From CERN to the world: six alumni, nine ventures and one shared mindset

Every year on 21 August, the World celebrates Entrepreneurship Day, a day for everyone who has turned an idea into something real. It's a day to honour the people who take a risk, build something new, and keep going even when the path isn't clear.

So what happens when CERN alumni take the curiosity and determination they built at the Lab and carry it out into the world?

For some, it becomes a device that helps wounds heal. For others, it's autonomous marine platforms, AI tools for musicians, hands-on civic tech, smart sensors that work for years without anyone watching, or software used by engineers worldwide. Nine ventures, six founders and one thing in common: the courage to try.

Three of these companies: Effetto Venturi, Cryo Mix and Little Beast Software are also part of CERN Venture Connect (CVC), a programme that connects founders with CERN's technologies, expertise, investors and partners to help deep-tech ideas reach the market.

Some of these ideas were born at CERN. Others grew alongside a CERN career. But in every story, the same thread runs through: face the hard problem, learn as you go, and keep moving even when the answer isn't obvious yet. If you've ever wondered whether your idea is worth chasing, these stories are proof that it's always worth a try.

Ion Biotec: from a curious question to a new technology

For Ana Megía-Macías, it all started with one question asked at a CERN talk on entrepreneurship: could the plasma physics she used every day in particle physics also become the basis of a company?

At the time, Ana was commissioning a hydrogen ion source for CERN's ELENA decelerator. Plasma had been used in medicine before, but always with noble gases like argon or neon. Nobody had managed to create a stable, low-temperature plasma jet using something as simple as ordinary air.

By the end of 2015, Ana had an idea. In 2016, back in Spain, she co-founded Ion Biotec with Dr Osvaldo Daniel Cortázar. It took a year to build a first prototype, and another year of testing before they finally had a stable cold-air plasma jet  gentle enough to touch, yet able to fight even antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

That technology can now disinfect food like meat, fish and eggs in seconds, without chemicals or heat, and Ion Biotec is exploring uses in farming and industry too.

It wasn't a straight road. Ana and her co-founder were scientists with no business background, and had to learn business language almost from scratch. Reaching hospitals and partners, and finding people willing to support a brand-new technology, took years of patience and became even harder when the 2020 pandemic hit.

Still, Ana is proud of what they built: something that simply didn't exist before.

"Seeing our research recognised so early on was hugely rewarding too. Being named one of the 50 best technology startups in Spain in 2018, and securing a competitive NEOTEC grant from CDTI, were confirmations that we were onto something real"

And this is not the end, the story continues...

Medical Plasmas: Why not people? taking the idea to human patients

In 2021, that same technology became the foundation of a new company: Medical Plasmas, was born as a spin off of Ion Biotec, created to bring cold plasma treatment to human medicine.

Its device, PlasmAction Med, targets chronic wounds like leg ulcers and diabetic foot wounds which affect around two million people a year in Europe and the US, often with no fully effective treatment. The device reduces harmful bacteria and helps wounds heal, without pain or anaesthesia.

Moving from animal testing to human medicine meant a much longer road. Full clinical trials, regulatory approval, and years of extra work. Medical Plasmas ran a trial with 60 patients over 17 weeks, and published the results in March 2026, as a result, it showed faster healing, better bacteria reduction, and an excellent safety record.

"I'm proudest that Medical Plasmas exists at all: a technology that started as a curiosity about plasma physics at CERN is now a real medical treatment."

CERN's influence on this journey goes well beyond that first spark of an idea. Coordinating international teams, arranging permits and cranes for equipment shipped from abroad, trusting collaborators, these are skills Ana first built at CERN.

CERN also gave her the confidence to take on problems outside her original training: she learned to simply try which is exactly the mindset it took to lead a company like Medical Plasmas.

The Alumni community still matters too, she says: finding the right business partners is a long process, and she continues to lean on people who understand both the science and the entrepreneurial path.

Along the way, the company also won CaixaBank's Premio Emprende XXI in 2023, and has presented PlasmAction Med at major international fairs like MEDICA in Düsseldorf and EWMA in Bremen.

For the future of PlasmAction Med, it is expected to reach the market in the coming months, with the team now preparing for launch across hospitals in several countries.

Effetto Venturi: buoys that don't hurt the sea

Valentina Venturi's inspiration came directly from the sea. The anchored buoys used in sailing competitions, which damage the seabed.

Founded in 2021, Effetto Venturi builds lightweight, autonomous marine platforms that do the same job without leaving a mark on the ocean floor.

Getting there wasn't easy. As she puts it simply:

"Salty water was and still is the biggest challenge."

Valentina says her CERN PhD taught her patience through difficult moments, and that working alongside people from all over the world helped her build the soft skills she still relies on today.

Something to be proud of, the company became the first supplier of autonomous buoys to the Olympic Games, a milestone Valentina is especially proud of.

Now, the team is building smaller, more precise platforms for new uses, from ocean data collection to entertainment and always with the same goal: protecting the seabed. We can't wait to see where the current takes them next.

Cryo Mix: AI co-producer for independent artists

For Craig McAllister, entrepreneurship meant trading physical hardware for sound waves. Founded in 2022, Cryo Mix uses Auses AI to help musicians finish and release their music and most important, without losing creative control.

As a mixing and mastering engineer, Craig kept seeing talented artists unable to finish songs because professional studio time was too expensive or hard to reach. So he began building tools to automate the technical side of his own job, not to replace artists, but to give them a shortcut to a professional sound.

The result is Nova, an AI co-producer that lets musicians shape their mix just by talking to it, while staying fully in creative control.

Cryo Mix has already reached more than 170,000 musicians. What means the most to Craig are the messages from artists who say they'd never have released their music without it.

"There is also a risk in never pushing yourself or finding out what you are capable of."

Craig says CERN taught him how to break down hard problems and keep going when something looks too complex to solve, a mindset that shaped how the whole team approaches their work today.

Looking ahead, Cryo Mix is building plugins and exploring how to offer Cryo Mix in a more tangible way, so artists can use its tools directly inside the software they already work in, with the long-term goal of supporting them from the first idea all the way to a finished, released song. Stay tunned!

Relatronica and Weltform: helping people make better decisions

For Giuseppe Aceto, it began with a simple observation: at CERN, big decisions are only made after being tested and challenged from every side. Why shouldn't the rest of the world work the same way?

That question led to two projects. Relatronica, a Swiss nonprofit founded in 2024, builds hands-on tools to help people understand and shape public decisions. Presenting Neuralforming, a game that turns a classroom of teenagers into a mini-parliament debating AI laws. Giuseppe's proudest moment is watching them take it seriously: debating, changing their minds, defending unpopular positions.

Weltform, founded in 2025, brings the same idea to complex decisions in industry, finance and healthcare. Rather than giving one, confident (and frequently incorrect) prediction, it stress tests a system to determine where it is most likely to fail and makes all forecasts publicly available so that they may be compared to actual events at a later time.

"You gain more credibility by being checkable than by sounding certain."

The path hasn't been simple for either project. Relatronica constantly turns down funding that comes from sources that want to dictate their priorities, while Weltform's biggest challenge is convincing people that an honest range of outcomes is more useful than a single number.

What's next? Both are now growing: Relatronica is turning its game into a tool schools can use on their own, while Weltform is opening its models to outside researchers.

CorrelationLab: systems built to work for years, unwatched

When Abhinav Mohan co-founded CorrelationLab in 2023, the goal was simple: build a space where engineers didn't have to choose between physics, electronics, and computing. “There was no obvious place to do that, so we made one". Abhinav mentions that, for a while, it was closer to a hobby than a company. They worked on what they found interesting and they did not think very hard about what it was for.

Then their first product launched.. Taelis, which lets all kinds of sensors, old or new, from any manufacturer , talk to one central system, with security built in from day one.

Since 2024, Abhinav has worked as an FPGA engineer on the Phase-2 Level-1 calorimeter trigger for CMS, one of CERN's flagship experiments, through a University of Hyderabad and UW–Madison collaboration. Designing electronics meant to run reliably for over a decade taught him a simple lesson: reliability isn't something you add later, it has to be part of the plan from the very start. That mindset, he says, is one he carries into everything he builds:

"CERN is a place where taking the long view is normal, and where the people around you are very good and happy to explain what they're doing. It's hard to work like that and then go back."

That patience hasn't been easy as hardware mistakes are slow and costly, and he now understands why small companies don't pass the stage of prototype. But choosing the harder, slower path anyway is exactly the discipline Abhinav is most proud of.

"We'd rather take the long way. We've gone through ten revisions of a thing to get it right, and we'd do it again."

Looking ahead, the team is working on giving customers full ownership of their own data, and pushing security straight into the hardware itself. But the bigger ambition goes further:

"What actually interests us is the general problem: systems that sense, compute and act across many physical nodes, in places nobody is watching, for years at a time. That problem shows up in agriculture and in industrial monitoring and in infrastructure, and the answers are mostly proprietary, expensive, and built so you can't leave. We think there's a version that isn't, and that's what we're building towards."

Little Beast Engineering / Little Beast Software: built on values, not hype

Little Beast, founded by Nikkie Deelen in 2020, designs superconducting magnets and builds the 3D design software engineers around the world now use to design them too.

There was no big theory behind it, just momentum. As Nikkie puts it:

"We just rolled into it."

What began as a consultancy quietly grew into the software company it is today. Built, above all, on values.

"We started with nothing, just a small budget for computers and a home office, and now, almost seven years later, we're running a serious software company."

CERN inspired Nikkie to build a team that feels at home in international settings, a comfort that traces straight back to CERN's global environment. And the technical knowledge the team built there still shows up in their day-to-day work today.

Their biggest challenge was finding their own business style. Little Beast isn't a typical start-up, but Nikkie sees that as part of why it works. The company's success comes from sticking to their own values, and the quality how customers should be treated. It's not always easy staying true to that, as they face some challenges by external factors, but it's been worth it.

Little Beast is preparing several new software releases and its very first app, with plenty more on the way.

Six alumni, nine ventures, one mindset

These nine ventures couldn't be more different. A wound-healing device, ocean robots, AI for musicians, civic tools, sensors for the middle of nowhere, magnet design software and at the same time qualities show up again and again: patience, curiosity, comfort working across cultures, and the willingness to keep going when the answer isn't obvious yet.

For some, CERN was where the idea was born. For others, it was where they learned how to tackle hard problems and build things that last. Either way, the mindset is the same: ask the difficult question, test your assumptions, learn from what doesn't work, and keep going.

If you're a CERN alum with an idea you can't stop thinking about — or already building something of your own — CERN Knowledge Transfer can help you take the next step, connecting you with CERN's technologies, expertise and networks to bring deep-tech ideas to market.

These stories remind us that entrepreneurial journeys often begin in unexpected ways, a talk that sparks a question, a problem encountered far from the lab, a skill that finds a completely new use. Do you have a CERN story to share? We'd love to hear from it. Submit yours here.