philadelphia-startup
(8)
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.
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.
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.