UC entrepreneur startup showcase

For the second year of the University of California Entrepreneur (UC) Startup Showcase, Christine Gulbranson, chief innovation officer at the institution and chairwoman of the GUV Leadership Society, brought 12 startups to the Global Corporate Venturing & Innovation Summit in Monterey, California, at the end of January.
The batch was split into two groups – one of early-stage and one of later-stage companies, with the former pitching first. A winner from each batch was selected by a panel of judges.
Shawn Headley, co-founder of UC Davis spinout Aluminum Oxide, was the first to pitch. Aluminum Oxide has developed a low-cost environmentally-friendly process to produce high-purity aluminium oxide whose only waste products are heat and hydrogen. The material is required in an array of sectors, from LED lighting to semiconductors, but its primary application is in lithium ion batteries, which are becoming increasingly important in the electric car industry.
Headley revealed serious ambitions for the spinout, as Aluminum Oxide hoped to produce a third of the global market by 2024. The company was in the process of raising $1.25m, Headley said.
Viola Sutanto, chief commercial officer and co-founder of Limeloop, took the stage to talk about how her company was tackling packaging waste. Sutanto, an alumna of UC Berkeley, said her company operated a platform called Smart Shipper that allowed e-commerce companies to access reusable packaging, manage logistics and gain analytics insights.
The packages are tracked through GPS and consumers use a prepaid label to send them back once they have received their goods. A total of 10,000 such shipments would save 70 trees, 90,000 gallons of water and 200 gallons of oil, Sutanto claimed.
Asked how the company planned to convince consumers not to throw away the packaging as they were used to, Sutanto said the system could offer incentives such as discounts on future purchases or free shipping on the next item.
Charlie Yeh, co-founder and chief executive of MFluidx, provided an overview of how the UC Berkeley spinout was commercialising a simple chip to collect blood samples and conduct bacterial and viral testing. The test delivered results within 12 minutes and offered analyses for multiple diseases, Yeh said.
The device employed a cartridge model and was initially targeting pneumonia in the US, after promising results during a proof-of-concept trial for malaria on 20 patients in Africa. MFluidx expected to hit the market within three to five years, Yeh said.
Nicholas Halverson, co-founder and chief executive of Occuspace, spoke about how his student startup had developed a real-time occupancy detection app, had deployed it on the UC San Diego campus and achieved a 20% download rate among the student corps within a month without marketing.
Halverson said most universities collected data about how their spaces were used manually, regularly sending out surveys to departments. But beyond cutting manual labour, automating the process also meant occupational data could be used to adapt heating, ventilation and air conditioning units – the energy savings alone would justify the university subscribing to Occuspace, which collected radio-frequency signals and analysed group behaviour, thus avoiding privacy concerns.
Byron Shen, chief executive of Velox Biosystems and an alumnus of UC Berkeley, detailed how the rapid 3D scanning technology developed by his company could detect cancer in the early stages and detect antibiotic resistance in urinary tract infections. The test for the latter would take just two hours, Shen said, compared with the current standard of two to three days. The company, which was in the process of raising $6m in series A capital, aimed to finish the platform within 12 months, gain regulatory approval within a year and a half and had already completed market validation studies.
The last company to pitch in the early-stage batch was Veocor Diagnostics, represented by Lorenzo Rossini, a post-doctoral candidate at UC San Diego who co-founded the medtech spinout with Prof Andrew Kahn.
Veocor was working on technology to analyse blood flow to predict the risk of clotting in patients following a heart attack, Rossini said. This was critical, as doctors faced a difficult decision in prescribing blood thinners following a cardiac arrest – doing so would reduce the risk of a blood clot but increase the risk of bleeding, and the cost-benefit analysis was not straightforward.
The technology works by using artificial intelligence to analyse standard ultrasound images, enhance them and provide a risk score within five minutes, Rossini said. This would benefit the 3.5 million patients with high-risk heart failure in the US alone, he added.
The first to pitch from the later-stage batch was Megan Mokri, chief executive and founder of Byte Foods. Mokri, an alumna of UC Berkeley, had developed smart vending machines that stocked fresh healthy foods from established brands recognised by the consumer. The fridges were placed in office buildings, she said, and the unique selling point was the platform rather than the food – a customer was charged only once an item had been removed and the door was closed, making it possible to take out items and read the list of ingredients.
Raymond Zhou, a post-doctoral fellow at UC Irvine, talked about how Glytr Therapeutics was developing a new class of antibody independent immunotherapies, targeting antigens abnormally expressed in virtually all types of cancer.
This solved a fundamental issue faced by immunotherapies, Zhou said, as current treatments could target only a small number of proteins and a single therapy could not be applied to more than one type of cancer. Glytr’s approach could kill multiple solid and blood cancers, Zhou claimed, ranging from breast cancer to leukaemia.
Neel Grover, chief executive and founder of e-commerce platform Indi.com and an alumnus of UC San Diego, had an entirely different proposition for investors. The company provided a software-as-a-service platform that was integrated into existing websites and apps, and drove consumer engagement by asking them to create and share videos about their purchase, with future sales tracked by Indi.
Brands received pre-approval of all content and could avoid the rampant fraud faced by so-called influencer marketing, where social media users with a large following are paid to promote a product, Grover continued. Indi was looking for between $5m and $7.5m, and was seeking strategic partnerships, Grover added.
OIin Hyde, chief executive and founder of LeadCrunch and an alumnus of UC San Diego, sang the virtues of his marketing platform, which generated leads for business-to-business companies. The platform, he said, created intent to buy, and to prove how serious LeadCrunch was about its offering, it relied on its own platform to attract clients. It took an average of 19 days to close a deal, Hyde claimed.
The company was looking to raise $3.5m to complete its $15m series B round, which was led by Bow Capital, a venture capital fund backed by University of California.
Jason McKeown, chief executive of Neurovalens and a visiting scholar at UC San Diego, revealed how his company had developed a device that could influence brain activity without the need for implants.
Devices that required implants were expensive and came with countless side effects, McKeown said. He added that 2.2 billion people globally were obese, and revealed he was working with the US Food and Drug Administration to develop his technology as a non-invasive weight loss treatment. He was planning to launch a paediatric trial in the summer.
The technology was also being developed to treat sleeping disorders and insomnia, McKeown said, and the ability to track a patient’s compliance to a prescribed regime was an added selling point.
Finally, Homayoon Kazerooni discussed the merits of SuitX, a spinout of UC Berkeley that designed, manufactured and marketed exoskeletons. Kazerooni, a professor in the mechanical engineering department and director of the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory, had previously founded two similar companies – Ekso Bionics and US Bionics – based on his research, but SuitX differentiated itself from these by focusing on the workforce rather than the military and paraplegic sectors.
SuitX, which was in the process of raising a $6m series B round led by original design manufacturer Wistron, had already sold more than 850 devices to clients such as carmakers BMW, General Motors and Nissan. Kazerooni said SuitX had developed three dedicated exoskeletons to tackle the most costly workplace injuries. The goal, he said, was to market the devices as a consumer product rather than capital equipment.
Two companies emerged clearly as winners – Neurovalens took home the award for best late-stage company during a ceremony at lunch on the first day, while Velox Biosystems came out on top at a ceremony during the second day’s lunch.