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About

A two-person AI company in Maryland.

Melian Ventures was formed in 2026 and does two things: it automates the repetitive work that costs small businesses their time, and it builds its own software.

The name is a place. Melian is the demonym for Milos, the Greek island where the two of us got engaged. The mark in our logo carries the same idea: an M and its reflection, woven together, with a horizon running through it.

We are deliberately small. There is no sales team and no account manager. When you write to us, one of the founders reads it and replies.

The people

Founders

Illustrated portrait of Ben Ballintyn

Ben Ballintyn, Ph.D.

Co-founder · Engineering

Ben builds the software. He has spent four years shipping AI to production in healthcare. At Prompt Health, an EMR platform for physical therapy, chiropractic, pediatric and speech clinics, he was the first senior AI hire and is now a Staff AI Engineer there. His systems write more than 100,000 clinical summaries a day for over 400 clinicians, and he is building AI voice agents and document pipelines that keep patient data safe.

Before that, at Booz Allen Hamilton, he led improvements to the CDC's national COVID-19 and influenza transmission-estimation (Rt) pipeline and built a health-fraud detection system for the FDA. He holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University, where he modeled neural circuits and decision-making, and a B.A. in biology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Illustrated portrait of Izzie Wang

Izzie Wang, M.D., M.P.H.

Co-founder · Applications, healthcare and strategy

Izzie develops applications, is our healthcare specialist and advises on strategy. She holds a Bachelor of Medicine (M.D. equivalent) from Sun Yat-sen University's Zhongshan School of Medicine, an M.P.H. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an M.S. in physiological optics and vision science from the University of Houston.

At the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute she ran the day-to-day operations of NAC Attack, a 32-site international ophthalmology trial: start-up, IRB submissions, contracts and regulatory compliance. She also implemented data workflows in Python and Stata, has published retinal research and has presented at ARVO.

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