Hot Topics

Startups

Startups November 19, 2018

Saving the planet from the ground up, literally

By GREGORY ZELLER // Allied Microbiata didn’t win 76West – but being a finalist in the innovative state-funded competition, which stimulates the clean-energy economy across the Southern Tier, wasn’t too shabby. A ground-level effort in more ways than one, the 2017 startup is an early-stage bootstrapper with ties to Stony Brook University and Columbia University, on a primary mission to remediate soils and sediments tainted by toxins. And the graduate of the PowerBridge NY program…

Read More

Startups April 16, 2018

With Patient Innovations, the wait may be over

By GREGORY ZELLER // Patient Innovations does not have modest goals. Citing a sad legacy of waiting-room delays and other gross inefficiencies costing healthcare providers both time and money, the 2013 startup is out to change the healthcare world. And if it generates a billion-dollar payday along the way, so much the better, says cofounder Ken Greenberg. Pardon Greenberg’s optimism, which may be influenced by his success as cofounder and CEO of award-winning, circa-1992, Hauppauge-based…

Startups April 11, 2018

Filling a modest plate, sweetly, at startup Foodcubate

By AMY ONORATO // The food industry is Anna Kotler’s bread and butter. The 20-year marketing veteran built her career working on brand development for food-focused Fortune 500 companies like Campbell’s Soup Co. and Conagra Brands Inc. – but when it came to defining her own recipe for success, Kotler wasn’t satisfied with the corporate climate’s structured lifestyle. “After working for those big packaged-food companies, I wanted a little more flexibility in my schedule,” Kotler…

Startups April 9, 2018

Rethinking the science of business (and clean energy)

By AMY ONORATO // Becoming an entrepreneur introduced Slawa Solovyov to a new way of thinking about science – a mindset incorporating business and marketing factors that went beyond straight research and development. For Solovyov, who had spent the previous 20 years pursuing superconductor research at Brookhaven National Laboratory, it was a challenge. And it would answer the question: What happens when a scientist wants to become an entrepreneur? Solovyov – also chief scientist at…

Startups April 6, 2018

Harvesting cash crops on a sprouting ‘urban farm’

By AMY ONORATO // Don DiLillo’s entrepreneurial journey doesn’t begin in a boardroom, but a basement – in his parents’ basement, on homemade shelves, in boxes of soil and seeds. In 2016, DiLillo was a 23-year-old working steadily for Empire LED Solutions in Farmingdale. But outside of the lighting-technology business, he was an agriculture enthusiast, a passion ignited over summers working the land at Ronkonkoma’s Thera Farms and cultivated at night, when DiLillo enjoyed YouTube…

Startups March 29, 2018

Ready to roll, MunchMoney already tastes the big time

By GREGORY ZELLER // Several different fuses lit Chris Kane’s lightbulb moment, but if there’s a recurring theme in this origin story, it’s his own munchies. Kane, now the CEO of MunchMoney Inc., was following a fairly familiar arc – a finance and mathematics degree from James Madison University, a burgeoning career as an administrator with Hauppauge-based Gemini Hedge Fund Services. But his stomach was rumbling, literally and figuratively. “Entrepreneurism is something I always wanted…

Startups February 20, 2018

For soaring startup Flygirl, smaller is way, way better

By GREGORY ZELLER // Entrepreneur Lisa Abbey always had a nose for the niche, but the roots of her burgeoning beauty business are colored by experience. A hair stylist with three decades of bobs, pixies and perms under her belt, all on Long Island, Abbey has also proven herself a creative risk-taker. The first two salons she opened, in 1989 and 1991, were located on the campuses of C.W. Post College (now LIU Post) and…