Elliot Menschik ^Leaders

I'm a physician/scientist/engineer turned repeat founder/CEO, startup investor and occasional executive. Most recently I served as CTO at Vivodyne combining robotic automation, 3D tissue engineering, microfluidics, and AI to de-risk drug development with human translational data at scale and before the clinic. Earlier, I was part of the founding leadership of Resilience, building this biomanufacturing startup from inception to 3000+ workers spanning 14 sites across North America. I was responsible for all things #techbio across lab, cGMP manufacturing and enterprise domains, including product development, infrastructure, applications, automation, data, and security (physical+cyber).

Previously, I was at Amazon’s cloud computing arm (AWS) where I started and led the company's work supporting startups and investors in highly-specialized industries (healthcare and life sciences, AI/ML, fintech, gametech).

Earlier I was a seed-stage VC, founding and leading the healthcare practice of Dreamit Ventures. I sourced and led investments in 40+ startups (digital health, diagnostics, devices) and worked alongside them to get to market with first customers and strategic partners. This was a collaboration with industry leaders including Johns Hopkins, Penn Medicine, Independence Blue Cross, and Kaiser Permanente.

I was previously the founder/CEO of HxTechnologies, an early player in health information exchange (think BitTorrent or Napster for medical images and records) which we sold to Health Care Service Corporation, the largest payer you've likely never heard of. HCSC owns and operates Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, Illinois, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Montana. Post-acquisition, I served as general manager at their health IT subsidiary, MEDecision, with responsibility for launching and running its provider-facing business.

Outside of healthcare and life sciences, I co-founded and ran Venturef0rth, one of the first coworking spaces in Philadelphia, which we sold three years later. I've also served on the University of Pennsylvania faculty, teaching science and engineering students how to launch and operate tech startups.

I've spent way too much time in school. I earned MD and PhD degrees at Penn Med doing computational research on Alzheimer's disease and memory function. I specialized in massively parallel simulations of large networks of biophysically-realistic neurons. Earlier I attended Johns Hopkins where I learned a thing or two about chip design on the way to a couple of degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering.