Leadership Team

Ed Colgate
Co-Founder and CEO
“Imagine how stark life would be if everything we touched felt exactly the same: smooth, hard and featureless. Yet that is precisely the experience that we’ve been forced to accept in the digital world. No more! Our mission is to bring “touch” fully into the touchscreen experience. We create the technology and tools that support rich, versatile and satisfying tactile experiences.”

Michael Peshkin
Co-founder
“Everyone expects their touchscreen to feel flat. It’s possible that we have lost our sense of touch or at least our expectation of being able to feel something on a touchscreen. I look forward to people becoming connoisseurs of touch, and I think they will.”

Greg Topel
Chief Business Officer
“The major drawback of touchscreens has always been the missing element of physical feedback. We constantly interact with the world through the sense of touch. Yet until now, that has not been possible in our electronic devices. Tanvas finally empowers touchscreens with what we didn’t know we were missing: true interaction with what you see.”
What a Long, Multisensory Trip It's Been
Mar 2006
Surface haptics research launched in the Neuroscience and Robotics Lab (NxR) at Northwestern University and the first of 30+ patents filed.
May 2011
Tanvas is Launched.
July 2012
Tanvas received an NSF SBIR Phase I grant.
March 2013
Secured seed round of investment from a major OEM.
June 2015
Closed a $4.6M Series A investment from R7 Partners, Peak6, Northwestern University, and Silicon Valley venture investors.
July 2016
Hired our 10th employee (and still hiring).
January 2017
Tanvas publicly debuted TanvasTouch at CES 2017. The technology was listed on WIRED’s Top 10 Sharpest Designs and received The Verge’s Best of CES “Most Touching” Award. Tanvas also received an IHS Markit Innovation award for the Automotive category as well as the prestigious Tibbetts Award from the SBA.
June 2018
Tanvas and Mimo Monitors are first to bring surface haptics to the digital signage and conference room display arena. TanvasTouch® also powered the “Gillette Babyface” campaign in collaboration with MediaCom, which received Gold and Silver at the 2018 Festival of Media Global Awards, as well as a Silver Lion at the 2018 Cannes Lion International Festival for Creativity.