philadelphia-startup
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The Camden Startup That Turned Graphic Design Into a Netflix Subscription
Two Rutgers grads had an idea in a Vietnamese ice cream shop: sell graphic design like a subscription, not a project. Seven years and 4 million-plus creative assets later, they run it out of the first Camden company ever to make the Inc. 5000.
Guru
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Daniel Friedman
Daniel Friedman is the CEO and cofounder of Ethermed, a Philadelphia-based health technology company that uses AI and clinical reasoning to automate prior authorization for payers and providers. He founded the company in 2021 with engineer Michal Such after concluding that administrative friction in healthcare was a solvable software problem rather than a permanent cost of doing business. Under his leadership Ethermed raised an $8.5M Series A in 2026 (over $15M total), signed nine health-system customers, and now processes millions of authorizations a year, most of them fully automated in seconds.
Vitable Health
Vitable Health is a Philadelphia-based health benefits company that gives hourly and blue-collar workers affordable access to primary care. Founded in 2020 by Joseph Kitonga, it pairs virtual and in-person direct primary care - visits, over 1,000 free prescriptions, common lab tests, mental health support and care navigation - with an integrated ICHRA platform, so small and mid-sized employers can offer real coverage to workers who typically fall between Medicaid eligibility and pricey commercial insurance. Employers pay roughly $30 per employee per month, and the company says it has made more than 100,000 lives eligible for care.
Hovr
Hovr is a Philadelphia-based marketing technology company that layers interactive, vertical-video experiences on top of existing hotel and resort websites. Its patented, no-code software lets marketers drag and drop video content - pulled from YouTube, Vimeo, Matterport, TikTok, and Instagram or uploaded directly - over static web pages using tools like Highlights, Anchors, Pins, and Pathways. The goal is to turn passive browsing into 'choose-your-own-path' storytelling that lifts guest confidence, engagement, and direct bookings, with a real-time analytics dashboard that ties video interactions to revenue. Hovr grew out of Hio, founder Jason Craparo's earlier networking and events venture.
HueDx
HueDx is a Philadelphia diagnostics company - formerly Group K Diagnostics - that turns any smartphone camera into a reader for lab-grade, quantitative color-based tests. Its patented HueCard color-correction hardware and AI-powered HueTools/HueCloud software let researchers develop, validate, and deploy paper-based colorimetric assays without proprietary readers or lab infrastructure, aiming to make quantitative results available at the point of care and at home.
Upped Events Inc.
Upped Events is a Philadelphia-based, software-only event management and payments platform that bundles ticketing, contactless mobile payments, on-site point-of-sale, CRM, mapping, staff and partner management, and real-time analytics into one system. Built for food and drink festivals, fairs, conventions, and community events, Upped aims to raise attendee spend and organizer ROI while cutting the number of tools a team has to juggle. Founded in 2020 by Mark Kozlowski, Louis Blitzman, and Filip Risteski, the company was acquired by Events.com in May 2025.
Damon Henry
Damon Henry is the CEO and co-founder of Asylon Robotics, a Philadelphia-area company building an American-made robotic perimeter security platform that pairs autonomous aerial drones, robot dogs, and human-in-the-loop AI into a Robotics-as-a-Service offering. An MIT-trained aeronautical engineer who worked at GE, Boeing, and Johns Hopkins APL before founding the company in 2015 with two dorm roommates, Henry has grown Asylon into a company that has flown more than 100,000 security missions for Fortune 500 firms and the Department of Defense, and raised a $26M Series B led by Insight Partners in 2025.
Jason Craparo
Jason Craparo is the founder and CEO of Hovr, a Philadelphia-based marketing technology company whose patented, no-code tool sits on top of hotel and travel brand websites and turns static pages into interactive, video-rich experiences that drive direct bookings. A Babson MBA who started as a dishwasher at 14 and ran Sonic Drive-In franchises by 21, Jason spent six years at social enterprise Juma Ventures before founding networking apps Contap and Hio, then pivoting the technology into hospitality. He holds a dozen granted patents, is a certified private pilot who flies aerobatics, runs triathlons, and is a father of three.
Brianna Wronko-Stevens
Brianna Wronko-Stevens is a University of Pennsylvania-trained bioengineer who turned a senior design project into HueDx (formerly Group K Diagnostics), a Philadelphia diagnostics company that reads lab-grade results off a color-changing card and a smartphone camera - no lab, no reader, no waiting days. Inspired by an HIV clinic internship at 17, she built a platform to deliver fast, quantitative results to the patients who can least afford to wait. She founded the company in 2017, served as CEO through a 2023 rebrand and raised millions in funding, then stepped into the Chief Scientific Officer seat to focus on the science.
Graham McConnell
Graham McConnell is the CEO and co-founder of Nth Round, a Philadelphia fintech that helps private companies, family enterprises and funds manage equity, run investor portals, distribute reports and create shareholder liquidity. A Dartmouth cognitive science graduate who oversaw software at the $25B quant firm AJO Partners before launching the company with his father in 2018, he is a self-described saver and Bogle-style passive investor on a mission to simplify and democratize private investing.
Mark Kozlowski
Mark Kozlowski is the founder and CEO of Upped Events, a Philadelphia event-experience platform he built to drag festivals, fairs and community events out of the spreadsheet era. A Penn State and Wharton-trained operator, he started by trying to pour a beer in under ten seconds (BeerMe), then turned that obsession with friction into a full registration, contactless-payment and analytics stack. In May 2025 Upped was acquired by Events.com.
CollX
CollX is a Philadelphia-area startup whose mobile app lets collectors snap a photo of a sports or trading card and instantly identify it and see its current market value. Built around AI visual search trained on a database of more than 17 million cards, CollX has grown from a quick valuation tool into a full collection-management platform and peer-to-peer marketplace where over 3 million users scan, organize, price, buy, sell, and trade cards. The company monetizes through Pro and Gold subscriptions, marketplace commissions, and referral revenue from hobby partners like PSA, Whatnot, and Fanatics.
Daymark Health
Daymark Health is a Philadelphia-based, tech-enabled cancer care company that delivers in-home and virtual supportive care to patients during the long stretches between oncology appointments. Working alongside patients' existing oncologists and partnering with health plans under value-based arrangements, Daymark combines a multidisciplinary care team - nurse practitioners, nurses, licensed clinical social workers, and health navigators - with a technology platform to provide 24/7 support, symptom and side-effect management, mental health care, care navigation, and help with practical barriers like transportation and finances.
Carolyn Mooney
Carolyn Mooney is the co-founder and CEO of Nextmv, a Philadelphia-based developer platform for building, testing, and deploying decision models - everything from vehicle routing to staff scheduling. A systems engineer by training, she ran missile simulations at Lockheed Martin, optimized pizza deliveries at Zoomer, and led Grubhub's systems engineering team before deciding the messy gap between data science and operations needed its own discipline. She calls it DecisionOps. In May 2026, FICO acquired Nextmv, vindicating the bet she and co-founder Ryan O'Neil made that optimization deserved the same engineering rigor as software.
Maggie McCullough
Maggie McCullough is the CEO and founder of PolicyMap, the Philadelphia-based mapping and data-visualization platform she launched in 2008. A former White House budget-office staffer turned housing researcher, she built PolicyMap after struggling to fit maps and data into her own policy work, betting that anyone should be able to make a map as easily as they shop online. The platform now serves universities, banks, health systems, nonprofits and governments, layering thousands of public and proprietary datasets into one searchable map. In December 2023 the company closed a $3 million Series A led by its former parent, the Reinvestment Fund.