Ramona: Duke’s Family Biomedical Business

Late in 2020 during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Gregor Horstmeyer and Mark Harfouche had an internet problem.

The pair had recently moved into a bare-bones bungalow rental in the Burch Avenue neighborhood of Durham along with Gregor’s childhood friend and neighbor, Paul Reamey, to focus on their fledgling biomedical microscope startup. Amidst the quiet, heavily tree-lined streets of the historic neighborhood, passersby would have been forgiven for thinking a fraternity group had moved in.

Many of the bedroom windows were blacked out to perform experiments with their prototype microscope systems. The dining room table was covered with computers, monitors, papers and everything else one would expect for workstations in a tech startup. Only one bedroom remained for sleeping.

The only thing preventing the small home from (barely) adequately serving as a research and development space was the extremely slow internet connection. Given the amount of data their test runs were generating, the lowest connection package the host provided just wouldn’t cut it.

Their solution: ask the neighbors if they could string up ethernet cables between their homes.

The resulting “yes” was never in doubt. Living next door was Gregor’s older brother, Roarke Horstmeyer, and his wife, Margaret Aery. Together, the two households comprised the core group working to build a startup company called Ramona.

“It was basically our version of a startup launching in a garage,” Gregor recalls. He would know, as Gregor, Roarke and their third brother, Derek, grew up in Palo Alto, ground-zero of garage startups and the silicon tech boom. “Actually, Durham today feels to us what Palo Alto felt like when we were kids, before it became more of a monoculture of big tech companies.”

That feeling is why the group decided to form a pandemic pod together in Durham, North Carolina, near Roarke’s then-new laboratory at Duke University. That feeling is also why all four members of Ramona’s leadership team decided to stay more than six years later.

They don’t all still live together, of course. That would be a pitch for a 90s sitcom, given that they’re now all married with six daughters between them. But they all still live in that same historic neighborhood within a short walk of one another, and they still see each other on a daily basis.

It isn’t just because they’re family. It’s because they’re all still pursuing their rapidly growing, Durham-style family business.

A Microscope of Microscopes

Ramona was technically founded in 2016, when Roarke and Mark applied for their first funding grant to develop the underlying technology. But the company’s foundations date back much further to Mark’s second day on campus at Caltech in 2011, when he met fellow doctoral student Roarke at a mixer.

Roarke was in his third year of graduate school, but the two hit it off immediately. Both were interested in physics and electrical engineering; Roarke being more interested in biomedical applications and Mark more focused on semiconductors and light generation and detection.

“There were very few Fridays we didn’t spend time together, talking about our work and ways to extend it beyond academic exercises,” says Mark, who has been taking computers apart and putting them back together since he was a kid. “We knew we wanted to work in optics, and in that field, the end goal is never just optics. It’s either defense or health. We decided to work toward health because it resonated more with us.”

Around the same time in the early 2010s, the technology enabling high-quality miniaturized cameras to be incorporated into modern smartphones was rapidly evolving. Along with those advances, the duo was inspired by a classic 1990s movie that transformed many practices in Hollywood cinematics: The Matrix.

Everyone knows the movie’s most iconic shot—Neo moving in “bullet time” to dodge a flurry of projectiles as his body flails with inhuman speed. That sequence was created by combining some 200 individual camera angles. If people could engineer that sort of optical synchrony on a movie set, why not on a microscope deck?

“The genesis of Ramona was our desire to leverage the economies of scale in the smartphone industry to make new types of high-performance microscopes,” says Roarke.

After several months of work, they took the first picture with their pieced-together microscope, and it turned out better than they’d hoped. Sure, there was a hole in one section and another was upside down — but they could still find Waldo.

By the following day, they had sorted out their software issues and demonstrated a successful proof-of-principle device capturing an extremely high-resolution image of a page of  the classic children’s puzzle book. By combining 24 smartphone cameras into a single platform and stitching their images together, they created a single camera capable of taking gigapixel images over an area about the size of a piece of paper.

“Roarke and I have different backgrounds and perspectives on how to work this problem, and how they fit together helped get us off the ground,” Mark says. “I’m always trying to push the fundamental limits, which helps find the root cause of problems, while Roarke is always pushing to get a demo in front of a researcher or doctor as fast as possible. The push and pull between the two has been really important.”

By the time Mark earned his doctorate from Caltech in the fall of 2017, Roarke had already graduated and accepted a faculty position in Duke’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. They had also already secured Ramona’s first grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore potential uses of their new microscope platform.

That project explored the capability of Ramona’s 96-camera platform to track and record the movements of freely swimming zebrafish. Due to their relatively simple brains and transparent skin, zebrafish are a widely used model for studying animal behavior. Researchers can literally see which neurons light up when the animals move, making it easier to measure and quantify how different pharmaceuticals and other chemical compounds affect the animals’ daily lives.

“While we got to develop our microscope technology, the zebrafish research community got the opportunity to form standards and processes for measuring certain behaviors or recording statistics that they never could before,” Roarke explains.

As Ramona’s technologies continued to evolve and demonstrate utility for researchers in many biomedical spaces, the company continued applying for bigger, more complex grants. A big opportunity came soon after Mark’s graduation in the form of a Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the NIH.

With Roarke beginning to set up his new lab at Duke and Mark focused on developing Ramona’s platform, they needed help getting their forms and applications in order. It just so happened that Roarke is married to an incredibly talented, logistically minded professional producer.

And Then There Were Four

Margaret and Roarke first met as freshman lifeguards watching the waters of Duke’s pool at Brody gym. They started dating as juniors and could often be found at longtime Durham outpost The Federal sharing burgers and Rogue Dead Guy Ales.

As the two moved from Washington, DC to Boston to Berlin to Los Angeles while Roarke pursued his education, Margaret was steadily making her mark on the production side of TV, film and radio.

She worked as a web producer for the long running show “Antiques Roadshow.” She was a production coordinator and associate story producer for Alton Brown’s Food Network gameshow “Cutthroat Kitchen.” And she was a producer for an independent film studio called Das Bombe Productions.

The further her career progressed, the more she found herself working on the production and logistics side of the entertainment industry. And as Ramona began gaining steam, everyone involved saw an opportunity for her to bring her skillset to the growing company.

“Before I officially joined Ramona, I found I was best at putting the structure in place to allow creative people to do what they do best,” Margaret says. “As I was helping Mark and Roarke set up their company and complete the administrative work behind their grants, I realized that it was essentially the same job, except the creative side is now the science and technology side.”

Meanwhile, Roarke’s brother Gregor was working as a senior engineer for Eckersley O’Callaghan, one of the few companies in the world focused on the chemistry and engineering of glass. For nearly a decade, he worked on a variety of projects for Apple ranging from the display glass used in iPhones to their main campus’s Steve Jobs Theater, which features seismically stable curved glass walls that are 22 feet tall.

By the time that enormous project wrapped up in 2019, Ramona was already a growing company with Roarke, Mark, Margaret and several other employees hard at work on their critical SBIR grant. Gregor was ready for a new challenge, and his interest and expertise in glass was a great fit for Ramona’s needs.

“Optics is a huge use of glass, and designing miniaturized glass elements to be highly performative is a really interesting engineering problem to me,” Gregor says. “I started helping on the engineering side, learning more about their technology and applications, and toward the end of 2019 I decided I wanted to go into a full-time role.”

Gregor began splitting time between his wife and home in California and Ramona in Durham. Two months later, Covid hit while he was in Durham. Before he knew it, he was living out of a suitcase for six months at his in-law’s house in Florida.

But for Ramona to continue making strides, he needed to work on the technology with his own two hands, and Mark was living alone in Durham. Having visited Roarke and Margaret often over the years, Gregor knew Mark well enough to know they’d have no issues working incredibly closely together for several months.

Before 2020 was over, the decision was made for the group to pod up, which brings the story back to boarded-up windows and ethernet cords stretched between two houses near downtown Durham.

A Growing Family Tech Business

Fast forward six years, and Ramona is growing and thriving—as is the family leading it.

The makeshift pandemic office and lab space eventually graduated to a more professional brick and mortar just off Duke’s campus. Those offices even overlooked The Federal gastropub, where Roarke and Margaret went on many dates as undergraduates. Today, the company recently moved into one of the newest office spaces around; The Roxboro at Venable Center, featuring over 100,000 square feet of lab and office space in a modern glass façade in the heart of downtown Durham.

“Our new offices include a big biolab space that will allow us to push the technology, improve new kinds of measurements and potentially develop new assays,” Roarke said. “We’re trying to codify and define these previously subjective measurements to allow researchers to push their work in new directions.”

Even before the move into the modern lab space, Ramona’s technology has been built out well beyond its first demonstration. While Roarke pushes the fundamental boundaries of what camera arrays can accomplish, such as creating 3D measurements and focusing on individual cells, the company has expanded its platform.

Ramona’s original prototype focused on free-swimming zebrafish in one big area. The team, however, quickly learned from its customers that monitoring many biological specimens, typically grown in multi-well plates, was an even more pressing pain point for their research.

Well plates are essentially collections of small Petri dishes that each house a single experiment. It could be cellular cultures exposed to potential antibiotics, small bunches of human tissue approximating the function of organs (“organoids”) to test potential pharmaceuticals, or individual animal models responding to external stimuli. Whatever the specific application, researchers often prepare hundreds, if not thousands, of individual wells across multiple plates, each with different variables to see how the test subjects respond.

By running all of these mini experiments in parallel, researchers can speed up their results. But tracking, monitoring and recording them all at once is challenging. Ramona’s platform, however, is capable of doing so autonomously and in exquisite detail across every well in an entire plate at once, allowing researchers to scale the same process across many plates much more quickly.

Ramona now has over 70 systems deployed in laboratories across the world from east Asia to Europe to Australia. Their small core team of four has grown to nearly 30, including sales, marketing and field application scientists traveling the world to demonstrate and install their microscope platforms.

All of their work recently culminated in a Series A funding round securing another $25 million in investments.

“We’re very happy to have this opportunity to continue to improve our technology to help the biomedical community uncover new findings, especially as labs transition to collecting more and more data for AI software-assisted discovery,” Roarke said. “It’s an exciting time to be making microscopes!”

A Growing Tech Business Family

While Ramona’s technology and business have grown over the years, so has its family.

When the company was first launched, Roarke and Margaret weren’t even married, let alone contemplating kids. They now have their hands full with three girls under the age of six. Similarly, Gregor and his wife are the proud parents of two young girls under the age of five. And “Uncle Mark” and his wife recently welcomed their first child—you guessed it, a beautiful baby girl.

“We joke that it’s kind of a Ramona blessing—or curse,” says Margaret. “Everyone who has had a child after joining the company—even if they’ve already had boys—has had a girl. I think we’re nearly up to a dozen.”

With all the stress that comes with raising families amidst the rising expectations of a multimillion-dollar company, one might expect pain points in making it all work. But the transitions have been seamless—perhaps even natural.

Because Roarke focuses primarily on science and technology and Margaret focuses on business and operations, their day-to-day responsibilities rarely overlap. That has made it easy for them to make a “no Ramona talk at the dinner table” rule stick over the years, even if Mark and Gregor occasionally broke it. Now, when the four are together, it’s much easier to stay away from talking business. Six girls under the age of six will do that.

“Kids force the issue for you,” Margaret said. “Just try having a conversation about the future of a company without one of them screaming that they have to go to the bathroom.” For all the potential pitfalls of mixing this much business and family, everyone agrees that it’s one of their greatest strengths.

“We’re all passionately trying to solve problems as Ramona grows, and we all have different ideas for how to do that,” says Mark. “And that isn’t bad, it’s just complementary. We all recognize the value of each other’s perspectives, and that closeness is often what helps inspire new angles to tackle whatever situation we’re dealing with.”

“The closeness can be a double-edged sword, but having a layer of professionalism removed sometimes makes things move faster,” Margaret agrees. “It allows us to really dig into problems quickly without feeling like we need to tiptoe around each other.”

The setup might not work for everyone, but it’s clearly working for them and their three families. They all live within walking distance of one another as well as Ramona’s former offices. Gregor’s and Roarke’s other brother and his family have since moved to the area, as has Mark’s mother-in-law to help with their newborn daughter.

“In terms of a place to be a kid and to have kids, Durham is just amazing,” Gregor says. “We love the community here and the ability to be so close to each other, our work, schools, great food—you name it.”

In a way, the business has blossomed as it was always destined to. In its earliest days, the company was called Optical Wavefront Labs. But there was another company with virtually the same name and logo. They had to make a change.

The group thought back to the company’s earliest days. Before they came together in Durham, the Horstmeyer family home in Palo Alto hosted many of their early conversations about the business and served as the company’s base before it had a space of its own. Gregor and Roarke’s father, Bob, was one of its earliest advisers and investors and also served on its board. Later, a connection he made at a neighborhood block party led to the company’s first institutional investment. Together, the home and that early support gave the young company room to take shape and grow.

With that in mind, the decision was easy: The family company was born on Ramona Street.