Startups

For The Wall Street Journal, reporter Jennifer Hiller spotlights Xcimer Energy, a fusion startup that is developing technology to defend against drones and other threats, founded by alumni Conner Galloway M.S. ‘09 and Alexander Valys ‘08. “We realized that no one was actually pursuing the approach to fusion that we thought was going to work, and so ultimately that’s what led to Xcimer,” says Valys.  

In a video, Visiting Scholar Ariel Ekblaw speaks to NBC News about floating, magnetic tiles that could be used to build structures in space. “We could self-assemble these [tiles] on the Moon,” says Ekblaw. “We could make habitats for the Artemis program. Once we have this idea of modular space tiles, there’s so many different things that we can do with self-assembly.”  

Alumni Erin Dawicki MBA ‘24 and Michelle Ewy MBA ‘24 speak to Boston 25 about developing LymeAlert, the first at-home test kit to detect Lyme disease in ticks. “The faster you treat it [Lyme disease], the way easier it is to treat and have complete resolution of symptoms for a lot of people,” says Dawicki. “But the second challenge is the current diagnostics we have miss 64 to 78 percent of early-stage cases.” 

MIT spinoff Found Industries’ new Cambridge headquarters and metals processing development center is highlighted by Boston Business Journal's Lucia Maffei. “We are developing electrochemical processes to recover gallium and, in time, indium, and germanium, and antimony and other critical metals directly from existing industrial streams,” says Peter Godart PhD ‘21, Found Industries CEO.  

Smithsonian Magazine’s Kristen A. Schmitt spotlights LymeAlert, an at-home screening kit to detect Lyme disease in ticks created by alumna Erin Dawicki MBA ‘24. Once we figured out how to do this, it almost felt like a moral obligation,” says Dawicki. “We have the ability to get this out into the world, and it can become a pretty affordable way to try and prevent as many of these cases of long-term Lyme as we can.” 

Bloomberg’s Gautam Mukunda highlights Prof. Scott Stern’s finding that 0.07% of business registrations in the 2010s reached meaningful acquisition within six years, and Prof. Danielle Li and Prof. Lindsey Raymond’s finding that AI technologies increased customer support agent productivity by 15%, to predict AI’s role in the influx of business applications filed in June.  

Alumnus Vikas Enti ‘20, founder of Reframe Systems, speaks to Boston 25 about his company’s work aimed at lowering the time and costs of home building with their new system that they used to robotically fabricate a residential building in Somerville. “We went from starting foundation work to handing keys over to our customer in about 180 days,” says Enti. “It would typically take about 18 months to build a structure like this in cities like Somerville—it's almost three times faster. Our units also cost 20% lower than traditional construction costs.” 

Fast Company’s Adele Peters spotlights “Project Obsidian,” a new geothermal power plant developed by MIT spinout Quaise Energy. The findings of former Senior Research Engineer Paul Woskov helped Quaise develop their tech. “Paul’s epiphany was realizing that if we can use the same energy to heat plasmas to millions of degrees Celsius to get fusion, why not use that for heating and drilling through rock at a much more modest temperature?” says Matthew Houde, Quaise co-founder.  

MIT researchers have created a new building design model that could enable engineers to construct buildings and bridges that use less materials, writes Tech Briefs’ Andrew Corselli. “Traditional topology optimization essentially starts with a blank space and tries to figure out at each point in this blank space: ‘Should there be material,’ ‘should there not be material’ from an efficiency standpoint,” says Prof. Josephine Carstensen. “Our approach populates the space with a bunch of lines that are instead candidates for ‘should there be material’ or ‘should there not be material.’ By using this line approach, we have the opportunity to have more control.” 

For the Boston Globe, reporter Aaron Pressman features MIT startup VulcanForms, a 3D printing manufacturer expected to create over 1,000 jobs with a new 1-million-square-foot-plant in Devens, MA. The facility will bring capacity for more customers in medical devices, aerospace and defense, and consumer goods industries. “MIT professor John Hart started the company with grad student Martin Feldmann [‘14] as a way to bring 3D printing techniques using lasers and powdered metals to larger-scale manufacturing jobs,” writes Pressman.

For Axios Boston, reporter Steph Solis highlights “Anita,” a solar-electric boat created by alumnus James Worden ‘89 that is due to launch this year. The boat was previewed at the 80th anniversary Charles River sail-a-thon. “The prototype, named ‘Anita’ after Worden's late wife, moves silently with no fumes or exhaust and uses LiFePO4 battery cells with a battery management system (it lets you charge the batteries while they're in use),” writes Solis. 

Boston Globe reporter Aaron Pressman spotlights MIT startup Liquid AI, along with the various AI efforts underway at MIT as part of The Globe’s 2026 Tech Power Players special section. Pressman notes that: “President Sally Kornbluth is reinvigorating the school’s support of the local innovation ecosystem, unveiling new online classes dedicated to AI — with free entry-level classes for anyone — and encouraging more entrepreneurship on campus.” 

For Fast Company, reporter Max Ufberg features MIT startup Formlabs, a company that has spent over a decade building 3D printers that make professional grade prototyping cheaper and faster. Using the selective laser sintering (SLS) Fuse X1 machine, Ufberg notes that Formlabs will apply their playbook to larger industrial systems. “The goal has always been make it easier to go from an idea to a real thing,” says Formlabs CEO Maxim Lobovsky ‘11. 

Moving Health, a D-Lab spinout founded by MIT students, tackles maternal mortality in rural Ghana by decreasing transport time to hospitals. CNN reporter Maya Baylis highlights how Moving Health’s tricycle ambulances were designed to navigate narrow, rough roads in areas where ambulances are scarce or impractical. “Sometimes the biggest barrier to surviving a medical emergency isn’t the lack of hospitals,” says Emily Young ‘18, CEO and co-founder of Moving Health, “it’s being able to get there in time.”