
Mans hand drawing Startup concept on white notebook
As UW’s collaborative innovation hub, CoMotion is dedicated to expanding the economic and societal impact of the UW community and beyond. By developing and connecting to local and global innovation ecosystems, CoMotion guides and partners with faculty, researchers, students, and entrepreneurs on their path to market, and helps them amplify the impact of their ideas.
The commercialization journey can take a number of paths. A UW innovator’s technology can be licensed, it can be offered as a service, or it can become a startup. As part of this last path, we are pleased to share ten startups that CoMotion helped spin out from the University of Washington in FY18. Companies are from a range of industries including enterprise software, telecommunications, bioinformatics, diagnostics and optics. Their products include improving the laboratory experimental process to making next-gen optical displays and sensors to using AI to transform the perioperative experience.
Over the past five years, CoMotion has helped spin out more than eighty startups, all of them working to develop innovative solutions and technologies across a variety of fields. All told, they are a part of the $12.5 billion that the University of Washington contributes to the state economy annually. Assisting startups from idea to launch is one of the many ways CoMotion helps to expand the economic and societal impact of the UW community.


Making the laboratory experimental process user-friendly, reproducible, and transferable through a simple web-based software application.
Tunoptix
Making low-cost, tunable metasurface optical elements for next-generation displays and sensors.

Perioperative care transformed by AI and cognitive science.
Merle Innovations
Advanced Wireless Communications.

Virvio designs innovative medicines that improve people’s lives. Their computational drug discovery platform rapidly optimizes synthetic biotherapies that are easy to manufacture, shelf stable and outperform known antibodies.

We are developing novel immunotherapeutic treatments for managing cancer and antiviral diseases using a CD180 backbone.
Ebiosec
Ebiosec is a data management platform for synthetic biology, and the developer of GenoTHREAT, an open-source screening tool.
Transcellular Therapeutics
TCT is developing drug therapies to treat Barth’s Syndrome and Congestive Heart Disease.
Icosavax
Icosavax: a new vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a deadly virus affecting newborns and the elderly.