Today on Veteran’s Day, we are honoring two current Activate Fellows who served in the U.S. military before beginning their journeys as hard-tech entrepreneurs: Jason Hoffman-Bice (Fourier, Cohort 2025) and Kelly Redmond (Oleo, Cohort 2024). Each of them have leveraged their military service, STEM training, and passion for solving hard problems as innovators and startup founders.
Hoffman-Bice is the co-founder and CEO of Fourier, where he is advancing a new frontier of ceramics materials and manufacturing that could solve the world’s most challenging problems in high-powered electronics. Before attending college for engineering, Hoffman-Bice was an enlisted non-commissioned officer in the U.S. Army and was deployed to southern Iraq.
Hoffman-Bice says his leadership style originally came from his father, an electrician who managed his own employees. Hoffman-Bice describes his inherited approach as listening-focused, with an emphasis on enabling people to do the work themselves—not micromanaging. During his service and deployments, he developed this style further. “I was provided extensive leadership training and opportunities managing small teams that honed my skills,” he said.
During his deployment to Southern Iraq, Hoffman-Bice discovered his interest in research and engineering, and once he returned he pivoted his career, leaving the military. He went on to earn a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from University of Florida, a master’s in materials engineering from Purdue University, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Northeastern University, where he invented Fourier's breakthrough technology.
Redmond began her military and STEM career at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “During that time, I was really inspired to pursue environmental engineering as my undergrad degree, because I was passionate about how environmental issues affected people and how people affected their environment,” she said—a theme that would carry through to her work today as founder and co-CEO of Oleo, a biotech startup transforming biomass waste into sustainable oil feedstocks.
During undergrad, Redmond traveled around the world learning about environmental issues faced by the global community. After graduating from West Point, she spent the next five years as an environmental science and engineering officer for the U.S. Army, which entailed leading teams ranging from 7 to 76 people and managing programs and projects that regulated the environmental practices of over 4,000 soldiers and spanned regions as large as the Army’s Indo-Pacific Area of Operations.
Then, having completed her active duty requirement and knowing she would enjoy the experience of running an organization, she pursued a master’s degree in engineering design at Stanford University, where she hoped to home in on her passions for solving environmental challenges. Indeed—this is where she met her co-founder, Gabi Dweck (also an Activate Fellow), and Oleo was born.
What They’ve Achieved Already
With its groundbreaking technology engineered to revolutionize thermal management in electronics, Fourier is backed by a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) SBIR Phase I grant and has even been invited to do research at the International Space Station National Laboratory. The startup recently hired its first employee, expanding beyond the founding team of Hoffman-Bice and his Ph.D. advisor Randall Erb, a professor at Northeastern University.
In terms of milestones achieved so far, Hoffman-Bice says, “There are a lot of wins. But I think I will have proud moments when I deliver on those wins.”
What’s next for Fourier? Having completed a thorough market discovery process through the NSF I-Corps program, Fourier is now focused on customer relationship development and is ready to work with early customers.
Meanwhile, Oleo is pioneering a low-carbon oil that could replace carbon-intensive oils across the consumer goods and biofuels industries. The technology is currently at the laboratory phase with plans to scale to the pilot setting in the coming months.
Oleo, a pre-seed-funded company, is now a team of four.
“I would say my proudest moment thus far with Oleo has definitely been building out the team,” said Redmond. “It represented us maturing into a company, not just a concept that was born at a university.
Takeaways from the Fellowship
Hoffman-Bice, a member of the Activate Boston Community and Cohort 2025, said the Activate Fellowship has already been impactful for him and his company. “The community has been, on its own, an incredible benefit,” he said, mentioning what he’s been able to learn from Activate peers and alumni. “We can always talk to each other—and the alums who are way more advanced have been an invaluable wealth of knowledge.”
“The resources that are provided are extremely impactful to any startup, and being a grant-funded organization, these resources are enabling me to have more flexibility. In terms of support, this is probably the best situation that a startup could be in.”
For Redmond, the timing of the Activate Fellowship was critical. “Activate came in at a time in Oleo's life when a lot of other investors were not willing to pledge their support yet,” she said. “We were very early-stage, and Activate gave us critical support that was necessary for us to keep going and actually get our innovation out of the university.”
She also said the connection to the Berkeley National Laboratory was instrumental in helping develop and scale Oleo’s technology.
Redmond, a member of the Activate Berkeley Community and Cohort 2024, also mentioned the community aspect of the fellowship. “From a personal perspective, the number one thing has absolutely been the community,” she continued. “I've been completely blown away by the other founders and the cohort and the staff at both the local and the national levels. I wasn't counting on having such a great support network and people that I could really connect with going into the Activate Fellowship, but it absolutely delivered beyond my wildest dreams.”
Sharing Their Advice
Hoffman-Bice’s advice for anyone interested in hard-tech entrepreneurship is to “be bold and just go for it.”
“You don't know what you're going to be able to achieve until you do it, even if you fail. I think the fear of failure is unfounded—if you fail and learn from that experience, you build resilience,” he said. “And during my journey I have found that, much like in the military, there's a sense of camaraderie in the startup community, because everyone's going through the same thing.”
Reflecting on her journey as a hard-tech founder, Redmond says, “It's been an incredible experience for me.”
“I think the ability to build your own organization and set your mission and your vision and work to make that real in the world every day is something that would probably resonate with a lot of veterans,” Redmond said.
“I think for me personally, the fulfillment that I got from being in a mission-driven organization has translated over to entrepreneurship—and I'm getting to set the mission and the vision myself. So I would definitely encourage other veterans who are interested in this path to go for it.”