Sebastián A. Cruz Romero is the founder and CEO of Capicú Technologies. He builds tiny AI that helps scientists make medicines from living cells. He is a former M.Sc. student in Bioengineering at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, where he earned his B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering.

His training spans research, industry, and startup experience at OcyonBio (biotech CDMO), Apple–USC, NVIDIA, MIT, and the University of Iowa, with support from 20+ scholarships and fellowships, including from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Apple, and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund. He also founded a mentorship program to foster biomedical engineering and bioengineering career development at his university, despite the lack of an academic program. Today, 82% of its mentees have landed internships at R1 institutions and leading life science and MedTech organizations.

News

• Apr. 2026: Capicú has been accepted to NSF I-Corps Puerto Rico!
• Apr. 2026: Submitted to OSV Fellowship Program.
• Mar. 2026: Paper accepted at MDPI Applied Sciences titled A Remote Smart Health Framework for Anemia Risk Stratification via Edge Medical Vision Systems!
• Feb. 2026: Capicú got awarded VentureWell’s E-Team Propel (Stage 2) Program’s grant!
• Feb. 2026: Capicú is part of parallel18’s Life Science Incubator, BioLeap’s Gen. 3!
• Jan. 2026: Submitted journal paper to MDPI Applied Sciences.
• Jan. 2026: Landed in Miami, FL for VentureWell’s E-Team Workshop! FYI. Cara Barnes is awesome!
• Nov. 2025: Capicú got awarded VentureWell E-Team Pioneer (Stage 1) Program’s grant!
• Jul. 2025: Accepted into NVIDIA Inception and AWS Activate programs!
• Jul. 2025: Granted NSF ACCESS support for project titled Compression and Profiling of Machine Learning Models in Biomedical Embedded Sensing!
• Jun. 2025: Completed the Cyberinfrastructure-Enabled Machine Learning (CIML) Summer Institute 2025 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center!
• May 2025: Founded Capicú, a deep tech startup focused on deploying AI/ML directly where biomedical data is collected. Learn more about Capicú here.
• May 2025: Selected to be part of the Dorm Room Fund Blueprint Student-Investor Track.
• May 2025: Submitted conference paper at IEEE GHTC 2025.
• Apr. 2025: NSF SBIR Phase I Project Pitch was invited for Full Proposal submission!
• Apr. 2025: Abstract accepted for 43rd PRISM/58th ACS JTM titled A Hybrid Ensemble-Distillation Approach for Compact Deep Learning Anemia Screening!
• Feb. 2025: Paper accepted at ISICN 2025 titled Performance Analysis of Post-training Quantization for Conjunctival Pallor Anemia Detection!
• Jan. 2025: Abstract accepted for SIAM CSE 2025 titled Evaluating Neural Network Quantization for Conjunctival Pallor Anemia Detection!
• Dec. 2024: Submitted conference paper at ISICN 2025.
• Nov. 2024: Abstract submitted at SIAM CSE 2025.
• Sep. 2024: Submitted summer conference paper at HotMobile 2024.
• Summer 2024: Completed the Apple-NACME Inc. AIML Intensive Bootcamp hosted at USC.
• Aug. 2024: Our paper titled LSTM Model for Sepsis Detection and Classification Using PPG Signals was published!