New tech company sets up shop in Cleveland Heights

Eugene Malinskiy, CEO and founder of DragonID.

DragonID, a technology company that focuses on medical devices and other healthcare-related projects, recently moved its headquarters from the Launch House in Shaker Heights to the Heights Rockefeller Building in Cleveland Heights. Last year, the company was named one of the top 25 tech companies in Northeast Ohio and the “coolest tech startup company” by Inside Business magazine.

Founder and CEO Eugene Malinskiy, 28, grew up in Kiev and moved to the U.S. with his parents when he was in his teens. He graduated from Mayfield High School and earned undergraduate degrees in chemistry and biochemistry from John Carroll University. He attended graduate school at the University of Copenhagen and Cleveland State University and has graduate degrees in biomedicine and engineering.

“I started the company when I saw a particular medical need,” he said. “Patients were getting strokes during cardiac procedures, and I thought I knew a way to prevent that from happening.” He developed a way to capture and remove blood clots from the body during surgery in a minimally invasive way. “We now work with doctors, hospitals and medical organizations to help them develop their ideas and bring them to the market,” Malinskiy said. “We do a lot of research and development and have a great engineering team.”

He added that Cleveland is the perfect place for his company’s headquarters, because it is one of the country’s top medical centers. DragonID currently employs about 20 people, but Malinskiy said he hopes to soon double that. It was the company’s growth, in fact, that necessitated its move from the Launch House.

The company’s other projects include a program that enables people to match themselves to doctors based on compatibility, a project DragonID is working on with another local company, CompassMD.

DragonID has also been developing a health and vaccination chart called Songbird, which enables families to have a better sense of their children’s medical needs. It is primarily aimed at under-developed countries, and it came about after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation came up with the idea and offered a grant for someone who could develop it. DragonID did not receive the grant but is still pursuing the project. “While we were designing the project, we came up with the idea of digitizing it, so it could be plugged in with a touchtone interface,” Malinskiy said. “Africa actually has more cellphones per capita than the U.S., so we digitized it and put a team together to pursue it as a nonprofit spinoff.”

Though Malinskiy lives in Mayfield Heights, he loves Cleveland Heights. He said he and his team work “48-hour days” and are often working through the night. They do get out, however, and take advantage of the many restaurants and coffee shops near their new office.

James Henke

James Henke, a Cleveland Heights resident, was a writer and editor at Rolling Stone magazine for 15 years. He is also the author of several books, including biographies of Jim Morrison, John Lennon and Bob Marley.

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Volume 7, Issue 5, Posted 9:58 AM, 04.29.2014