VILLAGEx 2022 Founder Friday: Muse Engine
Founder Fridays is a series that spotlights VILLAGEx founders and their startups
In July of 2020, Benjamin Legum, Jennifer Vondran, and Jody Strausser decided that it was the right time to found Muse Engine to develop ”the archetype”, a revolutionary injection printing platform that transforms traditional injection molding into an on-demand service in a fraction of the costs.
Legum and Vondran go back to their college days at Drexel University (2003). But it was in 2015, Vondran, a life sciences and healthcare technology consultant, decided to team up with Legum at their consulting agency, Keystone Scientific. In 2017, both Legum and Vondran began writing their product development textbook, Engineering Innovation, that landed them university teaching opportunities. Legum met Strausser in 2012 while managing Clarion University’s technology incubator. Strausser, a computer information systems professor, began working with Keystone Scientific on consulting projects. When the pandemic hit in 2020, they caught the bug of entrepreneurship, leading the three to practice the advice from their own Engineering Innovation textbook to de-risk and develop a new innovative technology.
“One of the things that we saw as barriers in manufacturing physical medical devices is the two to five-month lag in time, and the [high] cost of getting a static mold made for a medical part going for upwards of $150,00 to $750,000,” Legum said. “We all asked the same question: what if you didn't have to spend that cost for static molds? What if you could actually do that on-demand?”
Legum had experience as a manufacturing and process engineer for a top-tier spinal implant company, and, through Keystone Scientific, had also been involved in medical device manufacturing process improvement projects. The three dedicated and invested their time and money to better understand the medical device injection molding manufacturing industry more deeply. They developed market research, and then laid the best ideas out on the table for solving the high cost and high lag time of static mold and 3D printing. Then, “the archetype” was born.
Muse Engine is now a VILLAGEx 2022 company and is already looking to grow its team by hiring three engineers in the coming months. They aim to obtain a million-dollar fund seed round that would go towards investing in an automated version of “the archetype” this year. The team is also seeking to invest the funds to set up a facility around the Greater New Orleans region.
Q & A
(Responses have been edited for clarity)
Benjamin Legum: “[It’s simple] to upload your design to [our online platform], our online portal will immediately tell you if it can be made with our system, the part is put on que to be manufactured with “the archetype” that day so that it can be sent to you the next day. Usually there's a one to five-month window for developing the tooling and it's really expensive. Even if you're doing a really inexpensive piece of tooling, it still takes three to five weeks, and then you get charged at least $5,000 for a small batch of tiny parts. In our case, with our system, we circumvent all of that. You give us the same file format as a 3D printer and we can have a single part made for you in a matter of minutes or a lot of a few thousand in a day. It's injection molded, not 3D printed, so you don't have to worry about the striations; it's a whole component.”
How has your experience as a VILLAGEx founder been so far?
Jody Strausser: ”I come from a software engineering background. So as a new founder, just being able to be around Ben and Jennifer who have more experience in entrepreneurial ventures, and around external people is probably one of the biggest benefits of the VILLAGEx experience. I always say, ‘I don't know what I don't know. The Idea Village’s mentorship and opportunity to be in this environment has really, for me personally, broadened my horizon on the scope of my understanding of what it really means to build a startup. It's been eye opening in some instances of how you have to pivot in order to meet the true demands of the industry needs and requirements at any given moment.”
What does it take to be an entrepreneur?
Benjamin Legum: “Perseverance and the willingness to be flexible. Being willing to ask for help and look for guidance. Being willing to take guidance is huge. And being able to put yourself out there a little bit.
++++
Muse Engine is a product development company dedicated to simplifying manufacturing by incorporating the versatility and ease of 3D printing with the production quality of injection molding into an easy-to-use injection printing process.