Hartford Business Journal Special Editions

C T I N N O V A T O R S , 2 0 2 5 9 Coles continued to travel during his doctoral studies, returning to do field work in the Middle East and Latin America but also touching down in China, Ukraine and other countries along the way. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, he was trying to help businesses in Peru cope with the shi toward online commerce, not an easy feat for companies so dependent on real-world transactions. "Some business models just couldn't adjust in time," he said. Coles was on a plane from Egypt to Jordan when he got an email about interviewing for a job at UConn. He said he flew from Amman, Jordan, to Boston, landed in the middle of the night, hopped in a rental car and drove to the Storrs campus. "I woke up that morning, jet-lagged and did my job talk here," he said. "But it was true to form. I think this is what they hired: e dude that was just somewhere in the world that would show up when needed." Coles joined UConn's faculty in fall 2020, when online learning was still in full swing. When students returned to the classroom the following year, they had to remain spaced apart. In both settings, Coles said he leaned on his creative side to keep students engaged — comparing online teaching to hosting a talk- radio show and striving to make his in-person lectures as lively as a Broadway performance while preserving their educational value. Outside the classroom, Coles continued to travel. Notable adventures included a trip to a remote region of Nepal to consult with a factory making cheese from yak milk. At the same time, he was helping establish an entrepreneurship research center at UConn — now known as Daigle Labs — which opened in 2022. e center is named aer Kyle Daigle, an executive at GitHub, a San Francisco-based company that offers a cloud-based platform allowing collaboration among soware developers. Coles met Daigle, a Connecticut native and UConn grad, soon aer relocating to the Hartford area. Coles was on a run and noticed the Tesla solar panels on the roof of Daigle's home in Tolland. "While solar panels aren't that out of the ordinary, the fact he recognized a particular brand of them caught my attention," Daigle said in an email, noting that he found Coles to be "curious, outgoing and tech forward." Daigle eventually agreed to help fund the lab based on a shared vision for helping students in Connecticut and entrepreneurs in nontraditional locations build businesses. "Half the time, the challenge is finding that right person to collaborate with and help build your ideas," Daigle said. "You shouldn't need to move to San Francisco, New York or Miami to find your people." Leadership and technology Smart contact lenses are not new, and plenty of patents exist for their components, said Michael Cantor, a founding partner of Cantor Colburn, a Hartford-based law firm specializing in intellectual property. But aer meeting Coles in early 2025, Cantor decided to join Pantera's board. He has grown increasingly confident that the startup has the right mix of technology and leadership. e company is benefiting from recent breakthroughs in miniaturization, materials, batteries and manufacturing methods, said Cantor, who has more than four decades of experience in intellectual property law. But it also benefits from Coles' approach to leadership. Academics don't always make great founders. But Coles effectively translates his knowledge of entrepreneurship and early-stage ventures into the real- world challenge of leading the Pantera team, said Cantor. Coles, for example, oen cites academic studies in emails seeking advice from other company leaders on how to confront a particular hurdle. e citations offer solid support for what are essentially best practices in a given situation, Cantor said. e approach might sound pedantic. But Cantor said Coles excels at leading by consensus. "He's a very good listener, and he's very good at taking it all in from us before he gives his own ideas," Cantor said, noting that the two men speak every day. "His conclusions are based on input from everyone." Coles does not expect the company to need a lot of manufacturing space when it's ready for commercial production. He calculates Pantera could make 10 million lenses in a 700-square-foot space. But, if the company can pull it off, the spotlight on Hartford is likely to be much bigger. "Putting an independently powered computer on the surface of the eye — if we can do that, and I'm confident that we will when we go into clinicals — will be a feat that'll be on the cover of magazines," Coles said. "Putting an independently powered computer on the surface of the eye — if we can do that, and I'm confident that we will when we go into clinicals — will be a feat that'll be on the cover of magazines." – Ryan Coles I

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