ACCELERATE

Accelerate is the second event of the MIT $100K. As its name suggests, Accelerate helps early-stage teams build out their ideas with the support of industry experts and experienced entrepreneurs.

Starting in Winter 2021, MIT Accelerate will serve to highlight the progress that MIT-founded businesses have made throughout the year. All companies, including those involved in other MIT accelerators, are encouraged to apply for the chance to introduce their business to the broader entrepreneurial community

2024 Accelerate Finalists

1st place: Vocadian - Groundbreaking predictive fatigue risk management to empower a safer, healthier, and more productive workforce with voice AI. They support frontline workers and organizations with high-safety risk operations in industries such as transportation and logistics, mining, construction, aviation, and healthcare.

2nd place: Adalant.ai - Specializing in AI and LLM-driven solutions that address the pressing issues of case backlogs, prolonged delays in legal systems, and the ensuing social injustices caused by these delays. In collaboration with courts, they are pioneering voice transcription software specifically designed to assist court judges and stenographers.

3rd place: Crimson Scientific - Developing a new era of electrocardiogram (ECG) capture. Their design eliminates adhesive electrodes, wires and the clunky machine thereby making it possible to rapidly perform an ECG with almost no prior training. Perhaps to illustrate it best their vision is to build a product that can be used by anybody (no medical training), in any environment (backcountry or military) and deliver the results immediately to a physician for interpretation.

Audience choice award: RE Shuffle

2022 ACCELERATE Finalists

1st place: Vizzhy

2nd place: Multitude Insights

3rd place: Mesophase

Congratulations! Vizzhy will receive the $10,000 top prize and all three winners will get a free pass to the Semi-Final round of Launch this May!

We also want to extend our congratulations to the other teams that participated. This is just the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey and we hope to see you again soon!

2021 Accelerate FINALISTS

Candelytics, Inc: Candelytics is an accelerator-backed 3D analytics software startup formally partnered with a Defense research lab to develop the tools that will support the coming revolution in 3D data. Our vision is to deliver digital solutions that harness the power of complex 3D data, making it useful, intelligent, and impactful. We're starting with a billion-dollar pain point in our beachhead market: maritime law enforcement. By supplying the U.S. Coast Guard with advanced 3D analytical tools such as 3D visualization, 3D search, and object recognition, we plan to refine our technology in a challenging operational environment before expanding to broader commercial applications.

Floe: Floe is an MIT & Yale cleantech startup developing a smart, cost-effective, and environmentally-friendly solution to tackle the $11.1B US ice dam market. Our IoT-powered, automated system is far more effective than existing solutions in preventing the significant water damage caused by ice dams. Floe also considerably reduces operating costs (>40%) and carbon emissions (>99%). We are currently conducted a 50-unit paid pilot nationwide in 10 states with key customers, including Prologis, Vail Resorts, and the Hyatt. We ultimately aim to leverage our datasets and IoT sensors to provide value for customers year-round as the Nest for the building envelope.

Gaia AI: Gaia AI uses robotics and AI to decrease the fundamental costs of forestation — deploying autonomous drones to plant seed pods and create intelligently designed forests. Our lightweight go to market is a data play: utilizing drones, LiDAR, and computer vision to collect valuable measurements on existing forests.

Go-Aut: Go-Aut helps children to reach their maximum potential by addressing their developmental disorders before the age of 3. 1 every 6 children in the US have developmental disabilities. Yet just 20% of these children receive therapy on time. Our online assessment helps pediatricians identify the risk of developmental disabilities so they can provide early intervention and improve their patients' prognosis. We proved we can increase 5x the detection rate compared to the routine physician's practice.

Harvest: Harvest is a platform for crowdsourcing bargaining power. The platform allows graduate students to band together under an ‘ambassador’ and then collectively bargain with banks for better student loan rates. Banks benefit because it lowers their transaction costs and provides them with a bundle of pre-vetted borrowers. Students get lower interest rates, banks enjoy lower transaction costs, and we make money by charging banks a fee for each finalized loan. We have over 700 student sign ups so far and plan for negotiations to begin by May 1st.

Human Dynamics: Human Dynamics was founded on the vision of removing the need for humans to do dangerous and demanding physical work. To tackle food manufacturers’ immediate and unsolved problem of mandatory daily sanitation, Human Dynamics provide a patent-pending drone robotics system that takes over the liquid and foam spraying steps of sanitation as well as the visual inspection and verification steps. Taking on these activities reduces the overall sanitation process by 3 hours and reduces the labor requirement by 40%, thereby addressing labor shortage, improving safety and efficiency, and reducing costs as well as the likelihood of production delays.

KANO: 2020 has shown us that RNA and DNA therapeutics are the future of medicine. However, without the necessary biological infrastructure, the pharmaceutical industry will not be able to manufacture game-changing nucleic-acid-based therapies and vaccines. KANO’s proprietary technology can provide this infrastructure; it is the only production process that can manufacture long single-stranded DNA at scale. We can build the engine for future therapeutic race cars.

Osmoses: Industrial purification and separation processes account for 10–15% of the world energy consumption and 16% of the CO2 emissions. This is because we still use energy-intensive, century-old technologies. At Osmoses, we developed a clean solution to change this: molecular filters that can purify hydrogen and natural gas, and can perform carbon capture at scale. Our product is a membrane module and we target the $20 billion gas separation market, $1.5 billion of which is already serviceable. We are committed to transform the way chemical separations are performed and contribute to tackle climate change while generating value for our customers.

Project Prana: For hospitals struggling with ventilator capacity in a post COVID world, Project Prana’s iSAVE saves lives by enabling each ventilator to support multiple patients.

ProtectEd: The ProtectEd bookcase is a simple, practical, and easy-to-use security solution for schools, government buildings, and offices that protects against active shooters by serving as a physical barricade, ballistic barrier, and psychological deterrent while never presenting a militarized appearance.