Cy Schroeder, Harry Kainen, and Kat Krieger are the managing directors for this year’s MIT $100K Competition. We wanted to take a minute to introduce ourselves and share our vision for Accelerate in 2019!
The MIT $100K Leadership Team wishes you a happy summer!
Congratulate the winners of the Launch Finale: Infinite Cooling, Zilper Trenchless and Iterative Scopes
Infinite Cooling, a startup that developed a system at MIT to enable significant water savings in the process of cooling power generators, received the Robert P. Goldbderg Grand Prize at the MIT $100K Launch Finale. Its patent-pending technology uses electrical fields to recapture water that evaporated from the cooling towers of power plant. This water is then recycled back into the cooling system. Infinite Cooling's technology could decrease power plant water consumption by as much as 30 percent, saving millions of dollars to power plant managers every year.
The co-founders of Inifinite Cooling are Maher Damak and Karim Khalil, PhD candidates in the Varanasi Research group in MIT's department of Mechanical Engineering. Derek Warnick, COO, graduated from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2009 where he focused on sustainable energy and energy finance. The last co-founder, Kripa Varanasi, also serving as Chairman, is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.
Zilper Trenchless won the Audience Choice award
Zilper Trenchless, co-founded by brothers Daniel and Roberto Zillante, received the $10K Audience Choice award for its technology that avoids the need to dig trenches for underground piping installation.
Iterative Scopes won the $10,000 Booz Allen Hamilton Analytics Prize for its detection and diagnostic tools that help gastroenterologists identify cancerous colorectal lesions.
Steve Conine, co-founder and co-chairman of Wayfair, was the keynote speaker for this year's finale. Conine stressed that entrepreneurs need to value their customers more than they value their technologies. He recommended, too, the importance of creating a culture where people give honest feedback, which allows entrepreneurs to innovate faster.
Launch finalists announced!
Join us in congratulating the eight amazing teams who will pitch on May 14 during the Launch finale! Discover their elevator pitches:
Crystal Sonic: Electronic devices are built atop high quality wafers with extremely flat surfaces. Wafer surface quality is critical to device performance. Today’s wafers are made by cutting ingots into thin slices with diamond saws. Mechanical wafer sawing is a jarringly primitive step in an otherwise precise, exacting, and high-tech manufacturing process. It is like practicing surgery with a chainsaw. This sawing process is expensive, time-consuming, and introduces undetectable saw damage to surfaces. Our technology uses sound to atomically cut wafers 10x cheaper and 20x faster than sawing. Crystal Sonic will enable manufacturers to create better and more reliable devices at a substantially lower cost.
Leuko: We are developing the first non-invasive device for early identification of dangerously low level of white blood cells, leading to the hospitalization of 110K chemotherapy patients/year in the US, $2.7Bn costs and 7% mortality. Our device relies on optical imaging of nailfold microcirculation: a simple test to daily self-perform from home. This innovation will first enable physicians to personalize chemotherapy planning, improving efficacy and safety of treatments - often conservatively set at suboptimal frequency and dose to avoid infection. It could then benefit 10M immunocompromised US people; 4Bn with little or no access to testing for infection worldwide.
Zilper Trenchless: Zilper Trenchless has developed innovative technology to create versatile and cost-effective equipment, rendering our trenchless technology the best option for infrastructure contractors. Our machines achieve significant reductions in execution time, costs and environmental impact.
STEMgem: STEMgem provides smart device toolkits that allow learners to create their own real, relevant and impactful technology. STEMgem is an Internet of Things device that is directly connected to an online programming environment to let young learners create a build-it-yourself wearable smart device. STEMgem's mission is to engage teenage girls in the STEM fields.
Strand Therapeutics: As a platform, gene therapy has long held the promise of expressing therapeutics proteins directly inside our own bodies. In previous generations, companies focused on DNA delivery without controlled gene expression. In more recent years, RNA therapeutics have emerged as safer, easier to deliver alternative gene delivery vectors. Strand Therapeutics exists at the intersection between synthetic biology and RNA therapeutics: the only company that has built the genetic programming language of RNA to precisely control the expression of RNA therapeutics and deliver truly revolutionary treatments.
360 Truck: Each year, trucking industry in ASEAN loses billions of dollars from trucks that are running back empty after dropping the cargo, bearing the costs of running two ways but making money from only one. This is called empty backhaul.
New Day: New Day, is a smart employment platform providing job-matching and professionalizing skills to entry-/mid-level (blue-collar and services) workers in Southeast Asia. We are focusing on Southeast Asia (and Myanmar in particular) because it has the highest smartphone penetration and mobile internet usage in the world.
Infinite Cooling: Power plants are the largest user of water in the US, and most of this water is used for cooling. At MIT, we have developed a technology that uses electric fields to recover water from the evaporative losses of cooling towers so that the same water can be used again and again. The product offers an attractive 2-year payback to customers, and the market is $8B in the US and over $20B internationally. Our team comprises the inventors of the technology and we have strong technical and business skills.