Anna Lisa SomeraFounder

United States - Greater Chicago Area

Anna Lisa is serial entrepreneur with deep experience in startups, venture capital, technology transfer, biomedical research, and life science consulting. She specializes in early-stage, cutting edge technology businesses and has been a part of the entrepreneurial community for 18 years.

She helped drive the formation and raised angel and venture funding for several start-up companies while also serving as top management for many of the ventures. She also led regulatory affairs, quality, and operations for several medical device companies. She also has extensive experience in non-dilutive funding having helped new companies receive over $50M in SBIR/STTR, state and private grants. Her experience in this type of funding has landed her several contracts with Argonne National Labs, The Polsky Exchange at the University of Chicago, INVO at Northwestern University, the Illinois University Incubator Network, and more.

She is currently a Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Rhaeos, Inc., a digital health and medical technology company born out of the Rogers Research Group at Northwestern University, developing a non-invasive wearable flow sensors for various chronic medical conditions for hospital and home use. In less than 3 years, she has led the company through multiple value inflection milestones including bringing in >$8M in financing including major NIH and NSF grants, achieving FDA breakthrough designation, collaborating with major hospitals across the country for clinical studies, and winning MedTech Innovator, the largest medical device competition in the world beating out >1000 companies globally.

Anna Lisa has also been published in peer reviewed journals; serves as a Principal Investigator on multiple grants; has three graduate degrees: cell biology, business and public health; and has competed in >100 races including 5 marathons and 2 half-iron man triathlons.