Modelus

Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

Industry: Health Care, Biotechnology

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Prem Umang Satyavolu (MBA ‘25) Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

Brief Description of Solution: Modelus is the analytical and regulatory backbone for data-driven biology. Our AI platform for image-based biological analytics standardizes organoid and 3D-tissue experiments into predictive, decision-ready insights- helping labs quantify quality, detect variability, and move from artisanal protocols to a reproducible operating system for organoid-based drug development.

Funding Dollars: Modelus received the Johns Hopkins University President’s Venture Fellowship for $140,000 for ongoing development and testing.

What led you to launch this venture? My life pivoted when my grandmother’s cancer returned. We didn’t lose her to a lack of treatments – we lost time to a system that couldn’t predict what would work for her. With a psychology background and early work across addiction and schizophrenia programs, I saw the same problem in R&D: animal models often failed to capture human biology, while organoids – miniature, stem-cell–derived human tissues – were promising but inconsistent. I launched Modelus to close that gap. The timing is now: NIH has established the national Standardized Organoid Modeling (SOM) Center with $87 million in initial contracts at Frederick National Laboratory to reduce reliance on animal models and build accepted standards, the exact foundation our platform operationalizes across sites.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with the venture? Validating that standardization changes outcomes. Across four pilots, Modelus reduced organoid growth timelines approximately 30% and helped teams save up to $50,000 per experimental round, while surfacing earlier “go/kill/pivot” signals so researchers can reallocate effort and capital sooner.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company, and how did you solve it? The field is diverse, brain, liver, kidney, intestinal organoids, each with its own playbook. Instead of building bespoke tools, we created a platform-agnostic quality and analytics layer that works across organ systems. Just as important, we embedded a regulatory backbone, traceability, audit trails, and data-integrity controls aligned with FDA CGMP expectations, so evidence generated on Modelus is not only fast and predictive, but inspection-ready.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? Carey Business School’s MBA trained me to operate at startup speed: idea to prototype to pilot in months, not years, while pressure-testing strategy, ethics, and execution. The Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship inside Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures (JHTV) provided accelerators, stipends, and pro-bono support that turned our concept into customers and helped ensure that we achieved product market fit.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup, and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? Professor Tinglong Dai’s AI course. It taught me to translate complex models into practical, decision-grade systems, an approach that now underpins how Modelus designs analytics for biology.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? Professor Tinglong Dai has been a consistent sounding board, from first principles on AI strategy to how we communicate value to non-technical stakeholders. In a founder’s journey that can be lonely, that kind of rigorous, encouraging mentorship matters.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? Baltimore – especially around Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures (JHTV) – offers a uniquely collaborative biotech ecosystem, and it has been pivotal to our growth. The Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship has played a central role: under the leadership of Josh Ambrose (Director), Jake Dreier (Assistant Director), Deja Robinson (Student Program Administrator), and Paul Davidson (Associate Director), we gained vital access to mentors, labs, and commercialization support. Their programs helped us turn early momentum into disciplined execution and real traction.

Meeting my co-founder, Mantej Singh (a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine) through the Hopkins innovation ecosystem also underscored how this community fosters connection and collaboration at the intersection of research and startup.

Beyond Pava, Maryland’s broader startup ecosystem-through university accelerators at University of Maryland and Loyola University Maryland-offered funding, community, and connection to the region’s tight-knit entrepreneurial network. Because of that community, we were able to secure early customers, tap the right advisory relationships, and build a support system that continues to drive Modelus forward.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? We want to become the global standard for organoid-based R&D-the default software layer where experiments are designed, quality-controlled, compared across sites, and cleared for translational decisions with human-relevant accuracy. As NIH codifies organoid standards nationally, Modelus aims to be the platform that operationalizes them for every lab.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wish you’d known before launching and scaling your venture? Disruption doesn’t happen by improving the old system; it happens by replacing it. The science, the software, and the regulatory guardrails must move together. If you can align those three-and keep your mission personal, you don’t just speed up experiments. You give families like mine back what medicine too often steals: time.

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