Emerging Startups

Meet promising startups and growing businesses seeking visionary investment partners.

LaunchPad SBDC

At LaunchPad Small Business Development Center, in partnership with Octane, we work with promising medtech, biotech, and technology startups to refine their business models, sharpen their go-to-market strategies, and accelerate their path to investment. Through a rigorous advisory and evaluation process, each company featured here has been carefully vetted, mentored, and prepared to engage with forward-thinking investors.

Below, you will find a curated selection of startups, each presenting a snapshot of their business and a direct message from their founder. We invite you to discover the next wave of innovation and the opportunities ahead.

Meet the Startups

Lidavex

Lidavex is a maternal health technology company building a scalable labor-monitoring infrastructure designed to modernize how cervical progress is assessed, documented, and analyzed across care settings. Its flagship system, CerviLite™, generates objective cervical dilation data and connects it to a growing maternal health data ecosystem.

PROBLEM

Labor Assessment Does Not Scale Reliably
Cervical assessment during labor varies across providers, settings, and regions, limiting consistency as obstetric care expands into understaffed and low-resource environments.

Gaps in Infrastructure for High-Risk and Low-Access Settings
In contexts where frequent exams are clinically discouraged or specialist access is limited, current labor-monitoring tools do not scale to meet safety and workforce constraints.

Fragmented Maternal Health Data
Labor progress data is inconsistently captured and poorly structured, weakening EHR interoperability, population-level insights, and downstream clinical innovation.

SOLUTION

Lidavex is building an integrated labor-monitoring system that combines objective sensing, software, and analytics into a future-ready maternal health infrastructure.

CerviLite™ Monitoring System
A clinically designed device that provides standardized, quantitative cervical dilation data to support clinician assessment within existing workflows.

Scalable Data Infrastructure
A secure platform that aggregates de-identified labor progression data across facilities, creating a foundation for research, quality improvement, and system-level benchmarking.

Evolving Maternal Health Ecosystem
Planned expansion includes at-home monitoring tools and AI-enabled applications that extend labor insight beyond the hospital, enabling continuity of care across settings.

TRACTION

Intellectual Property Published
Core technology has been published with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
FDA Pre-Submission Completed
An FDA Q-Submission (Pre-Sub) has been completed, clarifying regulatory expectations, clinical validation strategy, and pathway planning.
EHR Infrastructure Partnership with InterSystems
Lidavex is partnered with InterSystems, a global healthcare data platform provider whose technologies support health systems reaching over 1 Billion patient records worldwide, enabling future interoperability with major EHR environments.
Initial Clinical Pilots Confirmed
Early pilot programs have been confirmed with clinical partners to evaluate system integration, workflow compatibility, and real-world data capture during labor.
Scalable System Architecture Defined
The platform is being developed as a modular, interoperable system, designed to support phased deployment and long-term expansion across institutions and geographies.

CONTACT LIDAVEX

Summit Technology Laboratory

STL has built an AI powered computer vision software, ArtemisTM, that turns any surface around you – flat, curved, or angular – into a seamless display. This enables wrap-around displays for immersive environments with no headsets for shared interactive experiences for a group of users. Use cases include location based entertainments (like theme parks, museums, theatrical lighting) and defense applications (like command and control, simulation training).

PROBLEM

Immersive environments without headsets, when built using projectors, can be much more accessible and affordable. But this is a painstaking long process today.

Inefficiency
Multi-projector displays on even simple surfaces today take hours or minutes to deploy for a certified technician using a manual touch heavy process.

High Cost of Ownership
Expensive hardware and repetition of the same manual touch heavy process when the display goes out of alignment increases cost of ownership.

Scalability and Accuracy
Non-automated processes cannot scale to a larger number of projectors or many different sizes and shapes of the surfaces.

SOLUTION

STL’s software, ArtemisTM, completely automates projection mapping using cameras providing wrap-around displays in just minutes on surfaces of any shape and size with unmatched scalability and accuracy.

Efficiency
Complete automation with the push of a button enables deployment of projection mapped environments in minutes.

Lower cost of Ownership
30x-300x reduction in hardware cost, along with automated deployment and no-touch maintenance reduces the cost of ownership by more than 90%.

Scalability and Accuracy
ArtemisTM scales to any number of projectors providing sub-pixel accuracy on any kind of surface. It can even handle dynamic surfaces like moving tent walls.

TRACTION

The product is already generating revenue. We are selling and growing – two bulk licensing contracts of more than $1M signed with two key channel partners, Panasonic and NPI-AV.
Pioneering tech team with 50+ years of combined domain experience. Founder is a professor turned entrepreneur from UC Irvine with foundational books and 100+ domain publications.
The business team has multiple prior exits and great sales experience.

CONTACT STL

Past LaunchPad Client Features

KOIL

Koil is the “AI Reddit for Teens”, where we’re building the first safe, teen-only platform that helps Generation Glass screenagers figure out who they want to be when they grow up and how to get there, with personalized career and life guidance powered by our RAG AI. With thousands of users, Koil is positioned to become the one-stop-shop for young adult resources worldwide, starting with careers.

Contact Koil

LENDROSE

Lendrose is a financial technology company helping underserved small businesses access capital they need to grow. We provide infrastructure that enables banks to offer a Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) solution to their business clients. Those same clients can then extend flexible payment options to their very own business prospects.

Contact Lendrose

NEED2SAY

Need2Say is a multilingual safety platform designed to prevent accidents, improve compliance, and boost productivity in high-risk industries. With real-time translation, AI-powered training, and a patented Q&A system, we connect field teams to the critical safety information they need instantly.

Contact Need2Say

Let's Get in Touch

We’ve curated this showcase to connect visionary investors with high-potential startups ready to grow. Whether you see a company that aligns with your interests or want to learn more, we’re here to help make the connection.

CONTACT LAUNCHPAD SBDC