Startup Contest
Share your technological innovation, no matter how early the stage.
The EIPBN 2025 Startup Contest is designed to support entrepreneurs, students, research staff, and faculty transition early-stage technologies into scalable ventures. The contest is the most visible way to present an innovation related to our founding topics of electron, ion and photon beam technology as well as micro-/nano-fabricated devices enabled by these patterning or novel nanomanufacturing techniques.
The Startup Session will begin with Jan Tiepelt, CEO of Fabublox. He will share the journey of his startup from its beginnings as a collaborative design tool at MIT to its growth into a global platform . Ventures participating in the Startup Contest will then be invited to pitch to the conference audience. The pitch will be presented live. The format for the pitch will be a 3-minute pitch followed by 2 minutes of Q&A with the audience. EIPBN 2025 Startup Contest winners will be announced later on the same day.
The winner will receive a sponsored exhibitor package consisting of an exhibition booth and services displaying your business for two days, Wednesday, May 28 through Thursday, May 29. The winner of the Startup Contest will be announced on eipbn.org and honored at EIPBN 2025 conference dinner on Thursday evening (one complimentary ticket will be waiting for the winner).
This contest is ideal for any venture developing a technology that is related to any of the topics in the technical scope of the conference. The contest encourages participation from all ventures incorporating new technical findings from any of EIPBN’s fields of scientific interest. Entry is open to startups at any stage of development – from early ideation to technology validation and growth. This contest aims to support the transition of technology and ideas from the lab into a scalable venture.
Entry is open to all attendees of EIPBN 2025. Please make sure to use the EIPBN 2025 Startup Contest Application template to submit the abstract for the startup competition.
Application Submission deadline is Friday, April 18, 2025.
Applications submitted after the deadline will be considered on a case by case basis.
Startup Keynote
From Process Documentation at MIT to a Global Platform – The FabuBlox Startup Journey
Jan Tiepelt
Abstract: In this talk, Jan Tiepelt, co-founder and CEO at FabuBlox, shares the journey of his startup from its beginnings as a collaborative design tool at MIT to its growth into a global platform used by over 1,500 users across 100 nanofabrication facilities in 14 countries in just over 2 years.
Originally intended to offer an internal solution for shared process database building at MIT.nano, the rapid adoption of FabuBlox reflects a global need for accessibility of knowledge, data interoperability, visualization, and communication of nanofabrication process design. FabuBlox uncovered a market gap between generic but easy-to-use, collaborative tools and expensive, siloed EDA platforms with very steep learning curves – leading to wide-spread adoption as an intuitive, highly automated process development platform in the R&D world. With completion of its beta phase in 2025, FabuBlox is shifting gears into AI-powered solutions for facility process and infrastructure management as well as an integrated marketplace for vendor relations and automation of fab service coordination.
Rather than focusing on the product, this talk will highlight the realities of building a startup, in particular lessons learned as first-time founders: the importance of short feedback loops, assembling the right team, and navigating fundraising options. Jan will share how FabuBlox used Lean Startup and Growth Hacking principles to evolve from MVP to a venture-backed platform, raising $2M in pre-seed funding in 2024.
A particular focus will be put on the challenge of finding product-market fit and scaling the venture to thrive long-term as a sustainable business while staying grounded in the needs of the R&D community driving global adoption of the platform.
This candid session aims to inspire and empower entrepreneurs in the nanofab space, offering key takeaways to building a startup beyond the product: talk about your idea, build with your users, and surround yourself with the right people – because in startups, execution is everything.
Bio: Jan Tiepelt received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Materials Science from RWTH Aachen in 2013 and ETH Zurich in 2017 before joining MIT to pursue a PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2017. His research was focused on nanostructure and energy-level engineering of organic semiconductor devices before completing his PhD in May 2024. Experiencing inefficiencies in nanofabrication process development not only in academia but also in industrial R&D as a display engineering intern at Apple, he set out to create the FabuBlox platform with his team of co-founders in 2023. Jan has served as CEO at FabuBlox since June 2024, guiding the platform’s growth to over 1,500 users globally in just over two years. Thanks to this rapid and wide-spread adoption, FabuBlox has been able to secure $2M in pre-seed venture capital backing under his lead, now scaling the company beyond its beta testing stage in 2025.
Previous Contest Winners
2024 Startup Contest Winner
2023 Startup Contest Winner
2022 Startup Contest Winner
2021 Startup Contest Winner
