Howard Carolan and the work between the breakthroughs

On March 3, 2020, Howard Carolan had a scheduling problem. He wanted Maryland lawmakers to support a program for young companies. He also had a meeting with a venture capital group. The investors won the calendar slot; the legislators received his written testimony. Success, it seemed, was going to require being in two places at once.

Carolan found room for a joke in the explanation. The fundraising meeting was his “punishment” for the progress CoapTech had made. It was a small word in a formal document, but a useful introduction to the person behind it: a founder trying to turn technical progress into enough money to keep going, with a little amusement at the bargain.

The proposition he put before the committee was practical. Early grants had helped his Baltimore company advance. That progress helped persuade investors. Public programs and private capital could reinforce each other. For Carolan, an economics graduate who became a company builder, the relationship between those two things was everyday work.

A different destination for an economics degree

“I was sort of slated to go to Wall Street,” Carolan recalled in a 2021 conversation. His father, who worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission, had reservations about that route. Carolan eventually took his economics training into Johns Hopkins, beginning as an analyst and finding that he enjoyed working across professional boundaries.

His formal education supplied several ways of looking at an organization. He earned a bachelor of science in economics at Duke University, then an MPH at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an MBA at the university’s Carey Business School. At Bloomberg, he also served as president of the Anna Baetjer Society.

There is a particular usefulness to having studied both numbers and organizations. A technically interesting project still needs a budget. A budget still needs people who can carry out the work. Carolan’s subsequent career repeatedly brought those questions together. His contribution was to help different kinds of expertise become a working enterprise.

Over roughly a decade at Johns Hopkins, his assignments included operational projects, information technology, and revenue enhancement. He led project management for Emerge, working with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory on applications built around systems engineering. The job put him between disciplines, where agreeing on the problem can be as demanding as building the answer.

Two universities, one young company

Steven Tropello became Carolan’s co-founder at CoapTech. Their partnership joined an inventor with an operator who had experience organizing projects and examining their economics. The company also joined two Baltimore institutions: technology developed at the University of Maryland and a team drawn largely from Johns Hopkins.

By December 2016, there was already a recognizable company-building route. The founders had worked with UM Ventures on commercialization and completed a licensing agreement the previous month. They had worked with Root3 Labs in Randallstown on a prototype. They had also found workspace at Spark Baltimore, at Power Plant Live.

Those details give the early story its scale. Before the later financing announcements and manufacturing arrangements, there were advisers, a prototype partner, and somewhere to work. A company can sound wonderfully self-contained once it has a name. In its first chapters, it may be spread across half a city.

TEDCO’s Maryland Innovation Initiative provided early backing, including a $150,000 Phase III award reported in 2016. The founders hoped that support would improve their position for a seed round. Even then, their work involved translating one completed step into a convincing case for the next.

The unglamorous arithmetic of staying in business

In July 2018, CoapTech reported $2.35 million in seed funding. The backing brought together university resources, state programs, federal support, and local angel investors. Carolan was assembling a financing base from several directions, each with its own expectations and timetable.

The mix matters to understanding his role. A founder dealing with several kinds of capital has several kinds of conversation to sustain. The technical work must keep moving while the business explains what has been accomplished and why another commitment is justified. There is no ceremonial moment when that responsibility conveniently finishes.

By 2020, Carolan could point to nine grants that together represented about a third of the company’s capital to that point. His argument to lawmakers was that grant support had helped open doors with investors. The early funding had bought progress, and progress had made further funding more plausible.

That August, CoapTech closed a $7 million Series B led by Hunniwell Lake Ventures. It was a distinct step up from the earlier seed financing. The new money was intended for commercialization, bringing the company into another phase of work with another set of demands on its leadership.

Hunniwell subsequently put Carolan and Tropello together for a founders’ video interview. There is something fitting about the format: the financing story and the partnership story share a screen. CoapTech’s development depended on both. Money alone could not supply the founding partnership; the partnership still needed money.

Making room for sales

Carolan’s advice to other entrepreneurs became more specific as the company moved forward. In an Anchor Ventures discussion with fellow founders Aaron Hsu and Larry Tiffany, he talked about the organizational adjustment required when a company begins selling. A team has to give sales the standing its new responsibilities require.

“Sales do become a paramount function as you start to grow”

Howard Carolan, at an Anchor Ventures discussion

He also connected that adjustment to company culture. It is an unusually concrete concern in a world fond of treating culture as something written on a wall. A company’s priorities become visible in who gets attention, who makes decisions, and whose work the rest of the team understands.

His point was about respecting a discipline. The people who take a product to customers have work of their own to do, and the organization must accommodate it. For a founder with a background in project management, commercialization meant another change in how the team worked together.

He was also becoming part of the region’s recurring conversation about entrepreneurship. A 2022 LifeBridge BioIncubator anniversary program listed him among the speakers discussing the journey from laboratory work to the market. The founder who had drawn on local help was now on the program for people making a similar journey.

The return address becomes a production address

One of the more tangible chapters came at The LaunchPort in Baltimore. In March 2024, the manufacturing accelerator announced CoapTech’s second-generation product launch. The first production-grade batch made there had been ready for market by mid-February.

For a company whose beginnings involved local universities, public programs, and nearby advisers, this made the hometown connection physical. Baltimore supplied more than the address on a presentation. It was becoming the place where the company’s products were made.

Manufacturing also changes the meaning of progress. An early prototype answers one set of questions. A production-grade batch answers another. The latter has a useful resistance to vague language: something must actually be ready. In Carolan’s company-building story, February 2024 supplies that sort of milestone.

He continued making the business case for the state’s support programs. In testimony that month, he backed changes intended to make Maryland’s Biotechnology Investment Incentive Tax Credit easier to use. The complaint was administrative burden. The aspiration was familiar: help young businesses bring in money, create jobs, and remain in Maryland.

In May 2025, CoapTech announced another financing round, led by Good Growth Capital, with participation from the USM Momentum Fund and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. The list again connected outside investment with institutions close to home. Carolan was still working at that intersection.

A founder changes chairs

On November 18, 2025, CoapTech announced that Brad Kreger would become chief executive. Carolan would step down as CEO and remain an adviser to support the transition. The person who had helped build the organization would continue with it in a different capacity.

Kreger brought experience from Velo3D, Fluidigm, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Affymetrix. The board’s explanation emphasized manufacturing and scaling. Those were priorities for the next phase, following the years in which Carolan had helped move the company from its founding concept into a commercial business.

The sequence gives the handover context without requiring a grand farewell. Licensing, financing, team building, sales, and production had each demanded attention. By the time the chief executive’s chair changed occupants, the company had accumulated an operating history that another leader could build upon.

There is a further entry on Carolan’s calendar. A September 2026 portfolio-showcase announcement listed him as CEO and co-founder of ICUFree. His CoapTech chapter had acquired an advisory role, while another company appeared beside his name. The founder’s work, apparently, still had appointments to keep.

Back in 2020, he had described an investor meeting as punishment for progress. The joke holds up. Building something gives a person more people to answer, more decisions to make, and more calendars to reconcile. Carolan’s career offers a fairly practical definition of entrepreneurship: getting enough of those people moving in the same direction that the next step becomes possible.