In this episode of the Achieve Podcast, host Jesse Warner interviews Sinan Gölhan, CEO and founder of GelTech Labs, a robotics‑first, AI‑enabled company that automates hydrogel biomaterial testing. Gölhan shares his personal motivation—stemming from a family cancer experience and a nanomedicine background—to improve drug delivery, leading him to develop a compact robotic lab instrument that replaces manual, labor‑intensive testing. He recounts the early fundraising journey (a UC San Diego pitch competition, a $100K seed, a $500K raise, and a subsequent $1M round), building a six‑person team, and generating revenue within two years of graduation. The conversation covers GelTech’s go‑to‑market tactics (targeting pharma and wound‑healing companies, leveraging conferences and LinkedIn, and using academic publications as marketing collateral), the integration of AI as an experiment‑planning assistant, and scaling constraints such as international tariffs and long lead times for hardware components. Gölhan reflects on key lessons—hiring slowly, firing quickly, and focusing on a clear vision—and offers advice to young entrepreneurs about committing fully when they have few personal obligations. He ends with a call to scientists and investors to engage with GelTech Labs, positioning the company as a future cornerstone of automated biomaterials testing infrastructure.
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Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. My name is Jesse Warner and I'll be your host today. Today we're excited to have Sinan Gohan, CEO of Geltech Labs, with us today. Sinan, welcome to the show. We're excited to have you.
Hi Jesse, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
So our audience can get to know you a little bit, give us the quick backstory on your business. What do you do? How did it all get started?
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm an entrepreneur from Istanbul, Turkey. Um, when I was in high school, unfortunately cancer was a big thing in my family, so I went to college in the US and studied nanomedicine, essentially trying to find better solutions for cancer so that patients can get better outcomes. Only 1% of chemotherapy drugs actually reached a tumor, and we wanted to bring that number up. And specifically, I started using these water-based materials called hydrogels to make those treatments more targeted. I worked in clinical settings, industrial settings, academic settings, and after a time, after a while, I grew so tired of doing the that manual scientific work. I felt like a robot, so I said, why hasn't anyone built a robot to automate these tests yet? And got into that. Now we've raised about $1.5 million, have a team of 6 full-time employees, and started generating revenue this year, 2 years after graduating college. So pretty happy with how things have come along so far. And yeah, happy to be on this podcast and share my journey.
Well, congratulations on the success. It sounds like you were, uh, you were doing some work at Harvard and UC San Diego, is that right?
Yeah.
Okay. And so you, you raised some money, you built a team. Tell me a little bit about how business has changed from 2 years ago when you started and kind of where you're at today.
Yeah, so I started essentially right out of college. I, I won a pitch competition at UC San Diego and I got about $100,000 from that and then spent about 9 months trying to raise money with no success and trying to build a product with no success. And then some— somewhere along the way, things started clicking. We actually got our first working robotic prototype down and we got our first lead investor, this biotech CEO in Boston. And then towards the start of 2025, we were really able to kick things off, raise the first $500K, actually hire some, some great engineers, some experienced engineers, and then raise that remaining million after we built our team and made some commercial progress as well. Yeah.
Wonderful. Talk to me a little bit about your go-to-market strategy, sales, marketing, outreach. Where are you seeing traction? What's working for you?
Yeah, so we sell these robotic box units, essentially. They're like a lab instrument about the size of a record player or a printer. And essentially our main strategy has been to target pharma companies, wound healing companies who work with these materials I mentioned called hydrogels, and really communicating directly with the scientists who are doing these tests manually. And essentially showing them the benefits of using our device and how much time we will save them from these kind of labor-intensive processes. And that's been our strategy there, using mostly conferences and LinkedIn to really just create those relationships with scientists who need our product.
So it's a pretty niche area. It sounds like there's a specific type of material that you're working with. Type of scientist that you're trying to work with. Um, events, LinkedIn, that's kind of what's working for you right now?
Uh, yeah, right now. And I'm the— currently the only person running commercial efforts, but thankfully we have more clients right now than we're even able to handle internally at our lab. Uh, so things are going great. Uh, we're now going to start a campaign starting in Q2 And we will hire a salesperson in Q3, and specifically we're targeting the, um, the medical hydrogel manufacturers in the US and focusing on automating, um, their processes. And, you know, we've lined up a lot of academic publications which are really important in this industry, getting that high-quality data, that scientific data that we use as marketing material to get to those industry accounts. Yeah.
Sunnit, Sinan, there's a, there's a lot of buzz right now around AI and automation. How are you using AI in your, your business?
Yeah, so we're a robotics-first, AI-second company. So really the core of what we do is in the physical automation, but we also have an AI tool integrated in our software that's for controlling our technology, and that enables— it's like an experiment assistant, experiment planning assistant, and it's able to assist the user with using the device and planning the next experiments to run with the device, as well as automating some of the other software and firmware processes involved with the operation of our tool. Yeah.
As you try to scale, what are some some of the constraints that keep showing up?
Yeah, a lot of the tariffs have been very challenging for us as a hardware company because ordering parts internationally has become a nightmare and shipping times are incredibly long. So a lot of time the bottleneck in our development is just waiting for some critical parts to show up in the mail that haven't come in yet because we ordered it from China or Taiwan or someone else. So that's been honestly the biggest challenge for us. Yeah.
You others see other constraints like time, people, systems, leadership, things like that?
Um, at first I did, but now our team has gone very established. We have a great group of investors as well supporting our company. And we have a great set of advisors advising our technical business acumen as well. And I have an experienced CTO at the helm who is far more experienced than I am. He has a PhD and about 20 years of industry experience developing lab automation systems. So I can really trust him to, you know, lead the technical team while I'm out raising money and getting on podcasts and stuff like that. Yeah.
As you look at the next stage of growth, what are you most excited about?
I'm really excited about just saving time for scientists and becoming a part of, you know, the next generation of biomaterials and the next generation of healthcare products and seeing our tool accelerate the labs that are making these major breakthroughs.
Let's look back on the last couple of years. Some of your journey. You're fairly new at this journey, really, in a couple years. Yeah, isn't that far into it. Talk to me a little bit about some of the wins and the mistakes that you had along the way. What are some of the lessons that you've learned?
So yeah, I mean, I think one key lesson was to, um, hire slow and fire fast. I think it took me a second to learn that, and it took me about 9 months to actually get to the right team that could bring us to, you know, a successful startup. And yeah, that first period of, you know, getting right out of college and trying to find people to work for me for free because we didn't have any money and chasing after investors and being really kind of unfocused about things and having a very shallow vision as to what a team needs to be to build a product like this was probably my biggest mistake, was kind of just hitting the gas without kind of taking a second and really trying to work my way to where I needed to be. Yeah.
Last question here for you. What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs who are kind of on a similar journey?
Yeah, to any entrepreneurs, like if you're in college or, you know, you're young, or some might say you're too young a lot of the time, I would say this is the best time to pursue anything like this. You know, at my age, you know, you have no kids, no responsibility, no mortgage, no nothing. And I feel like I can just commit my life fully to just working on a company. And, um, if you absolutely, you know, believe in it, just go at it 100%. If you're 50/50 about something, it's probably not worth it. Yeah.
Any other final thoughts or things you want to share with our audience?
Uh, yeah, uh, we're building the future of automated biomaterial testing infrastructure. And if there's any scientists out there or investors out there who are interested in what we're doing and what we're working on, uh, yeah, please reach out to me.
Well, Sinan, think— thanks for sharing your story, your insights with us. For those listening, if you want to learn more about Gel-Tek Labs and what Sinan is building, go to gelteklabs.com. And that'll wrap up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. A big thank you to our sponsor Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executives for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed today's conversation, follow our show and share with another entrepreneur who'd also find value in it. Again, thanks for listening, and we will see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.
