Meet our 2024 Finalists

Helix Carbon (first prize - $100K) revolutionizes CO2 utilization by using electricity to transform captured CO2 into carbon-neutral fuels and chemicals, challenging fossil fuel dependency in hard to abate markets. Born from MIT innovations, we combine dramatically improved catalysts with cheaper materials to create CO2-based fuels & feedstocks that are cost-competitive in fossil-reliant markets. After targeting syngas in ammonia plants, we will begin decarbonizing other industries such as plastics and liquid fuels.

Max Compute Co. (Yope prize - $100K) is building the "Cloudflare for LLMs,” an AI inference optimization platform for large companies. We help product teams using LLMs cut costs, reduce latency, increase reliability, and decrease computing related carbon emissions. For every AI query, we believe there is a maximum amount of computation necessary to solve it. Today companies are massively over-utilizing energy for AI, and our mission is to push towards the lower limit. Our first product is a proxy between companies and LLM inference endpoints where we employ a number of techniques to optimize AI workloads, notably prompt optimization and model routing.

MEET OUR 2023 Finalists

• Active Surfaces (First place): Active Surfaces is commercializing an ultra thin-film solar technology based on decades of MIT research. Our technology can unlock terawatts of dual land use next-generation deployment. Our innovative manufacturing approach drives down our manufacturing costs, transformational for semiconductor and electronics manufacturing. We imagine a future where any surface can be active.

• Autonomous Cyber Co: The cybersecurity industry has consistently faced a dramatic skills shortage. Our product will act as an AI partner to cyber operators that will effectively upskill them and address the industry-wide skills shortage. Our market opportunities exist wherever individuals have a need for cybersecurity knowledge beyond their expertise. We divide these opportunities into application security ($8B TAM), network security ($1.5B TAM), and adversarial training ($3.2B TAM).

• AugMend Health: Mental health clinics face soaring demand, struggle to manage services, leading to clinician burnout. AugMend's AI-powered VR platform automates intake assessments and onboarding exercises, saving clinicians 10hrs/week all covered by insurance. We are able to ease implementation and reduce friction by conducting clinical trials and pilots with treatment centers and private clinics such as Kaiser, to seamlessly transfer intake assessments and onboarding exercises for patients with anxiety to our self-guided VR modules.

• Casemind: Casemind is a legal AI platform that makes lawyers more productive. With technology based on GPT4, the engine of ChatGPT, lawyers can analyze documents, legislation, and cases. Casemind allows lawyers to automate most of their routine work, so they can focus on what matters. Even our platform's earliest prototype can already pass the bar exam in all 50 US states.

• SeiaBio: Chemical fertilizers support food production for half of the global population. Yet, their production causes a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions, and their use destroys native soil microbiomes. Many have worked to develop microbial fertilizers as a replacement, but the microbes needed are delicate and difficult to manufacture. Seia Bio has developed a self-assembling coating that protects microbes from processing and storage stresses to enable their widespread use in agriculture.

• Sensea: The world’s fastest-growing food sector is not agriculture, but aquaculture, which refers to farming seafood in the ocean. This 200-billion-dollar industry is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. At Sensea, we are developing underwater wireless and sensor technologies to bring the data and AI revolution to the world’s most sustainable food sector and capitalize on the growth of the blue economy from 1.5 trillion today to more than 3 trillion by 2030.

• Soundboard: One-person businesses waste substantial time and resources on admin & operations. Because they do not have any support, this waste directly impacts their income. They currently manage their businesses in complex Excel files and use expensive or manual billing tools like PayPal or Venmo. By offering a one-stop shop for their core needs, we enable one-person businesses to focus on their clients by putting client management and billing on autopilot.

• Vocadian: Vocadian empowers a safer, healthier, and more productive front-line workforce with evidence-based voice AI. Our proprietary voice technology assesses fatigue, sleepiness, and circadian rhythm based on human speech. We target high-stakes safety-sensitive industries, such as transportation & logistics, mining, aviation, and healthcare. Vocadian uniquely offers proactive fatigue risk management, leading a paradigm shift in organizational health.