Colony Counting, Reimagined.

For 15 years, Jill has been obsessed with a single problem: microbial safety and intelligence should work together, not be siloed. Jill started in the food industry building a cold-pressed juice brand, then pivoted into high-value agriculture to solve the lack of health standards in an emerging market. At Willow Industries, she developed patented ozone-based decontamination technology that scaled across the US and international markets, proving that regulated microbiology markets reward precision and trust.

While scaling Willow, Jill kept seeing the same bottleneck everywhere: labs worldwide—whether in food safety, clinical diagnostics, agriculture, or environmental testing—spend billions on manual colony counting. Technicians struggle with accuracy. One trained lab tech cannot match AI speed. Two technicians counting the same plate will disagree by ±30%. Testing volumes are rising across every vertical, but the reading process hasn't changed in over a century. The bottleneck is real, the problem is universal, and it's ripe for disruption.

In 2024, Jill co-founded Mira Science to solve this exact problem. Working with an amazing team of AI software engineers, they built the Mira platform and mobile app to empower and encourage lab techs to embrace the very novel use of AI and modernize a process that hasn't fundamentally changed in over a century.