Cédric Kovacs-Johnson

Most engineering students spend their summers chasing internships. Cédric Kovacs-Johnson spent his chasing competitions. As an undergraduate in chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he skipped the resume-building track and entered the invention circuit instead, betting that building something real mattered more than a line on a page.

The first thing he built was almost a joke and almost brilliant at the same time: an automated French press he called the "American press." It placed second at the College of Engineering's Innovation Days. The next thing he built was not a joke at all. Working with classmates Charles Haider and Taylor Fahey, he created Spectrom, an add-on that let ordinary desktop 3D printers produce full color on demand. In 2014 it won first place in the undergraduate division of the National Inventors Hall of Fame Collegiate Inventors Competition, and it earned him two patents.

Spectrom did what most college projects never do. It became a company, and then it became an acquisition. MakerBot, one of the best-known names in desktop 3D printing, bought it in 2015, the same year Kovacs-Johnson finished his degree. He joined the company as a product manager for materials and extruders, learning what it meant to ship hardware at scale. He had a gold medal, two patents, and an exit before he had been out of school a year.

Then he changed course entirely. Watching a family member navigate a slow, opaque insurance approval process taught him something that stuck: in the American healthcare system, the entity with the most power over a patient's care is often not the doctor. It is the coverage. A single approval could take months, and no amount of medical expertise could speed it up. That realization became the seed of his second company.

In 2017 he founded Flume Health in New York. The pitch is unglamorous by design. Flume is a software layer that connects a fragmented ecosystem of claims systems, point solutions, and vendors so that payers and self-insured employers can build and operate health plans without stitching everything together by hand. It is infrastructure. It is data plumbing. And it is exactly the kind of problem Kovacs-Johnson keeps gravitating toward: the thing that should already exist, but doesn't.

The market noticed. Flume raised a seed round led by Crosslink Capital and recruited operators from high-profile ventures. In February 2022 it closed a $30 million Series A led by Optum Ventures and Cigna Ventures, bringing total funding past $40 million. That two incumbents in the very market Flume aims to reshape chose to back it says something about the thesis.

His vision is expansive but concrete. He talks about a future where signing up for benefits is not a choice between two nearly identical tiers, but an entry point into a far wider range of plans built for the tens of millions of Americans on self-insured employer coverage. Getting there, in his telling, means fixing the boring layer first. You cannot reinvent the product until you have rebuilt the pipes underneath it.

In 2025 his alma mater recognized the arc. The UW-Madison College of Engineering named him an Early Career Award recipient, a nod to an alum who had built two companies before most people finish finding their footing. He credits mentors like plastics engineering professor Tim Osswald for shaping how he thinks. And he still answers the small questions with the same competitive streak that sent him into those undergraduate contests: summer over winter in Madison, Badgers over flamingoes.

The throughline is not an industry. It is a temperament. Kovacs-Johnson is drawn to problems where the obvious solution is missing and the work to build it is tedious enough that most people walk away. Color in 3D printing was one. The data layer behind health plans is another. Whatever comes next, the pattern is likely to hold.