evia Bio, once known as BlueCube Bio, grew out of research by Mechanical Engineering Professor Allison Hubel. She pioneered the use of Raman spectroscopy to see ice forming inside cells and pinpoint the threshold at which freezing turns lethal.
Her decades of studying natural molecules called osmolytes—that trees use to survive Minnesota winters— led to patented, non-toxic methods for preserving living cells.
Evia Bio is tackling one of regenerative medicine’s biggest bottlenecks—cryopreservation. For decades, the industry has relied on dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a solvent that shields cells during freezing but can later poison them, causing side effects from nausea to heart failure. The startup is preparing to launch its first DMSO-free preservation medium that promises safer treatments for patients and cheaper, more reliable manufacturing.
Hubel, who leads the international Society for Cryobiology, isn’t done chasing answers. Her lab still preserves cells to -50 Celsius—imaging them molecule by molecule—in search of that sweet spot between life and death.
“Nature isn’t finished teaching us,” she said.
Reshaping how machines move
Innotronics began almost by accident—when Mike Gust overheard a student describe Professor Rajesh Rajamani’s new magnetic sensor that could determine an engine’s piston position.
“As he started to move on, I said, ‘Hey, wait a minute. I’ve been looking for this my whole life,’” recalled Gust, then-director of industrial relations at University of Minnesota’s Center for Compact and Efficient Fluid Power.
Traditional sensors press against actuators—components that trigger motion—causing wear and tear over time.
“Non-contacting sensors like ours last much longer,” said Rajamani, the Benjamin Y.H. Liu/TSI Applied Technology Chair in Mechanical Engineering. “They don’t have moving parts, and that makes them much more reliable.”
In 2016, Innotronics was named among “Best University Startups” in the United States for good reason. Today, it has sold 30,000+ units. Plus, one of the world’s largest companies in motion control technologies, Parker Hannifin, uses the sensors on its wake boats.
Next up for Rajamani: adapting the tech to machines in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing.
Making better magnets
Niron Magnetics, a University of Minnesota spinoff company founded by Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Jian-Ping Wang, is building its second plant in Sartell, Minn. near St. Cloud.
Opening in 2027, the full-scale manufacturing facility will create 175 jobs and produce 1,500 tons—3 million pounds—of the world’s first high-powered permanent magnet made without rare-earth materials, eliminating the environmental and supply-chain challenges tied to traditional magnets.
Among Niron’s accolades are Fast Company magazine’s 2025 World Changing Ideas, TIME magazine’s 2024 Top Greentech Companies, and TIME's Best Inventions of 2023.
Niron has secured more than $100 million in funding from global manufacturers for its magnets—made from two abundant materials, iron and nitrogen. These companies include Volvo Cars, General Motors, Samsung, Harman Audio, Western Digital, Peerless Audio, Stellantis, and Allison Transmission.
“I’m happy with what the Niron team has achieved,” said Wang, who holds the college’s Robert F. Hartmann endowed chair. “It simply started from curiosity-driven research on unknown physics and materials science when I joined the U in 2002, but I’m also focused on what’s next.”
Wang is leading efforts to revolutionize soft magnetic materials, which play an important role in power electronic devices and the electric motors used in generators and household appliances. His recent discovery: a new alloy—which he named after Minnesota as “Minnealloy”—that could reinvent that space and help reduce the carbon footprint, too.
Additionally, Wang is directing the development of energy-efficient AI hardware by using magnetic and spintronic technologies. Its success could eliminate or at least reduce the number of nuclear reactors being built for the AI boom.
Giving back
In addition to sponsoring research on campus, Niron has hired many UMN graduates over the years. Nearly 30 are employed now.
Want to support CSE faculty like Wang? Email Justin Midiema.
Optimizing healthcare processes
A startup company developed by University of Minnesota faculty, called Q-rounds, is transforming one of the toughest challenges in healthcare—coordinating daily visits of healthcare professionals with hospital patients. When doctors and nurses miss connecting on rounds, communication gaps with patients and families can lead to errors, which raises the risk of serious medical mistakes by more than a third.
John Sartori, who holds the endowed Robert and Sydney Anderson Professorship of Electrical and Computer Engineering, built Q-rounds with Medical School colleague Michael Pitt.
Launched in 2021, Q-rounds quickly showed impact. In a pilot at the M Health Fairview Masonic Children’s Hospital neonatal intensive care unit, family attendance more than doubled, nurse participation tripled, and more than 1,000 family members joined rounds remotely.
“Q-rounds not only improves patient experience but also enhances care, supports best practices, and streamlines the rounding process for doctors and nurses,” Sartori said. “Because of overwhelming demand, we continue to expand its use at more clinical sites and refine it based on user feedback.”
Creating game-day jobs for sports referees
Their mission was clear: Simplify the $10.5 billion referee management industry. When Wyatt Gustafson started Refr Sports with fellow hockey player Huck Sorock, Gustafson was finishing up his computer science major at the University of Minnesota.
They won the 2022 MN Cup student division with their original idea—an app that connected sports organizers to available referees and vice versa.
Today, their company has evolved into a full-service platform for scheduling and paying sports officials. Recently, a referee coordinator used the platform to manage one of the largest youth sports tournaments in the United States—the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) World Basketball Tournament at ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Florida with nearly 10,000 athletes and more than 700 teams from around the world.
The founders are driven to stabilize the referee industry. Roughly 60 percent of new referees quit after the first year. Outdated tech is one of many reasons.
“Leveraging mobile-first tools,” Gustafson added, “appeals to the next generation of sports officials.”
Saving lives with an online dashboard
Echo Data Analytics LLC, co-founded by computer science alumnus Tariq Bashir, turns routine incident reports into dynamic dashboards that help fire departments and emergency medical services (EMS) make smarter, faster decisions.
“My passion for the fire service grew when my wife and I volunteered as part-time firefighters in Golden Valley,” said Bashir, who spent nearly 20 years as a software engineer. “I saw the need for data analytics in the fire service when I eventually pursued the role full time, and that’s where my two passions really fused together."
Every time a fire or EMS team files a report, Echo’s software collects the data and turns it into clear, actionable insights—tracking incidents, response times, and operational trends. Administrators can see what’s working, identify bottlenecks, and communicate results to city leaders.
Already in use in several Twin Cities metro-area cities—including St. Paul, Brooklyn Park, Edina, and Minnetonka—Echo Data Analytics has expanded to five states and more EMS services.