Disrupt

Katakem’s ‘robot chef’ speeds up drug development with reliable chemistry • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, Katakem, Robotics & AI, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Organic chemist Manuela Oliverio was working on a new drug when he noticed that test results on mice weren’t consistent, because the molecule being administered was always different depending on the chemist who produced it. It occurred to him that automation and robotics could make the drug development process more predictable, and so he founded Katakem, one of the startups in the ZebethMedia Disrupt Battlefield 200. With Katakem, Oliverio aims to develop what he calls a “robot chef” for chemists — a device that makes chemical reactions more consistently reproducible while accelerating the experimental process. He claims that the current prototype, dubbed OnePot, can collect data about chemical processes 150 times every second and automate repetitive, mundane tasks like heating, cooling and mixing different molecules. “The production of a chemical product is strictly regulated and standardized. [But] the development phase between discovery and production is still carried out manually and no significant data is extracted,” Oliverio told ZebethMedia in an interview. “Through data, we can help companies develop new life-saving drugs faster and, of course, this means higher revenues and better margins for them … Data [from OnePot] is reliable, clean and immediately usable.” To Oliverio’s point, drug development today is a lengthy and expensive endeavor. Only about 12% of drugs entering clinical trials are ultimately approved for introduction by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And estimates of the average R&D cost per drug range from less than $1 billion to over $2 billion, with errors and mistakes adding to the price tag. Katakem developed OnePot over the course of three years, designing both the mechanical and electrical components in-house. The company is seeking chemists to beta test the device, particularly those in corporate and academic settings, to collect data that it plans to use to train an algorithm that can recommend “faster and more sustainable” ways to develop molecules. Image Credits: Katakem Image Credits: Katakem Given the size of the problem — and addressable market — it’s not surprising that Katakem has competition. Automata is also creating a robot to handle basic lab tasks, and it recently raised $50 million to do so. There’s Kebotix, a startup developing AI and robotics tools to expedite the discovery of chemicals, and Artificial, which sells a lab automation platform aimed at life sciences R&D. But while Katakem has the dual challenges of proving its technology works and overcoming rivals, Oliverio isn’t concerned. Based on existing commitments, he expects Katakem’s annual recurring revenue to hit $350,000 by the end of the year and $3 million by the end of 2023. Presumably, those projections assume Katakem finds success with its early customers and demonstrates that OnePot does all the company says it can do. “As our clients — chemical companies — are key to economies, we are not subject to high variability in demand,” Oliverio said. “The robot is ready to be commercialized.” To date, Calabria, Italy-based Katakem has raised €1.3 million ($1.27 million) in capital from undisclosed seed investors, according to Crunchbase data.

Ambr wants to solve the billion-dollar burnout problem by tracking employees’ working habits • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Ambr, Battlefield 200, Biotech & Health, burnout, Disrupt, Enterprise, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Worker burnout is real. Reports suggest that work-related chronic stress could be costing businesses up to $190 billion annually in reduced output and sick days, not to mention the much-discussed “Great Resignation” where workers are jumping ship in search of a greater work-life balance. In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared burnout an “occupational phenomenon,” adding it to its International Classification of Diseases. This is a problem that Ambr is setting out solve, with a platform that promises to address worker burnout preventatively. The company is demoing its wares at TC Disrupt this week as part of the Battlefield 200, and we caught up with the founders before and during the event to take a closer look at an early iteration of its product. Ambr was founded in February this year by Zoe Stones, Steph Newton and Jamie Wood, a trio of former Uber managers who witnessed the impact of worker burnout firsthand. “Burnout was a problem across our teams, and as managers and individuals, we didn’t know what to do to prevent it,” Chief Product Officer Wood explained. “We researched the causes of burnout and learnt that burnout is primarily the result of workplace factors like poor relationships, unmanageable workloads, poor time boundaries and a lack of control.” The founders, who are all based in London, are in the process of making their first hires and raising a pre-seed round of funding, which it said it expects to close “in the coming weeks.” Burnout data Ambr’s technology currently relies on self-reported check-in data from Slack, with a configurable survey-like system for gathering feedback from workers. Worker feedback. Image Credits: Ambr But while this kind of in-app survey functionality isn’t exactly unique, the company is in the process of developing additional tools to proactively figure out whether a workforce is at a higher risk of hitting burnout. This includes using natural language processing (NLP) to identify whether workers are happy to talk about what they’re doing outside of work or whether they always talk shop. This will mean using data from an open-ended question in the daily Slack check-in survey, which asks “What’s on your mind today? Share any work or non-work topics.” The idea here is that if a worker only ever mentions work stuff, then they may be at risk of burnout, though in reality it’s probably an imperfect indication given that people are less inclined to talk about personal things with an automated survey than they would be with a human work colleague. Worker feedback. Image Credits: Ambr While all NLP analysis is apparently anonymized, with the resulting aggregated data only accessible to management, it would be better applied to more organic conversations within public Slack channels or Zoom calls, though this would obviously raise greater privacy concerns even if the data is anonymized. At any rate, this gives some indication as to the types of things that Ambr are working on as it looks to automate the process of assessing burnout risk. “We’re investigating other features and integrations in the future that may leverage NLP but nothing yet on our product roadmap,” CEO Zoe Stones said. Elsewhere, the company is exploring using anonymized data from other workplace tools such as email and calendar software. This could work in a number of ways. For example, it could detect whether someone is emailing excessively in the evening or on weekends, or perhaps they have wall-to-wall meetings for 90% of the week — a scenario that could force someone to work far more than their allotted hours to keep their head above water. Wood also said that there’s potential farther down the road to integrate with human resource information systems (HRIS) to identify workers not taking their full vacation allowance. Ultimately, this gives companies valuable data on work culture, helping them address smaller issues before they escalate into full-blown problems. Ambr analytics. Image Credits: Ambr “Nudges, not nags” But spotting risk factors is just one element of this. Ambr is also working on “nudges” that serve workers gentle reminders inside their core workplace tools, perhaps suggesting ways they could cut down on out-of-hours work. “Initially, we’re delivering nudges through Slack, but we plan to rapidly expand into using Microsoft Teams and also a Google Workspace add-on,” Wood explained. “It is important to highlight that nudges are used sparingly — only when we think they can have a meaningful positive impact on behavior. Our principle is nudges, not nags.” Ambr’s ethos can perhaps be juxtaposed against the myriad meditative, mental health and well-being apps that have raised bucketloads of cash in recent years. Indeed, Ambr’s approach is more along the lines of, “why fix something when you can stop it from happening in the first place?” “We are beginning to transition to a world of work where employees are demanding more from their employers — Ambr will enable companies to adapt to this new reality, particularly as hybrid and remote working becomes the norm and as more Gen Zers enter the workforce in the coming years,” Wood said. Beyond the usual health and well-being players which, according to Wood, typically have lower adoption rates given that they’re not integrated into workers’ day-to-day tools, there are a number of startups with a similar approach to Ambr. These include Humu, which uses nudges to encourage behavioral changes, though it’s not specifically focused on countering burnout. And then there is Quan, which issues well-being recommendations to users based on self-reported assessments. Ambr’s closed beta went live in June this year, and it said that it has been gradually onboarding new customers from its waitlist, including startups and “later-stage growth companies” globally. It expects to launch publicly in early 2023. In terms of pricing, Ambr is pursuing a standard SaaS model with customers paying a monthly per-employee fee.

As healthcare goes remote, Equipt Health brings medical hardware to the home • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, Equipt Health, Hardware, medical equipment, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

It’s no secret the pandemic has pushed healthcare to become virtual, in theory making it easier for patients to attend appointments and access the care they need. But Rebecca Weisinger, CEO and co-founder of Equipt Health, has seen plenty of patients falter in the long process of qualifying for devices they need. Equipt is a home medical equipment company; it aims to streamline the process for providers and patients to access medical equipment needed for care. Weisinger told ZebethMedia because of patients’ physical limits and lack of resources to make the process easier it has to be “connective, informative, transparent.” Though Weisinger has seen access issues professionally, personally she has also seen her friends and family experience hardships in accessing medical equipment due to the various layers of complications. Equipt aims to make the process easier by being the packager, the logistics, the clinician (via its provider network), providing technical support, and the return of data from connected devices. Although the company launched earlier this year as part of Y Combinator’s Winter cohort, it is certified to deliver DME (durable medical equipment) and HME (home medical equipment) devices across 24 states. The company is looking at expanding its reach in the near future, according to Weisinger. Currently, the company has been able to focus its efforts on sleep apnea products through the creation of Helio Sleep, a sub-brand of Equipt. The at-home sleep test offered by Equipt through Helio Sleep. Image Credits: Equipt Health Equipt provides patients a home sleep test that is later interpreted by a sleep physician, and if they qualify, the company will guide the patient on the next steps of getting medical equipment, ranging from CPAPs to alternative devices through Helio Sleep. “We created Helio Sleep to give users a better way to understand and improve their health through sleep tests, best-in-class treatment devices and access to board-certified physicians,” read the Helio Sleep launch announcement. “24M Americans are currently undiagnosed for sleep apnea, leaving them not only tired but also at risk for serious health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure.” In addition to proving a more integrated path for patients, Equipt partners with medical device companies looking to go to market. Once a company is ready to launch medically cleared equipment, the company can market the product on its site to help fulfill demand. This feeds into its financial model where the company charges for DME and HME consultations. At the moment Equipt is not accepting insurance payments for care but is transitioning to “providing insurance reimbursement or insurance payments.” Although the company’s first focus is the sleep apnea market, Weisinger explained she hopes to expand services to cater to individuals with more chronic conditions. “We want to help a lot of the new medical device companies and support them as they go to market,” Weisinger said. “But at the same time, we think there’s great opportunities in the infusion pumps based around treating diabetic patients, home dialysis equipment, and other home medical devices that would include breast pumps and other like mobilization devices or hospital home.”

The Warriors’ Draymond Green talks podcasts, social media and the elephant in the room • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Disrupt, Draymond Green, Media & Entertainment, NBA, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

The Warriors’ Draymond Green took the stage at ZebethMedia Disrupt today where he discussed his podcast, social media… and yes, the Jordan Poole punch. Green has spent the last several years building up his resume off the court, most notably through his popular podcast, “The Draymond Green Show.” Green touched on how his podcast has disrupted the media industry and how he continuously receives a lot of pushback on it. Like Green himself, the podcast has courted some controversy, but it also gives listeners a rare look into an active NBA player and the various athletes he invites on. “Me doing a podcast is very disruptive to the sports media industry,” Green said. “You’re listening to me speak about this game in a totally different context than you will hear anyone in the media speak about. Why? Because I actually just played that game. So my perspective is totally different. And in doing a podcast, the media is not able to create the narrative that they want to create. There was a lot of pushback. For those pundits that had a problem with me doing the podcast, I wonder what they’ll say this year because I actually won an NBA final doing it, so it couldn’t have been much of a distraction.” Green said he’s currently working toward building something incredible in the media space outside of basketball. He noted that although numerous notable individuals have founded and worked on several projects at once, such as Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, people still questioned his ability to record a podcast after a game. Green, of course, also had to address the punching video that took the internet by storm earlier this month. The video depicts Green punching teammate Jordan Poole during practice. He revealed that he rewatched the video numerous times throughout the day when it was leaked. Draymond Green onstage at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 20, 2022. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia “I watched that video 15 or 16 times throughout the day,” Green said. “I kept putting myself through it because when I watched it, I couldn’t quite understand it. The video is six seconds. Just me walking up. No sound or anything, nothing leading up to it or anything. And so I’m watching the video, and I’m like: ‘man, this is bad.’” Green said he recognizes that he has to address the elephant in the room and own up to his mistake. He revealed that he had recorded a podcast episode regarding the punch, but didn’t release it because he was still reeling from the situation and didn’t want it to seem like he was only addressing the situation for personal gain. Green has since addressed the situation during his self-produced documentary called “The Countdown.” In the opening of part one, Green said: “I don’t think I cared about anything anyone said until the video was leaked.” When asked about this opening, Green said “narratives run the world” and that when you take a private situation public, it changes everything. In addition, Green touched on his struggles with social media and how he feels about constantly being subjected to everyone’s opinions online. “We live in a day and age of social media and it’s great,” Green said. “But it’s not always censored. So you’re subjected to everyone’s opinion, and I don’t know if that’s always the best thing. You’re kind of in a position on Twitter or Instagram where everyone feels like they can say whatever it is that they want to say.”

One month after entering the spend management space, Rippling goes after global payroll • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Disrupt, Fintech, human resources, parker conrad, Rippling, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

When Parker Conrad founded Rippling in 2016, the HR company initially focused on the process of onboarding employees. It has since evolved to manage all aspects of employee data, from payroll and benefits, to the apps employees use, to a device management platform that enables Rippling’s customers to retrieve, wipe clean and store employee computers when staffers part ways with a company, as ZebethMedia’s Connie Loizos reported last year. Today, at ZebethMedia Disrupt, Rippling unveiled what Conrad describes as the “biggest launch” of his career — its new global payroll product. As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge in remote work with companies who had previously resisted hiring employees globally suddenly being forced to embrace the concept. One of the reasons companies resisted the move for so long is the myriad compliance and administrative headaches that come with paying people in other countries. In the past couple of years, a number of startups have emerged to tackle the problem — including Deel, Remote and Remofirst. And now, Rippling is out to take on all those startups — including Deel, which is actually a client of Rippling’s — with its new global offering. He says it will give U.S.-based companies a way to pay workers all over the world — whether they be full-time or contract — more “seamlessly.” Conrad claims his startup has an edge on its competition because its payroll product is integrated with its existing workforce platform — making it easier for companies to integrate it with all of their existing data. This full-stack approach is intentional, the executive says. An employee graph, which houses all employee data, sits at the bottom of Rippling’s tech stack. Then on top of that, the company has what it calls middleware components, such as reports and analytics, custom policies and permissions such as role-based permissions workflow automation. “Companies can now hire, pay and manage a workforce across the world in one unified system, with the same powerful automation, policies and analytics no matter where employees are based,” he said. Conrad also touts the speed at which businesses can move — saying that companies can onboard employees and contractors in 90 seconds, run payroll “in minutes” in everyone’s local currency and automate global compliance. The executive also makes a lofty charge — that other players in the space are “actually payroll aggregators.” “They’re companies that are sitting on top of a series of other local partners in terms of the actual payroll systems that they’re using. And so they’ve got these different systems in different countries, and that creates this sort of like shitty experience for clients,” Conrad charges. “Rippling is the first one that’s actually built a single payroll system that can pay people around the globe. I swear this is the world’s first global payroll system.” Conrad is no stranger to the HR tech game. He previously founded Zenefits, which actually launched on the Disrupt stage at Battlefield in 2013. The entrepreneur resigned after that company faced compliance issues, and just months later, he founded Rippling. His return to the space has thus far proven to be more successful than his first venture. Exactly one year ago today, Rippling raised $250 million in a round that valued the company at $6.5 billion. As TC’s Loizos pointed out, that deal made Rippling more valuable than Zenefits ever was before it sold a controlling interest earlier this year to a private equity firm. Then in May of this year, the startup raised an additional $250 million at a staggering $11.25 billion valuation, officially propelling it to decacorn status. And now, with Rippling’s expansion into new verticals, the startup is branching out its offerings — and revenue streams. Just last month, Rippling unveiled its new spend management offering, putting it in direct competition with the likes of Brex, Ramp, TripActions and Airbase, among many other players in the space. By adding global payroll, Conrad believes Rippling’s product suite is stronger than ever. “I think that a lot of the advice around how to build technology companies is wrong. I think that people have for 20 years told startup founders that what you want to do is to build something extremely narrow. And so people have been building hundreds of these little, extremely narrow, like point solution SasS businesses,” Conrad told ZebethMedia. “We’ve sort of forgotten about the benefits of deep systems integration and bundled contracting and pricing because 20 years ago, you could count the number of business software vendors on one hand.” In his view, the shift to the cloud changed that and created an opportunity for entrepreneurs to turn individual features from companies such as SAP and Microsoft and rebuild them into standalone SaaS services. The founder is confident about Rippling’s multi-pronged approach of building multiple products in parallel. “The shift to the cloud is largely complete and now we’re seeing a shift back to all-in-one, cloud native systems, where I think, Rippling is going to dominate,” Conrad said.

Figma CEO Dylan Field on why he sold to Adobe • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Adobe, Disrupt, Dylan Field, Enterprise, Figma, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

A month after Adobe announced its plans for acquiring Figma, the popular digital design startup, Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field sat down with our own enterprise reporter Ron Miller at Disrupt 2022 to discuss the deal and his motivations for selling to Adobe, a company that Figma’s own marketing materials have not always described in the most glowing of terms. “We were having a blast — we are having a blast — but then we start talking with Adobe and Adobe is a foundational, really impressive company and the more I’d spend time with the people there, the more trust we built, the more that I could see: ‘Okay, wow. We’re in this like product development box right now,’” Dylan said, surely making his media trainers happy with his non-answer. He noted that Figma today offers tools for ideation and designing mockups, with plans for launching additional tools for more easily taking those mockups and turning them into code. “I started to form a thesis of ‘creativity is the new productivity’ and we don’t have the resources to just go do that right now at Figma,” Dylan noted, giving the standard answer that 99% of founders tend to give when they sell to a bigger rival. “If we want to go and make it so that we’re able to go into all these more productivity areas, that’s gonna take a lot of time. “To be able to go and do that in the context of Adobe, I think gives us a huge leg up and I’m really excited about that.” Surely, the fact that this deal — assuming it closes — will also create generational wealth for Field was a bit of a motivator, but for some reason, founders always deny this. Asked about any potential pressure from investors, Field denied that this played any role in the sale — especially because Figma continues to double its revenue year over year. “That was never the consideration here,” Field said “It said it was: what’s the best opportunity to achieve our vision? The vision for the company is make design accessible to everyone. So design — is not just interface design. It’s creativity. It’s productivity. It’s you know making it so that we can all be part of the digital revolution that’s happening. The entire world’s economy is going from physical to digital right now. Are we going to leave a bunch of people behind or going to give everyone the tools. I feel a lot of pressure and I think it’s really important that we give all of these people these tools really fast.” The Figma PR team surely had a smile on its face after this answer. I don’t think that’s necessarily how Adobe feels about its $82.49/month Creative Cloud subscription package that surely not everybody can afford, but Field stressed multiple times that Figma will remain an independent company and that there are no plans for changing the company’s pricing plan. Adobe is paying $20 billion for Figma, though, so let’s see if that changes over time. “What Adobe’s told us is that they want to learn from Figma,” he said. “And I think in general, they’re going ‘okay how do you go to more of a freemium model? How do you make it so that you’re able to really be bottoms up?” Adobe isn’t paying all of that money for education, though. A Coursera marketing course is a lot cheaper than $20 billion, after all. Over time, the company has a responsibility to its shareholders to increase its revenue, so we’ll see how that plays out — always assuming the deal closes. That’s not a given in this current regulatory environment. Field, for what it’s worth, thinks this is a very offensive move by Adobe, whose XD Figam rival never quite caught with designers. “They’re trying to figure out: how do you make it so that you’re able to adapt the products they already have, but also to sort of bolster this new platform. And yeah, I don’t think that’s risk-averse in any way, ”

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.