From postdoc to entrepreneur

After a 1.5-year postdoc in the Liberali lab — where he co-developed and tested a new microscope to track the development of organoids in real time — Andrea Boni co-founded a company that provides live-imaging systems based on a revolutionary microscopy technology. Six years after its launch, the company is thriving, and so is Boni, who has found his calling as an entrepreneur. Andrea Boni developed an interest in microscopy early on. In primary school, he owned a small light microscope that he used to look at slices of vegetables and bugs collected from ponds. He had even devised a tool to cut thin slices of the objects he wanted to inspect under the microscope. As a master's student in biotechnology in Milan, Italy, Boni continued to enjoy the possibility of seeing living cells under a microscope, but he also became fascinated with the technology itself, which has seen incredible developments over the past decades. Boni's penchant for microscopy grew during his PhD at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, where he realized that he was drawn to the applications of the technology more than he was interested in the biological processes it allowed to decipher.