Janet Campbell and the art of starting again

Janet Campbell had spent ten years building Seno Medical when she decided that the next person to run it should be someone else. By September 2015, she had raised more than $100 million and put together the team behind the company’s technology. These are usually the credentials a founder presents when asking to stay. Campbell used the occasion to announce a departure.

Her reasoning was specific. Seno was moving toward a different commercial phase, and she wanted a CEO suited to that work. She would help the board through the transition as a special adviser. Meanwhile, another venture, Dominion, was ahead of her. The announcement contained both an ending and a fairly conspicuous clue that she had no intention of retiring.

There is something disarmingly practical about this. Founders are often introduced as if the title were an attachment issued at birth. Campbell’s career treats it as a job with particular responsibilities: find a promising technology, gather the people who can develop it, and obtain the money to give them a chance. Then consider what the organization needs next. Even when the answer involves changing the name on the office door.

An education in other people

The preparation began well before Seno. Campbell earned a BA at the University of Missouri and an MBA in finance at Johns Hopkins. She also lists professional working proficiency in Spanish, Italian, and French. The combination gives her biography an agreeable breadth: languages on one side, the mechanics of financing a business on the other.

Her earlier operating record was concrete. At Mach Diagnostics, she served as CEO, raised two rounds of capital, and developed an organization that included 40 sales representatives and a nationwide distributor network. At Health Tech, which she founded and led, she negotiated licensing and joint-venture agreements involving both large corporations and younger businesses. These were jobs requiring a commercial structure around an idea.

She also became a partner at Houston investment-banking firm Rockecharlie & Co. At InforMedix, she served as president and chief operating officer, overseeing an IPO and hiring the team that launched its first commercial product. By the time she founded Seno in San Antonio in 2005, Campbell had worked on several of the problems that a new company eventually has to solve, whether its founder enjoys them or not.

A 2006 University of Missouri leadership conference captured a more everyday qualification. Campbell was scheduled to present a breakout session on surviving business travel. Among all the titles and financing milestones, it is a pleasing reminder that an executive career also involves getting from one place to another. Somebody has to know how to do the trip.

Her first examples of business leadership were close to home. Campbell credits her mother and grandmother, both entrepreneurs and executives, as early mentors. Later, she learned about venture capital from Marty Sutter and worked with Jack Gill and Patricia Cloherty. She remembers those relationships for their creativity and fun as well as their investment knowledge. The pleasure of learning from other people runs alongside the financial education. A classroom can confer a degree; a working relationship can keep supplying lessons long afterward.

The company after the company

Seno occupied a decade. The length matters. Campbell’s move in 2015 followed years of development, organization-building, and fundraising. Her explanation placed the company’s next phase at the center of the decision. A founder can understand an enterprise intimately and still see a reason to change its leadership. Intimacy with the business may make that judgment more possible, however difficult the conversation.

“My passion is finding a new technology, identifying, developing and building a team and pursuing a successful outcome.”

Janet Campbell · on her 2015 transition

Dominion gave her another beginning. BellaMia Technologies followed in 2021. The ventures shared an interest in laser technology and the work of building teams around it. They also gave Campbell a continuing role in the activity she had identified when leaving Seno: bringing a new technical project into an organization that could pursue it.

BellaMia’s team offers a useful view of what such an organization contains. Alongside Campbell are responsibilities for development, technology, business, research and development, and sales advice. The people are spread across several states. A company assembled around a technical idea still needs someone to think about commercial questions, someone to lead development, and people able to connect those efforts.

That is where her background becomes relevant again. The former operating executive and investment-banking partner brings experience in hiring, agreements, financing, and bringing products to market. A founder with that history has several ways to be useful before anyone adds another company name to the résumé. The repeated beginning carries accumulated practice with it.

Recognition, with a local address

In November 2013, Campbell received a Gold Stevie Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year. Her award was in the consumer-products category for companies with 11 to 2,500 employees. The category is a useful corrective to the way biographies smooth everything into a single broad accolade. Awards have rules, categories, and entry forms, too.

The competition that year attracted more than 1,200 nominations across its categories, with entries from 18 nations and territories. Campbell’s recognition arrived while she was still leading Seno. It marked work already underway, two years before the leadership transition that would make room for her next venture.

Then came a distinctly local honor. In 2016, she joined the San Antonio Women’s Hall of Fame in the science category. Seventeen women were selected that year from more than 40 nominations. The class included people working in government, education, the arts, finance, and technology. Campbell’s place among them reflected the technical enterprises she had helped build from her San Antonio base.

For someone with a finance MBA and a career moving between operating and investment roles, the category is telling. The boundaries in a university prospectus are tidier than those in a working life. Campbell’s work had crossed several of them. San Antonio chose science as the place to put her name.

Two chairs and a different kind of audience

In April 2022, Campbell visited Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio, for the Patricia Adams Lecture Series. Her schedule included business classes and a keynote engagement. A photograph from the visit shows her in conversation with Bernae DySart, the two seated in patterned armchairs with a small table between them. The setting makes a change from an executive headshot.

The lecture series was created to bring women with substantial professional experience into contact with students. Campbell’s visit put the sequence of company-building into a setting where listeners were still considering their own choices. In classrooms, an experienced executive can become something more approachable than a list of achievements. Students can ask about the work between the milestones.

Heidelberg’s business newsletter recorded her sessions with classes taught by Patricia Berg and Lisa Kahle-Piasecki. Its placement among other classroom visits matters in a small way: Campbell’s experience became part of the ordinary business of learning. A career accumulated over years could be discussed by people near the beginning of theirs.

Her professional affiliations include the Texas Business Hall of Fame and the University of Missouri’s Griffiths Leadership Society for Women. The university that gave her an early credential appears again in her later professional life. That return is a quieter kind of continuity than founding another enterprise, but it belongs in the same story of people helping other people become ready.

The teams come back together

In May 2026, the next chapter acquired a new shape. Dominion and BellaMia announced a merger. The combined company would operate under the BellaMia Technologies name, with Campbell as chief executive and Cooper Collins as executive chairman. Two businesses she had founded were coming together under one organization.

Campbell’s comment had a directness that suited the occasion: “I am thrilled to bring my teams together.” She said she expected the combination to speed product development, broaden commercial reach, and improve efficiency across the business. Those were ambitions for the merger, with the work of achieving them still ahead.

Windome Banking Partners, which advised on the transaction, described a practical case for combining the organizations. The opportunities included shared sales and corporate functions, common manufacturing components, and engineering work that could serve both product lines. A merger announcement can fill a page with abstract nouns. Underneath them sit familiar questions about who sells, who builds, and which tasks can be done together.

For Campbell, this is a different assignment from the one she described on leaving Seno. In 2015, she was preparing to hand a company to its next leader. In 2026, she was taking responsibility for bringing two teams into one business. The continuity lies in her willingness to make organizational choices around the work ahead.

Her career now stretches from earlier operating roles through Seno, Dominion, and BellaMia, with fundraising, public recognition, and university visits along the way. The titles keep changing. The people remain essential. A founder can supply the first idea and still spend much of her career making room for the others who will have to carry it forward.