Cédric Kovacs-Johnson: 2025 Early Career Award recipient

BSChE ’15
CEO and Founder, Flume Health

A chemical engineer, innovator and entrepreneur whose inventions solve a wide range of challenges, from materials to health administration.

Over the last decade, Cédric Kovacs-Johnson has held many titles, including engineer, entrepreneur, inventor, and CEO. But the title that best describes him is problem-solver.

As an undergraduate, he decided to skip traditional internships and instead spend his summers working on engineering competitions. An automated French press he designed (which he called the American press) won second place in the College of Engineering’s Innovation Days competition; more importantly, the experience exposed him to 3D printing, which he soon became obsessed with.

The following year, his design for Spectrom, a device that adds color to 3D printers, swept the same competition; even more, it led to two patents, a gold medal at the National Inventors Hall of Fame Collegiate Inventors Competition and, eventually, a company that he sold to major 3D print company MakerBot.

Soon, however, Kovacs-Johnson came across an even bigger problem he wanted to solve: health insurance. “It started with my little sister. I watched her during her ramp up to brain surgery for epilepsy. It was roughly 18 months of back and forth with our insurance plan,” he says. “This led me to the conclusion that if you’re a patient in the United States, your outcomes probably have more to do with what insurance you have than what doctor you have.”

His solution was Flume Health; founded in 2019, the company offers a data integration platform for the healthcare industry. Backend systems within insurance companies and health providers are often fragmented, antiquated and unable to communicate with one another. Flume serves as a universal translation layer across all these systems and formats so they can exchange data—improving communication, transparency and consumer choice.

So far, the company has raised more than $40 million in venture capital and is implementing the platform with a wide array of insurance providers.

“Our goal is simply to make healthcare more affordable and easier to use, and I believe that starts with the insurance,” Kovacs-Johnson says. “We’re not being prescriptive about what exactly is the right health insurance model for every person, but we hope to make it possible for all those models to reach people. And if you can have a competition between health plan ideas in the marketplace, the best ones will win out.”

Which engineering professor made the greatest impact on you?

Tim Osswald, a professor of mechanical engineering who wrote one of the fundamental books on plastics engineering, played a huge part in our success. He’s witty and brilliant. We’d go into his office and spend half the time talking about spaghetti, but in fact we were talking about plastics. We would leave, and we’d be laughing, and we’d have this amazing technical breakthrough.

Of what professional accomplishment are you most proud?

My team. I’ve been able to build a team that has consistently pushed me to be the best version of myself. There are people that I felt lucky just getting on the phone with and now they work for me. I’m very proud of the culture we’ve been able to build here, one of empathy, where there’s no shame in asking for help, and one where people feel secure being very vocal and having productive disagreements.

Which do you prefer?

Winter or summer in Madison?
Summer.

Sweet Caroline or the Jump Around?
Sweet Caroline.

Flamingoes or Badgers?
Badgers.