Battlefield

And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2022 is … Minerva Lithium • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Minerva Lithium, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VentureNo Comments

ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022 — the first in-person Disrupt in three years — is in the books. And as always, we end it by crowning the winner of Startup Battlefield. It began with 20: As seasoned ZebethMedia readers will know, startups participating in the Startup Battlefield were hand-picked to compete in the event. During the first two days of Disrupt, the companies pitched before judges — multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders — for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted Battlefield Cup. After much deliberation, the ZebethMedia editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: Advanced Ionics, AppMap, Intropic Materials, Minerva Lithium and Swap Robotics. They pitched in front of the final panel of judges today, which included Mar Hershenson (Pear VC), Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone, Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures), ZebethMedia editor in chief Matthew Panzarino, David Tisch (BoxGroup) and Richard Wong (Accel). One startup emerged victorious. Without further ado! Winner: Minerva Lithium Minerva Lithium has produced Nano Mosaic, a coordinated polymer framework that looks a bit like black gravel and extracts critical materials from brine in just three days. Minerva says that it can extract one metric ton of lithium using just 30,000 gallons of water, and it can do it in three days. Evaporative brine processing needs to evaporate 500,000 gallons of water to get to the same amount of lithium. Just one gram of this absorbent material has a surface area equal to that of a soccer pitch, which should give you an idea of just how little you’d need to extract a large amount of minerals. Read our coverage on Minerva Lithium here. Runner-Up: Intropic Materials Plastics are great for so many things, but they stay around for an awfully long time. Intropic leaps to the rescue with a set of enzymes that can be added to plastics at the very beginning of their life cycle, before it is even turned into products. The additives the company makes have been proof-of-concept tested and it wants to upend how plastics are made and disposed of. Intropic’s additives make many of the most commonly used plastics biodegradable in normal commercial composting. The enzymes are added to the pellets or powders that are used in the normal course of plastic production. This gives plastics new, biodegradable capabilities without changing the manufacturing processes used to create plastic products. At the end of the lifecycle, when it’s time to get rid of the material, the products can be composted into their component parts. Read our coverage on Intropic here.

Intropic helps single-use plastics decompose from the inside out • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, bioplastics, Climate, Disrupt, Hardware, Intropic, StartupsNo Comments

Plastics are great for so many things, but they stay around for an awfully long time. Intropic leaps to the rescue with a set of enzymes that can be added to plastics at the very beginning of their life cycle, before it is even turned into products. The additives the company makes have been proof-of-concept tested and it wants to upend how plastics are made and disposed of. Intropic’s additives make many of the most commonly used plastics biodegradable in normal commercial composting. The enzymes are added to the pellets or powders that are used in the normal course of plastic production. This gives plastics new, biodegradable capabilities without changing the manufacturing processes used to create plastic products. At the end of the lifecycle, when it’s time to get rid of the material, the products can be composted into their component parts. Aaron Hall, CEO at Intropic, and Jolene Mattson, the company’s process engineer. Image Credits: Intropic Materials. The problem with current ways of disposing of plastics is that while materials made of plastic can decompose, nature does it from the outside in, and it takes a very long time. The innovation from Intropic, pitching in the Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022, is the additives are added to the plastic raw materials, which means that the materials dissolve through a process called depolymerization. Essentially, the polymer chains are reduced to monomers, which nature’s normal decomposition processes can take care of. The company claims that when the plastics are subjected to water and relatively low heat (40ºC / 104ºF), PLA and PCL plastics treated with the additives can break down 98% faster than without the additives. At an industrial scale (for example, when the plastics are cutoffs or leftovers from regular manufacturing processes), the water-and-heat bath can break down the plastics in less than 48 hours, which can then be further processed. For post-consumer plastics, those same conditions occur naturally in commercial composting. “The enzymes are activated by temperature and water, not one or the other. We need both. And that’s really important because if it were just temperature, you wouldn’t be able to put this in a truck or a warehouse in Arizona or Houston in the summer,” explains Aaron Hall, CEO and founder at Intropic. “If it were just water, when it gets humid, all of a sudden you’ve got things melting or degrading. For now, we need both, but in the future, there are angles that we can explore to create even more handles of control, which is a lot of the fun.” Because the additives are added before the manufacturers have started shaping the products, the possible use cases are vast, the company told me, and because the manufacturing process itself doesn’t change, it could, in theory, be rolled out very quickly. “We’re developing enzymatic additives that can go inside of plastics and enable them to self-degrade. There are many different application spaces where that is relevant,” says Hall. “Single-use packaging, especially food packaging, is an enormous space that we’re interested in, but there are lots of other single-use plastics that are also important, right? Think about all of the tech packaging. The plastics our headphones come in, all the little sleeves, shrink wrap, etc.” An undegraded film of PLA (polylactic acid) plastic, left, is shown with biodegraded fragments of PLA, right. Image Credits: Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering The company is at the early stages of what it’s doing, but is making some very interesting progress. It has completed its proof-of-concept work and has published a few papers in academic papers to show that the technology works. Right now, Intropic is working to scale up its manufacturing to the kilogram scale. “We are not tied to this number, but for the sake of an example, let’s say we’re going to use 1% of additives. That means that one kilo of additive can equate to 100 kilos of the finished product,” Hall explains. “That’s more than enough to do testing and validation for the initial stages. From there, we’re looking to find partners.” The company is particularly focused on ensuring its product will work at enormous scales, to maximize its force for good, and tackle as much of the plastics problem as possible. “The way we’re looking to formulate is that we’re working on making this into a ‘master batch.’ It will be a powder or a pellet, depending on what our partners need. We’ll be able to add that at the beginning, which means we’ll be able to get into all sorts of products,” says Hall. “This could be anything from coatings, such as an aqueous coating or a solvent-based coating, all the way through to injection molding, roll-to-roll and lamination, covering the full spectrum of plastics manufacturing. That’s, ultimately, what’s really cool about this being an additive: That’s just naturally how the process flow goes, which means it’s fairly straightforward to integrate into many of these channels.” Image Credits: TechCruch The company is very careful about making universal declarations about its efficacy, explaining that the additives do need to be activated with heat and water for the rapid breakdown to occur. I asked whether there would be a benefit to having these plastic additives, even if the final product ends up in landfills, for example. “As a PhD-trained scientist, I’m going to be careful about making claims,” Hall laughs, “but having these enzymes inside could lead to something that has a much faster degradation even in a landfill environment with less-optimal conditions. That’s certainly a possibility, but something that we would want to validate before we make any strong claims about it. Having said that, it is exciting to entertain that thought, and there’s no reason to think it would absolutely not work.” What struck me the most about talking with the Intropic team is that it sees itself as part of a large, overall solution to the plastics problem. The team also spoke with great enthusiasm about other innovations in the materials space, especially

BetterData taps the blockchain to help create better synthetic data • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, BetterData, Crypto, Disrupt, StartupsNo Comments

As the global data privacy regulatory landscape gets more convoluted and constrictive, engineering teams looking to use structured data to improve their products and AI models are being pushed to jump through plenty of hoops to stay compliant. BetterData, which is launching onstage at the ZebethMedia Disrupt SF Battlefield startup competition, is aiming to help customers quickly generate representative, synthetic structured data so that technical teams can work with data in a compliant way without waiting for months to gain clearance to use actual user data or generate their own. The company’s product helps generate the AI data in a secure way that allows clients to upload real user data and securely transmit and convert it without a copy of the data landing on BetterData’s servers. User data is tokenized and stored on a blockchain which is only accessible with a user’s private encryption keys. Image Credits: BetterData The generative data copy maintains the key properties of the original structured data while anonymizing and scrambling the information. This enables teams to train models and create products that are capable of parsing organic user data, but helps them avoid lengthy bureaucratic processes often required to gain access to user data. The startup’s co-founders, CEO Uzair Javaid and CTO Kevin Yee, have backgrounds in AI data generation and blockchain security. They met at the Entrepreneur First program in Singapore. The duo have raised $770,000 in funding and grants so far and are in the process of closing a seed raise. “We’ve spoken to hundreds of data teams… and they all face the problem which is access to data,” Yee told ZebethMedia in an interview. “It takes a long time to access data under data protection rules… They’re trying to innovate, but it takes so much time.” Image Credits: ZebethMedia The company announced onstage that they will be expanding the private beta after a number of successful pilot programs. BetterData is particularly targeting customers in the Banking Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) world, as well as data and AI teams at tech companies. Yee and Javaid hope their product can not only help those teams stay compliant with the increasing sprawl of data privacy regulations but can also help them avoid data attacks and leakages by tapping encryption and the blockchain. The blockchain element will also allow customers to have an immutable access log and a full breakdown of data lineage so they can ensure that data is never being mishandled. For now the company’s product focuses exclusively on processing and generating structured data, but as they build out their functionality, they plan to start generating text data using natural language processing models. They are planning to launch a public beta of their cloud services solution by the end of this year.

Labby wants to make milk healthier and cows happier with better sensors • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in AgTech, Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, Hardware, LabbyNo Comments

For most dairy farmers, milk flowing from their cows is tested by a traveling technician once per month. But in a world where bovine mastitis can appear from one day to the next, it is udderly ridiculous to test milk flowing from cows once per month. Today at ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield, Labby offered a different solution, with an inline optical sensor that can test cows every time they are milked. For now, the product detects potential issues early, but over time, the company believes it can start predicting issues before they occur. The company’s product is called MilKey and comes in two variants: a hand-held product that can be used anywhere, or an inline product that can be hooked into the milking machines, which enables daily farmers to test continuously. The main difference between the two products is also their strengths. The handheld device can be used by any technician out in the (literal) field; you select the cow you’re testing on a smartphone app, and the test results show up with the right animal. That’s great when a cow is wandering about or if you have suspicions about a particular animal having an illness. The inline device is fully automatic and works over Wi-Fi. For this device, the results need to be assigned to the right cow manually, but it makes it feasible to test every cow, every milking. Labby’s portable sensor. Image Credits: Labby. Labby tells ZebethMedia that the device takes spectral measurements of milk samples and uploads them to the cloud. From there, the company uses machine-learning models to take spectral readings as inputs. It can estimate the content of the milk, broken down into fats, proteins and somatic cell counts. Once the measurements are taken and assigned to an animal, the farmers can use an app or any web browser to see the full testing history of any animal, to ensure they are going a-bovine and beyond in terms of milk production. “Animal health records are like human records; they give critical indications about animal health and feed efficiency. It turns out that milk is the best biomarker for everything. Currently, the industry only tests once a month for each animal. We think this is a systemic failure for the farmers and for the animals,” says Julia Somerdin, CEO and founder of Labby, in an interview with ZebethMedia. “One complication for animal health is mastitis. It one of the most common yet expensive diseases, and it can change from day to day. So when they do 30-day testing, the test will tell you everything is fine, but the next day the animal could develop a case, which can be subclinical with no symptoms. So for farmers, between testing days, they have no idea how the animal is doing.” You may be wondering “who cares,” but dairy farming is a hell of an industry. There are 9 million cows across 40,000 farms in the U.S. Worldwide, there are 250 million cows across 115 million farms; it all adds up. Labby’s dashboard gives you unherd-of amounts of details, both for spot testing and trends for each animal in the herd. Image Credits: Labby. “With our solution, we can provide on-farm real-time testing to help provide the farmer with daily, weekly and monthly health records,” says Somerdin. “Animal health is the critical indicator that’s missing from today’s industry practices.” From the numbers and the impact, you’ll be unsurprised that there are big sums of money involved. The best milk gets farmers the best price, which means that milk quality is directly linked to revenue, the Labby team tells me. The benefit is two-fold: Healthier cows need less veterinary attention, and higher-quality milk nets the milk producers more money per gallon of milk delivered. “We can insert Labby in the value chain. Dairy is a very input-intensive industry so we have all kinds of suppliers that help farmers produce more and better milk, and then the dairy farmers sell their milk to dairy processors. With our service, the big battle, besides the money-saving aspect, is we create all this real-time data,” says Somerdin. “Animal genetics companies can use that data, helping them refine their algorithms. We can also bridge the gap between dairy producers and veterinarians, enabling telehealth for cows.” Labby’s inline milk analyzing sensor, MilKey. Image Credits: Labby. Apart from the fact that when I hear “telehealth for cows,” I giggle at the thought of a cow staring into a Zoom screen and talking about its feelings and its four upset stomachs, it’s easy to understand how Labby adds significant value and the ability to be an early warning system for animal health. “The most important thing is that you don’t need a technician to sample the milk anymore. The cleaning can also be integrated with the current system,” says Somerdin, explaining how the company has designed a set-it-and-forget-it approach to continuous testing. Labby was part of Techstars, and raised a total of $1.3 million from them and a number of other investors, including MIT Media lab’s E14 fund. The company officially started selling its products in early October, and has only just started shipping its products to customers. In the short term, it’s a hardware+SaaS business, but after that, it’s time to start milking the data itself for wisdom. “Our business model has three revenue streams. For the dairy farmers, they pay once for the hardware equipment, then monthly for us to provide the testing in the cloud. The farmer pays per cow per day,” says Somerdin. “In addition, we’re looking at data. We believe we are generating significant value for the industry, such as for genetic companies. We will have a data licensing fee, but we will wait to offer that until we have half a million cows on the platform.” Over time, the company hopes to be able to use big data to catch a glimpse of the future, too. “The data will help us develop a reliable benchmark for each animal,” says Somerdin, and suggests that deviations from

Advanced Ionics teases electrolysis innovation ‘to clean up’ the filthy hydrogen business • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Advanced Ionics, Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Biotech & Health, Clean Energy Ventures, Climate, DisruptNo Comments

Advanced Ionics, a climate-tech startup that hails from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is striving to drive down the price of green hydrogen by slashing how much electricity is needed for electrolysis by as much as 50%. That’s an admirable goal, because despite all the talk of hydrogen as a “fuel of the future,” the industry is still filthy for the most part — driving climate chaos via pollution-spewing production methods. Most of the hydrogen gas that humans produce is “grey“; a classification that means the producers rely on methane (or worse, burning coal) to isolate the element for use in fertilizer and as fuel. But as awareness of climate change and interest in hydrogen-powered freight grows, so too has demand for an environmentally friendlier alternative. In contrast to the grey stuff, “green” hydrogen taps renewable energy and electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. It’s a superior production method as far as the climate is concerned, but it is also costly because it demands a ton of clean energy. Image Credits: ZebethMedia As Advanced Ionics founder Chad Mason tells it, the startup’s coming electrolyzer will “use 35 Kilowatt-hours to make a kilogram of hydrogen by running at 300 Celsius,” while tapping industrial heat, non-ceramic materials (that work at lower than typical temperatures) and steam instead of liquid water. Per the CEO, “existing technologies are generally in the 45 to 60 [Kilowatt-hours] range, practically speaking.” The executive presented onstage today at ZebethMedia Disrupt Startup Battlefield in San Francisco. There are other ways to cut the cost of electrolysis, such as by manufacturing cheaper electrolyzers and limiting maintenance. “But if you don’t address electricity use and price of electricity, it doesn’t matter,” Mason told ZebethMedia. The company is targeting between 20% and 50% less electricity use. The CEO said his interest in electrolyzers was first sparked through anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, which his family applied to crops on their farm in North Dakota. “So I understood early on,” said Mason, “the importance of hydrogen to make all of these important commodities and chemicals that are also very polluting industries.” Armed with $4.2 million in seed funding from Boston’s Clean Energy Ventures and Texas-based SWAN Impact Network, Advanced Ionics has a ways to go. The company aims to deploy “demonstration units with a few partners” and kick off sales starting next year, and it is targeting 2025 for a commercial launch. Then, “we’re going to try to really hit the gas and produce as many of them possible, and try to have as big of an impact as possible as quickly as we can in the latter half of the decade,” said Mason.

Kayhan Space is making orbit safer with timely, automatic collision warnings for satellites • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 20, Disrupt, Kayhan Space, Space, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

The orbital economy is heating up, but the infrastructure that supports it is starting to creak. Kayhan Space is a startup that makes sure your satellite doesn’t crash into another — or a launch or piece of space trash, for that matter — using modern data crunching techniques and a web-accessible platform. Kayhan presented today at Disrupt SF as part of the Battlefield, and the business is considerably further along than when we first covered them; at the time, they were raising a pre-seed round, but now they’ve got their feet under them and are raising again. Founded by old friends Araz Feyzi and Siamak Hesar, who came together to the U.S. from Iran for school years ago, the company is taking on the natural result of the last decades order-of-magnitude increase in satellite launches: traffic. Space may seem like a big place, but low Earth orbit is actually pretty crowded, relatively speaking. With thousands of satellites zooming around on all kinds of trajectories, and tens of thousands of pieces of space junk as well, the chances your spacecraft will have to juke a bit to avoid a screw going 20,000 mph or so are getting higher. When orbits overlap to the point that a collision is possible, it’s called a “conjunction” — a more neutral term than “collision course,” certainly. “There are a lot of satellite-on-satellite conjunctions; it’s less than 10% today but the paradigm is shifting,” Feyzi told ZebethMedia. “The sheer number of conjunctions is increasing, because we’re tracking more objects and there are more active satellites — and we expect that to get worse.” Worse not just in terms of frequency, he explained, but in the decreasing amount of time before a potentially catastrophic event occurs. This lead time is very important, because last-minute maneuvers are both hair-raising and waste fuel — what could have been avoided by a tiny impulse hours ago becomes a longer emergency burn. Normally satellite operators report their positions and orbits to Space Command — sounds impressive, but imagine a control tower at an airport that suddenly grew to 10 times its normal size. They can only do so much, so fast, and they rely on operators calling in the latest data and changes. With thousands of satellites in the sky, de-conflicting orbits over a period of hours or days — and deciding what to do via phone call — is no longer a realistic option. Kayhan’s Pathfinder orbital tracking platform. Kayhan is working to automate the process as much as possible using the freshest data available. Some of that is the high precision object database maintained by the government, yes, but there are other tracking sources too, plus the real-time info coming from customers and anyone who makes it available. Their Pathfinder platform provides situational awareness, conjunction warnings, recommended new orbital paths — if you have the right thruster, it’ll even provide the impulse. “We use all of this data, and we’ve developed a large amount of proprietary algorithms and processes. For example, we’ve developed a modern prediction engine that predicts the paths of objects, that allows us to very rapidly calculate, simulate and re-simulate the motions of objects in space,” Feyzi said. The turnaround time for a conjunction response is measured in minutes instead of days, but it’s no less carefully considered, Feyzi continued: “When you go on Pathfinder and you look at the recommendations prepared for you, you can be sure they’re safe — we’ve screened them — and second, it’s feasible for you because it fits all the constraints you have: your propulsion system, your ground contacts.” Image Credits: ZebethMedia He also emphasized that these capabilities aren’t limited by, for example, how fast a radar dish can turn. Being a data-based product, it can scale arbitrarily. “The beauty of software, and the way we have designed our infrastructure is it is easily scalable. We could onboard every satellite available today and it wouldn’t be a problem for us,” Feyzi said. Integrations with other satellite and mission management platforms are coming as well — not everyone wants to work with a whole new tool, so the data will be available via SDK. You may wonder whether a pure data play is defensible as a business. Feyzi admitted that others may very well attempt the same type of system, but Kayhan’s head start and expertise is not to be underestimated. “We have five Ph.D.s in astrodynamics on our team today. The amount of data we process and the amount of processing we do is extremely heavy; unless you develop these core capabilities to run effectively and efficiently, you won’t be able to achieve what we are achieving,” he said. “If you have the data, the capital, the people, yes, maybe in two years, you could develop the platform — no one has done it so far, but where we’ll be in two years is very different from where we are today.” To that point, Kayhan itself is expanding its capabilities with a now product it calls Gamut, meant to offer the same kind of automated safety checks but for launches. Image Credits: Kayhan Space Scheduling launches isn’t just about waiting for good weather — you have to thread the needle to put the payload in the right orbit and place, perhaps among dozens or hundreds of peers. As the number of satellites rises, the prospect of a ride-share mission hitting several different orbits quickly becomes a very complex logistical problem. And the kicker is, if you miss your launch window by a few minutes, you need a new solution. “We invented a new method that leverages GPU processing to process launch screening an order of magnitude faster,” Feyzi said. That means launch companies can be prepared for more eventualities, and hit fast forward on the paperwork and other official processes one has to get through to send a rocket into space. Gamut is still in development and testing, but you can expect to hear more about it soon as

Here are the 5 finalists of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2022 • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Disrupt, StartupsNo Comments

During the last two days, 20 startups pitched their companies as part of ZebethMedia’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2022. These 20 companies were selected as the best of the brand-new Startup Battlefield 200 and competed for a chance to take home Battlefield Cup and $100,000. ZebethMedia editors and expert judges winnowed them down to the following five finalists who will be presenting in front of a whole new panel of judges on the last day of Disrupt, October 20, 2022: Advanced Ionics Advanced Ionics is striving to drive down the price of green hydrogen by slashing how much electricity is needed for electrolysis by as much as 50%. That’s an admirable goal, because despite all the talk of hydrogen as a “fuel of the future,” the industry is still filthy for the most part — driving climate chaos via pollution-spewing production methods. Most of the hydrogen gas that humans produce is “grey“; a classification that means the producers rely on methane (or worse, burning coal) to isolate the element for use in fertilizer and as fuel. But as awareness of climate change and interest in hydrogen-powered freight grows, so too has demand for an environmentally friendlier alternative. In contrast to the grey stuff, “green” hydrogen taps renewable energy and electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. It’s a superior production method as far as the climate is concerned, but it is also costly because it demands a ton of clean energy. AppMap Boston-based AppMap wants to stop bad code from ever making it into production. The open source dynamic runtime code analysis tool, which the startup claims is the first of its kind, was built on the simple idea that developers should be able to see the behavior of software as they write it so they can prevent problems when the software runs. Unlike static analysis tools that don’t show runtime information, AppMap — which was built from the ground up over a three-year period — runs within the code editor to show developers which components are communicating with which components, at what throughput and latency, at what network speed and whether there are any errors between them, enabling developers to get actionable insights and make improvements quicker than before. Intropic Materials Plastics are great for so many things, but they stay around for an awfully long time. Intropic leaps to the rescue with a set of enzymes that can be added to plastics at the very beginning of their life cycle, before it is even turned into products. The additives the company makes have been proof-of-concept tested and it wants to upend how plastics are made and disposed of. Intropic’s additives make many of the most commonly used plastics biodegradable in normal commercial composting. The enzymes are added to the pellets or powders that are used in the normal course of plastic production. This gives plastics new, biodegradable capabilities without changing the manufacturing processes used to create plastic products. At the end of the lifecycle, when it’s time to get rid of the material, the products can be composted into their component parts. Minerva Lithium Minerva Lithium has produced Nano Mosaic, a coordinated polymer framework that looks a bit like black gravel and extracts critical materials from brine in just three days. Minerva says that it can extract one metric ton of lithium using just 30,000 gallons of water, and it can do it in three days. Evaporative brine processing needs to evaporate 500,000 gallons of water to get to the same amount of lithium. Just one gram of this absorbent material has a surface area equal to that of a soccer pitch, which should give you an idea of just how little you’d need to extract a large amount of minerals. Swap Robotics Swap Robotics manufactures electric grass-cutting and snow removal robots and detailed onstage how it’s making sustainable outdoor work equipment. For the next few years, 95% of the startup’s focus will be on facilitating robots that cut grass and vegetation on 1,000+ acre utility-scale solar farms. The company’s secondary focus is sidewalk snow plowing. The team decided it would be their mission to create a solution that could sustainably cut grass in a controlled environment. Swap Robotics was aware that solar vegetation cutting comes with its challenges, as it requires a unique type of cutting deck that is able to get underneath solar panels, and recognized that a robotic solution could address the problem.

Reverion eyes commercial launch to draw more energy out of biogas • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, biogas, Biotech & Health, Climate, Disrupt, Reverion, StartupsNo Comments

Born inside the Technical University of Munich, the engineers behind Reverion say they’ve had their heads down for seven years developing a way to get more electricity out of biogas and existing fuel-cell technology. Biogas comes from decomposing waste and is mostly made up of methane. It’s a form of chemical energy that must be converted into electricity before it can flow into homes. You could do this by burning it, but that would release pollutants and waste around half the energy; a comparably cleaner and more efficient option is to use fuel cells, which generate electricity via an electrochemical reaction — sort of like a battery. Either way, some energy is lost in the conversion process, but Reverion aims to push biogas fuel-cell efficiency toward its limit. “Normally, the industry fights for say, a 0.2% increase in efficiency per year. That’s even an achievement,” Reverion chief executive Stephan Herrmann told ZebethMedia. “We get an increase from the best power plant that’s available, of 60%, to 80% just in one step.” According to Herrmann, Reverion achieves this 20% efficiency boost by capturing and processing gas that would otherwise go unused inside the fuel cell. The CEO of the Eresing, Germany-based company presented today in San Francisco at ZebethMedia Disrupt Startup Battlefield. “Fuel cells themselves always have had this like 80% efficiency in them, but they have some limits,” said Herrmann. “What typically happens is that up to 30% of the fuel you feed to the fuel cell comes out unused again.” The CEO added, “We eliminate that by basically re-increasing the quality of the gas in two steps and then recycling it into the fuel cell.” With $7 million in tow, the startup says it is now gearing up to pilot 10 modular power plant units, each housed in 20-foot shipping containers with enough capacity to power 100 households apiece. Reverion aims to deliver its first unit “roughly” by the end of the first quarter of 2023 — and all 10 before the end of the year. The company secured its seed funding from Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection, the European Social Fund and XPrize.

Incooling is building servers that use liquid to cool down • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, cooling, Disrupt, Enterprise, Hardware, Incooling, StartupsNo Comments

The way Incooling CEO Helena Samodurova sees it, the IT world is experiencing two major crises: an energy crisis and a supply chain crisis. For IT teams, satisfying new climate-friendly energy budgets is presenting a challenge, particularly when dealing with older computer hardware. At the same time, acquiring improved, less power-sucking machines is becoming tougher both because of shipping backlogs and because hardware is quickly running up against efficiency limits. Motivated to solve the dual crises — an ambitious goal, to be sure — Samodurova co-founded Incooling, which focuses on efficiency in data centers. Incooling, which is pitching in the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt, designed a custom-built server with a proprietary cooling system that it claims allows for superior thermal management, enabling the server to achieve high-efficiency standards. “Our own design and cooling allows for unleashing the full potential of today’s technologies which otherwise are not met due to heat and space constraints,” Samodurova told ZebethMedia in a recent interview. “With our technology, we are able to increase the performance on scaleable and non-scaleable tasks by accelerating the existing hardware and saving … on energy use.” Samodurova began developing Incooling’s tech in 2018 with Rudie Verweij, the company’s second co-founder. The two met at the High Tech Campus, a tech center and R&D ecosystem on the Southern edge of the Dutch city of Eindhoven, during a hackathon. After partnering with CERN in Switzerland — Samodurova leveraged connections there through her work at HighTechXL, an incubator that’s previously commercialized CERN technologies — Samodurova and Verweij designed prototype server hardware. Their server uses a two-phase cooling system with refrigerants specifically designed for extreme heat and conditions, which Samodurova claims allows it to a reach some of the fastest processor speeds of any server on the market. A diagram illustrating how Incooling’s phase-change cooling system works. Image Credits: Incooling Incooling’s secret sauce, if you will, is the aforementioned cooling design and control. Samodurova says the system is able to quickly respond to fluctuating heat loads, adjusting to ensure the server’s processor stays within safe temperature ranges. “As we are entering a new market — cooling and compute — we don’t really have direct competition,” Samodurova said. “Cooling companies focus only on cooling and server manufacturers only on the end server, whereas we take the best from both worlds and combine it in the ultimate custom solution where every major component is specifically designed to perform at their designed maximum capacity and that way enhance the end result above the current market benchmarks.” Certainly, Incooling’s mission is an important one. It’s estimated that data centers consume about 3% of the global electric supply and account for about 2% of total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide; cooling costs can total around $2 billion a year. While traditional data centers consume less energy than they used to, the demand for compute to drive AI-powered applications and accommodate the growing public cloud threatens to derail progress. Samodurova was loathe to reveal much about how Incooling managed its servers’ efficiency improvements — it’s early days for the company, which is in the midst of raising capital. But she did say the cooling system employs phase-change cooling, a technique that can provide a more reliable way to cool electronics than conventional air conditioners and air compressors. Phase-change cooling harnesses a cooling fluid’s latent heat of vaporization — the point at which it transitions from a liquid phase into a gaseous phase and vice versa. Fluid in a phase-change cooling system collects heat until it vaporizes, at which point it becomes less dense and travels to the cooler part of the system. There, it dissipates the heat, and as it does so, the gas transitions back into a liquid and recirculates back toward the heat source. Phase-change cooling offers several benefits, perhaps chief of which is reduced energy usage and thus costs. Unlike, say, a fan, the system doesn’t require a continuous supply of electricity to cool components. As an added benefit, because it doesn’t contain moving parts, it’s less prone to mechanical failure. It’s hardly a new technology. Phase-change cooling features in Xiaomi’s circa-2021 Mi 11 Ultra smartphone. And on the server front, Microsoft has experimented with a two-phase cooling system on the banks of the Columbia River, using steel holding tanks to submerge servers below the water and carry heat away from their processors. A render of Incooling’s server, based on an existing Gigabyte blade. Image Credits: Incooling Rival startups are experimenting with phase-change cooling for servers, also. Submer Immersion Cooling — which has venture backing — submerges servers in a special, contained fluid, allowing techs to swap hardware components even while the system is operational. Meanwhile, ZutaCore’s processor-cooling technology dissipates heat through a liquid contact. But Samodurova asserts that Incooling, which currently has a 12-person team, is “continuously growing” as it prepares to mass-produce its server next year. She wouldn’t answer questions about potential customers or projected revenue, but she claimed that one of Incooling’s prototypes has been running in a data center for over a year. Also notable, Incooling has a partnership with PC manufacturer Gigabyte to use the latter’s R161 Series, G-Series, and H-Series server platforms as the testbed for Incooling’s tech. In a preliminary run, Incooling said it achieved up to 20 degrees Celsius lower processor core temperatures — leading to an up to 10% increase in boost clock-speed and 200 Watts lower power draw. “The pandemic showed how much we rely on technology and how important reliable connections are,” Samodurova said. “Due to pandemic, we were able to directly showcase Incooling’s added value by bridging the gap between the demand for compute and the existing solutions.”

Swap Robotics is paving the way for electric solar vegetation cuts and sidewalk snow plowing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Disrupt, Robotics & AI, Startups, Swap RoboticsNo Comments

Swap Robotics, a company that manufactures electric grass-cutting and snow removal robots, presented today at ZebethMedia Disrupt Startup Battlefield to detail how it’s making sustainable outdoor work equipment. For the next few years, 95% of the startup’s focus will be on facilitating robots that cut grass and vegetation on 1,000+ acre utility-scale solar farms. The company’s secondary focus is sidewalk snow plowing. The startup was founded in October 2019 by CEO Tim Lichti, CTO Mohamed H. Ahmed, Machine Design Lead Spencer Kschesinski and Electrical Design Lead Adonis Mansour. Lichti, Kschesinski and Mansour all attended the University of Waterloo together and then got to know Ahmed during their first year. The team originally planned to develop a robotic cutting solution for sports fields, but kept hearing from landscapers that cutting 1,000+ acre utility-scale solar installations was a challenging job that could use a modern solution. Tim Lichti, CEO at Swap Robotics pitches as part of ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia The team decided it would be their mission to create a solution that could sustainably cut grass in a controlled environment. Swap Robotics was aware that solar vegetation cutting comes with its challenges, as it requires a unique type of cutting deck that is able to get underneath solar panels, and recognized that a robotic solution could address the problem. “Right now, there are a couple of main challenges when cutting all of the vegetation in solar fields,” Lichti told ZebethMedia in an interview. “The way it’s done is unsustainable. It’s done by gasoline or diesel-powered equipment, so there’s obviously a big carbon footprint there. There’s also a high cost from gasoline and diesel itself. The equipment is also going through rough terrain, so there’s a lot of equipment breakdown and costs associated with that. Since what we’re doing is 100% electric, it’s a lot more sustainable. There are also way fewer parts, so it’s not going to break down nearly as often.” Image Credits: Swap Robotics The robots have built-in hydraulics that move the grass cutting blades and the snow plow attachment. The attachments have a “quick swap” system, hence the name Swap Robotics, to make it easier and quicker to switch attachments. The robots’ batteries can also be swapped in five minutes, which allows for nearly 24/7 operation. The robots can also hold more than 1,000 pounds. Within 60 days of debuting its robots in mid-2022, Swap Robotics had over $9 million of signed agreements for solar vegetation cutting. Swap Robotics says it has developed the world’s first 100% electric cutting deck to reach the grass and vegetation underneath solar panels. The company also says it has developed the world’s first 100% electric “rough cut” deck that can easily cut down vegetation up to two-inches in diameter. Lichti says Swap Robotics currently has several robots in commercial operation in Texas, but is unable to disclose which companies are currently using the robots. The startup is also in the midst of releasing a batch of 10 new robots and has ordered supplies for the next batch of 10 robots. The company anticipates additional sales in the future as a result of its new relationship with SOLV Energy. As for the company’s business model, Swap Robotics charges a price per acre. Lichti says the model is convenient because customers are already familiar with paying a price per acre for grass cutting done by humans. The price per acre can vary depending on factors such as the size of the site, frequency of cuts and the terrain. The startup’s goal is to provide customers with 15% to 20% in savings when compared to their current cutting costs per acre. Image Credits: Swap Robotics The startup also announced that it received an investment from SOLV Energy, the largest utility-scale solar building company in the United States, but is unable to disclose the amount. Lichti says the funding is part of its pre-Series A round that it plans to close at the end of October. A large portion of the investment will go toward commercialization of the startup’s robots. The company plans to ramp up operations to have dozens of robots in service. In addition, some parts of the investment will be used for capital expenditure. Prior to this investment, Swap Robotics raised $3 million in the three years after its launch from angel investors and SOSV. The funding was used to get Swap Robotics’ initial batch of a dozen robots into commercial operation. The investment was also used for software, mechanical and electrical development. Swap Robotics at ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia Swap Robotics plans to have a larger Series A round in 2023. “Long term, we would love Swap Robotics to be an outdoor robotics platform for work,” Lichti said. “We’ve developed a form factor that is compact, extremely strong and robust and has a built-in hydraulics system that can have dozens of different use cases. I think this makes it an ideal platform for heavy use cases, especially those that sometimes may be seasonal.” Lichti reiterated that the startup’s main focus will largely be on solar vegetation, and that the potential for its additional use cases is part of its longer term vision. As for what these use cases could look like, Lichti noted that the robots could potentially be used for street sweeping or reforestation efforts.