madison-wisconsin
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Steve Watt and the Long Bet on Friendly Bacteria
For nearly two decades at one small Madison biotech, the microbiologist has pursued an unfashionably patient idea: sometimes the useful bacterium is the one that keeps a dangerous neighbor out.
Roland Green Keeps Turning Lab Bench Problems Into Companies
Before Roland Green built antibody platforms, he wrote poetry, chased snow, and taught English in Prague. The same curiosity later turned a graduate-school workaround into NimbleGen - and now shapes how Invenra moves complex biology from bench to business.
Ben Camp Is Building the Search Engine for a Decision Nobody Wants to Get Wrong
A seminary student wandered into digital marketing and found a problem worth a decade. Now Ben Camp is turning the internet's noisiest doorway into a calmer, more useful place to choose care.
The Hacker Who Put the Annual Pentest on a Permanent Shift
Casey Cammilleri spent years being paid to break into companies. Then he found the more stubborn vulnerability: an industry still treating security like an annual appointment.
Alex Kubicek Learned to Read Hail. Then He Rewrote the Policy.
A failed rooftop sensor, more than 100 investor rejections and years of hail data turned a Wisconsin atmospheric scientist into an insurance founder. His wager is simple: when risk gets measured at ground level, it can be priced - and prevented - with far more intelligence.
The Pentest That Never Clocks Out
A solo hacker in Madison got tired of writing the same annual report twice. So he built software to run the test all year - and turned continuous penetration testing into a business.
The Insurance Company That Started With a Bet on Farmers
A hunch about farmers in 1927 grew into a top-ten American insurer. Here is how American Family Insurance built a mutual empire on the promise to inspire, protect, and restore dreams.
Trip Hofer
Trip Hofer is the CEO of Redox, the healthcare data interoperability company that moved more than 15 billion healthcare transactions across 12,000-plus organizations and 90-plus EHR systems in a single year. A near-25-year veteran of healthcare who started at Booz Allen and the Washington, D.C. mayor's office, he ran the largest mental-health provider in the United States as CEO of Optum Behavioral Solutions and sold virtual-care company AbleTo to Optum in 2020 before taking Redox's helm in November 2023. He is also a Venture Partner at .406 Ventures.
Allen Hao
Allen Hao is the founder and CEO of CL Global Academy, an international education company he co-founded in 2009 with Katrina Hao after the two met in Cambridge. From offices in the UK, Shanghai, and the US, the academy runs its 'OxCam Programmes' - short, project-based academic courses taught in Cambridge colleges by University-affiliated faculty. Hao has called himself an entrepreneur since age 16 and built the company without external funding into a profitable business serving over 1,500 students a year, with a claimed 24,000-plus alumni. Internally he goes by the title 'Chief Student-Centered Officer.' Born in Shanghai and splitting time between Cambridge and Madison, Wisconsin, he completed a Master's at the University of Cambridge from 2023 to 2025.
Olli Health
Olli Health is a Madison, Wisconsin healthtech company that runs an AI-powered managed service for home health coding and OASIS quality review. It pairs proprietary clinical AI with certified human coders to turn raw patient charts into accurate ICD-10 diagnosis codes and reviewed documentation - reportedly at 98%+ accuracy, roughly 4x faster turnaround, and about half the cost of traditional coding vendors. Founded in 2023 by Eric Steege, Joe Freudenthal, and Jeremy Gordon, Olli serves home health agencies that collectively care for hundreds of thousands of patients, and raised a $10M Series A in late 2025.
Eric Steege
Eric Steege is the CEO and cofounder of Olli Health, a Madison, Wisconsin healthtech startup using AI to handle home-health agency coding, OASIS review, and clinical documentation. After more than four years as a product lead on Amazon Alexa's generative AI and subscriptions team - where he launched Alexa's first direct-to-consumer subscription for older adults and caregivers - he co-founded Olli in 2023 to cut the cost and turnaround time of the paperwork that slows down home health reimbursement. By late 2025 the company served over 100 home health agencies and raised a $10M Series A led by Industry Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $13M.
WellStack
WellStack is a Madison, Wisconsin healthcare data platform that unifies fragmented clinical, financial, and operational data into a single governed source of truth. Built on a cloud-native Unified Data Model and a Snowflake foundation, it gives providers, payers, and data collaboratives out-of-the-box Patient/Member 360 views, modular Decision Hubs, and AI/ML-ready analytics - so healthcare organizations can predict, prevent, and personalize care without the years-long data-engineering slog.