Startup Spotlight Med-Tech and Real Estate Ventures Find Pre-Seed Success
Discover four startups gathering momentum out of the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
- By
- May 20, 2026
- Entrepreneurship
The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago is the university’s hub for venture creation, startup acceleration, and commercialization support. The center designs and delivers programs that help founders build, launch, and scale transformative ventures across industries, with deep expertise in early-stage company formation, investor readiness, and innovation ecosystem partnership development.
Below, learn about four startups from the Polsky Center that are finding success at different funding stages.
Pre-Seed: Theta Neurotech
Theta Neurotech aims to provide much-needed advance notice for the 3.4 million Americans who suffer from unexpected epileptic seizures. The company’s wearable device continuously monitors brain activity and detects shifts that occur up to two hours before seizure onset.
Cofounders Truman Pierson, AB ’23, and Chris Fitz first took their idea through the College New Venture Challenge and then joined Polsky’s Launch Accelerator. Pierson was later selected for the Polsky Founders’ Fund Fellowship.
The major inflection point came when the startup received $200,000 in the George Shultz Innovation Fund finals—the first check in what would become a $1.9 million pre-seed round. The startup became one of the first tenants of Hyde Park Labs and is part of the UChicago Science Incubator. The next milestone is a pilot clinical study at UChicago Medicine, followed by work with the US Food and Drug Administration to clarify the regulatory pathway.
Seed: Beacon
Cofounded by New Venture Challenge 2015 alumnus Brian Clark, MBA ’15, Beacon is working to stop the spread of illnesses indoors with wall-mounted, app-controlled devices that use far-UVC light technology to deactivate airborne and surface pathogens for continuous disinfection that is safe to use in occupied environments. The company secured its first enterprise customer in healthcare and launched its second-generation product after closing a $1.6 million seed round in 2025. The funders include Harper Court Ventures. The company is also investing in clinical research partnerships to further validate its technology and expand its applications.
In April 2025, the team won Inno Madness, a bracket-style competition run by Chicago Inno in which startups face off against one another for votes from the public on which company they would invest in.
Clark praises connections to Booth. “The number of people willing to make introductions, share advice, or lend an ear has been a huge competitive advantage.”
Pre-Seed: Unlisted
Unlisted unlocks $31 trillion of value in the real estate market by focusing on the 98 percent of homes that aren’t for sale—yet. The software platform, founded by Katie Hill, MBA ’13 (XP-82), features more than 120 million off-market property profiles that homeowners can claim, edit, and enhance, including indicating their willingness to move as a way to deter or attract buyers, at unlistedhomes.com.
The startup was initially funded via angel investors in 2022, the same year it took first place in the Alumni New Venture Challenge. Unlisted went on to receive more than $200,000 in nondilutive and equity investment from the State of Ohio’s Entrepreneurial Services Provider Program and by earning first place in Pitch HearstLab New York and the University of Dayton’s pitch competition. At the end of 2024, Unlisted announced that it had raised $2.25 million in seed funding. In October 2025, the company was named to the Top 5 of TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield 200 global pitch competition. Unlisted is likely to raise its next round this year.
Seed: OrisDX
NVC 2022 winner and George Shultz Innovation Fund recipient OrisDX is revolutionizing how head, neck, and oral cancers are diagnosed. Using a saliva-based oral rinse diagnostic, OrisDX allows physicians to detect these cancers with 93 percent sensitivity and 99 percent specificity.
The company is based on science developed through a decade of foundational research at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago. Contributors include UChicago Medicine’s Dr. Nishant Agrawal, Assistant Professor of Medicine Dr. Evgeny Izumchenko, and Patrick Conniff, MBA ’22.
OrisDX raised a $4 million seed round led by Jeremy Krell, MBA ’16, of Revere Partners. Additional funding came from UCM Ventures and Harper Court Ventures. In October, the company announced that the OrisDX Founder Lab at University of Chicago won a $250,000 Accelerator Award from the Chicago Biomedical Consortium. The funding will help enhance the HPV testing capabilities of OrisDX’s Oro Lesion Saliva DNA Test.