In this episode of Give It A Nudge, Steve sits down with Dr. Mariam Martin-Mnatsakanyan, the Founder and CEO of AirLabOne. They talk about the reality of digitizing physical assets for complex, high-risk industries like healthcare, mining, and space exploration.

Mariam explains exactly how her embedded technology takes existing legacy machinery and makes it intelligent and self-regulating. This autonomy is crucial for environments that are harsh or completely isolated, like microgravity, where human intervention just isn't possible.

Building deep-tech hardware is notoriously hard. Mariam spent over five years bootstrapping the business entirely on her own, without traditional funding. She explains why she deliberately ignored early investors who didn't understand her vision, choosing instead to follow her own structured path.

This resilience paid off when she secured a global patent for remotely accessing real and virtual scientific instrumentations, and later won major validation from tech giants at the Select USA Investor Summit. She also walks through her plans to expand into Southern California while waiting on a major grant that could see her technology manufactured in local clean rooms and sent into space.

We get into Mariam's personal story, too. She traces her early career as an analytical chemist and pharmacology researcher , from hunting for male contraceptive drugs at the University of Geneva to breast cancer drug discovery at the University of Sydney.

She opens up about the exact moment her own frustration with accessing lab equipment sparked the idea for her global collaborative platform. Steve and Mariam also trade thoughts on the loneliness of being a solo founder, the critical importance of industry validation over random advice, and why building new technology that pairs with old equipment is the ultimate sustainable business model.

Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro: From pharmacology researcher to deep-tech founder

02:50 – The origin of AirLabOne: Making legacy machinery intelligent

04:53 – Microgravity: Why space is the ultimate test for autonomous tech

08:06 – How the frustration of drug discovery sparked a global patent

13:03 – The lonely road: 5 years of bootstrapping without co-founders

16:24 – Ignoring the noise: Why you shouldn't take advice from outside your industry

19:00 – Winning validation at the Select USA Investor Summit

23:20 – The pivot to scaling: Expanding to California and raising capital

29:56 – Sustainability: Pairing cutting-edge AI with old infrastructure

34:11 – Manufacturing locally and the wait for a major space grant

Links:

Connect with Mariam → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariam-martin-mnatsakanyan-phd-4b0310104/

AirLabOne → https://airlabone.com/

Connect with Steve → https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevegrace/

The Nudge Group → https://thenudgegroup.com/

Give It A Nudge Podcast → https://www.youtube.com/@giveitanudge/

The Trouble With People → https://thetroublewithpeople.substack.com/