This past month marked several milestones at the at the CITRIS Foundry. We co-hosted Cal Hacks, received international visitors, held our CITRIS retreat at UC Merced, hosted the final week of the Intel Make-It-Wearable Challenge, welcomed Max Levchin to Cal, and selected our Fall 2014 Cohort!
We’d like to welcome four new teams who recently joined us as part of our 3rd cohort. We saw many excellent teams apply this year and were very impressed with the quality of companies out of the University of California. The teams selected by our committee this Fall stood out as companies creating impactful solutions to big problems in energy and health. We’re excited to have them on-board and part of our growing family of 14 startups. You can learn more about our new companies below.
From our four new teams, two companies were also chosen for our Partner Challenges. WattTime was selected for the BECI Energy & Climate Challenge, while BioInspira was chosen as our first-ever Samsung Innovation Challenge. As winners of our Partner Challenges, these teams will have additional access to industry-specific mentors as well as additional funding or other resources to help them accelerate their progress. They join our previous Challenge winners, Clarity (BECI Challenge winner), Knox, Mentl and Smartbod (QB3 Challenge winners).
CalWave is developing a power plant that converts wave power into electricity and freshwater, operating at economical maintenance costs. CalWave has developed a patented novel wave energy converter, designed to harvest the underutilized and abundant power of ocean waves. The technology’s basic operation principle is simple: the system operates like a pump submerged in the ocean, powered by the movement of overpassing waves. The absorption of the waves generates hydraulic power, which is transmitted onshore via output pipes. This hydraulic power is then used in two ways: to run a hydraulic motor, generating electricity, or to supply a reverse osmosis process, producing and distributing fresh water.
Glamorsky is building an intelligent wearable device for making emergency calls, collecting biometric data, and reporting necessary life style changes for aging adults. The vision of Glamorsky is to integrate fashion elements into technology, to promote self-confidence in using technology within the senior community, and ultimately to provide a higher quality of living to seniors.
WattTime develops software for smart devices that cuts their carbon content through timing, using a novel real-time power grid analysis algorithm. WattTime has the world’s only public, accurate, and comprehensive real-time algorithm for determining the environmental footprint of electricity drawn from a power grid at a particular place and time. Their cloud-based software uses this information to automatically control commercially-available smart devices to use energy at clean times, helping users meet sustainability targets and aiding renewables integration. WattTime offers an API so that app developers, OEMs, and analysts can leverage this data for their own applications.
BioInspira is developing a novel low-cost gas sensor platform that accurately detects airborne chemical concentrations through visual color changes of the sensor. The technology is based on the manipulation and arrangement of bacteriophages into structural films that exhibit colorimetric sensing properties. Applications of this technology include environmental sensing for NOx, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) sensing, as well as the daily health monitoring to detect halitosis and the buildup of lactic acid levels in the body.