Ben Solomon

Founder and CEO FedTech

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Ben Solomon is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of FedTech, a Washington, DC-based organization that exists to solve a specific and well-documented failure: the United States government funds an enormous volume of world-class research through its agencies and national laboratories, and comparatively little of it reaches the market. FedTech’s answer is to match entrepreneurs — people who can build a company but do not have a technology — with federally developed inventions that have no team behind them. What distinguishes the model is that FedTech is equity-free, describing itself as a fully integrated deep tech commercialization platform rather than a conventional accelerator taking a stake in what it helps create. Solomon founded the organization in 2015 after completing the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps programme, which teaches federally funded researchers customer discovery, and he came to it from an unlikely background in broadcast and financial media rather than from venture capital or government.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of FedTech, established in 2015 in Washington, DC.
• Built FedTech on an equity-free commercialization model working with federal agencies, national laboratories, research institutions and corporate innovation programmes.
• FedTech reports 174 studio companies incorporated, 526 startups accelerated and more than 300 technologies commercialized since its founding.
• FedTech reports that startups from its programmes have raised more than $5 billion in follow-on funding, across more than 300 programmes executed in 28 global markets.
• Adjunct Lecturer in technology commercialization and lean startup principles at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business from 2015 to 2018.
• Early-career roles in media as a researcher at NBC Sports and a news assistant at Bloomberg News.

Professional Journey

Solomon read History at Princeton University, and began his working life in media rather than technology, first as a researcher at NBC Sports and then as a news assistant at Bloomberg News. Neither is an obvious route into deep tech venture building, but both involved the same underlying skill that FedTech’s model depends on: finding a story inside a large volume of raw material that other people have not made sense of.

He subsequently took an MBA in entrepreneurship and marketing at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and went through the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps programme — the government’s own effort to instil customer-discovery discipline in federally funded researchers. Going through I-Corps exposed him to the scale of the problem directly: a very large pipeline of publicly funded research with no commercial path, and a population of capable founders with no access to it.

FedTech was founded in 2015 to close that gap. Rather than acting as a technology-transfer office or a vendor, it operates as a commercialization platform, running programmes that pair entrepreneurs with specific federal technologies, taking them through customer discovery, team formation and company incorporation. The equity-free stance is deliberate and is central to how federal agencies are able to work with it: an organization that takes a stake in the companies it helps form has a different set of incentives from one that does not, and agencies including NASA and the Department of Defense have engaged FedTech on that basis.

From 2015 to 2018 he also taught as an adjunct lecturer at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, delivering graduate teaching on technology commercialization and lean startup principles — the same material FedTech’s programmes apply in practice.

FedTech has since grown into an international operation. The organization reports 174 studio companies incorporated and 526 startups accelerated, over 300 technologies commercialized, more than 300 programmes run across 28 global markets, and more than $5 billion raised in follow-on funding by companies that have come through its programmes. Solomon has built out a senior team around him, including a chief operating officer and a vice president for venture building, and describes his own motivation in terms of democratizing access to deep technology.

Education

Princeton University

BA, History

University of Maryland, Robert H. Smith School of Business

MBA, Entrepreneurship and Marketing