Ronawk has just been accepted into the Houston Cohort of the Mass Challenge program – a Texas accelerator.
Spun out of the University of Kansas Medical Center and founded in 2019, the Olathe, KS startup has technology that can be used to repair a patient’s injured tissues or in the early-stage diagnosis of some diseases.
A.J. Mellott and Heather Decker of Ronawk
Inclusion in this cohort “allows us to engage with investors that are outside of the Kansas City Area,” Ronawk CEO A. J. Mellott told the 4thEst8. “This opens the door to mentors and investors throughout the state of Texas, which is wonderful, because I had no connections in Texas.”
Ronawk calls their product T-Block technology, and it makes patient-specific biologics for the treatment of many diseases, cancer, organ injuries, and burns because it can mass produce the patients own stem cells in the lab. The biologics can also go into making vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.
“We actually sell a product to scientists that allows them to grow cells in 3D (rather than petri dishes, so)… they behave more like they do in the body,” Mellott said. “If they’re of a stem cell type, they produce the biolgics that are used as raw materials… so we’re able to help them do that more efficiently, and our product dramatically reduces the cost of producing those biologics.”
The company has two full-time employees (Mellott and CTO Heather Decker). Earlier this month they announced their intention to hire 25 workers in the next 18 months.
Pandemic and IP
Mellott and Decker used the pandemic to drill down on their technology, for which they have a patent pending, and hopes of a patent being issued later this year.
“We looked at different markets. We pivoted a little bit to biopharma… (we were able to) develop some other applications for our products that we haven’t publicly released yet,” Mellott told the 4thEst8. They “will allow us in 2022 to market to two additional verticals outside of life sciences.”
Mellott says the company is mostly bootstrapped with “a little bit of funding… by a family office” (something CrunchBase calls ‘ Venture – Series Unknown’ from June, 2020) for an undisclosed amount. 4thEst8 readers first heard of Ronawk when they were featured in this spring’s InvestMidwest Forum.
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