In Spring 2020, the CITRIS Foundry welcomed 32 teams covering deep tech fields from AI and engineering systems to materials science and biotechnology, tackling issues including health care, energy and the environment, transportation, and sustainable infrastructure. The six-month CITRIS Foundry incubator program offers company teams coaching, co-working space, a toolbox of resources, and access to the CITRIS Invention Lab makerspace and the Berkeley Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory at CITRIS.
A description of spring 2020 CITRIS Foundry company teams follows.
Aila Health
Founders: Rory Stanton, Charlotte Nelson, Ben Glicksberg, Arjun Bidesi
Aila Health is an AI-based precision health management platform empowering patients with personalized healthcare at home. With clinical and patient-generated data, Aila Health delivers an expedient and accurate digital diagnostic tool that improves provider decision-making and patient lives. The tool helps clinicians deliver personalized care based on each patient’s unique health situation and lifestyle.
Align.ai
Founders: Igor Molybog, Jon Lam
Align.ai provides a real-time, transparent data-processing engine that builds real estate broker-client connections. While current listings platforms have hundreds of thousands of property listings, the Align.ai data-processing engine allows access to a similar volume of property listings with much less effort than is typically required to create a large database of listings. Brokers simply add Align.ai to their email lists and do not have to upload any data manually.
Anchorgrid
Founders: Abdulrahman Bin, Timothy Barat
The need to upgrade California’s utility infrastructure is a top priority in the state to avoid wildfires and power outages. Anchorgrid’s novel sensor systems use vibrations to assess risk to critical equipment to ensure device integrity.
BearHouse Innovations
Founders: Charlie Davidman, Joseph Choi
Approximately 450,000,000 hours per year is spent on on-screen time in the U.S., and parents are at a loss for how to effectively tackle this issue for their children. Bear House Innovations incorporates existing technology, and provides a mobile platform where parents can effectively negotiate “social contracts” with their children to teach them soft skills such as clear communication, fairness, and accountability to develop healthy habits of human interaction while minimizing screen time usage from an early age.
Birb
Founders: Brittany Birberick, Matt Griffin
Birb develops collective temporary housing ownership methods so that graduate students can asset-build even when taking pay cuts for graduate school. Shared economy technologies will be used to create a new class of housing that exists between traditional homeownership and rental leasing.
CalAster
Founders: Thomas Galeon, Pierre-Louis Mis, Oskar Radermec, Meryll Dindin
To respond to emergency calls in a quicker, more scalable manner, the CalAster team created AsTeR, an innovative emergency platform designed to analyze, prioritize, and visualize emergency calls using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. This efficiently streamlines critical care for victims in emergency situations.
Coreless Technologies
Founders: Tom Yuzvinsky, Sarah Lindley
Coreless tunable nanospheres are an essential component for healthcare diagnostics product development using lateral flow assays. Coreless develops efficient nano-tools that can aid people working in contaminated areas, rural regions with low healthcare access, and the detection of plant-based diseases in farms.
Curiosity Foundation
Founders: Alfred Young, Sukhmeet Singh
The Curiosity Foundation builds a non-profit platform that pays teachers to teach technical skills such as coding, design, and hardware over the summer to underprivileged children at no cost. By addressing and focusing on the communities that need the most support, Curiosity Foundation is hoping to foster equal opportunity for success regardless of socioeconomic background.
DaanMatch
Founders: Cara Foss, Sylvia Krystal Lumbreras Martinez
DaanMatch gives organizations the tools to present their work, share their stories, and increase impact for all stakeholders. It assembles portfolios of complementary programs matched to each corporation’s funding philosophy. Offering the platform in multiple languages to reflect the population of India allows additional scalability.
DeepRed Technologies
Founders: Kechao Tang, Junqiao Wu, Chase Chen
DeepRed Technologies develops material solutions in thermal infrared imaging, especially applied in breast cancer screenings. Its tools will ameliorate current deficiencies in breast cancer mammograms such as pain, high cost, and lack of availability.
Dispatch Goods
Founders: Jessica Heiges, Adam Boostrom, Lindsey Hoell
Dispatch Goods builds an ecosystem of reusable, trackable, environment-friendly and non-toxic takeout containers. This innovation will not only replace single-use but also make healthy, sustainable eating more easily available to consumers.
FakeNetAI
Founders: John Gao, Josiah McDonald, Keith LoMurray, Raymond Lee
FakeNetAI’s specialized machine learning algorithms identify “deepfakes” — artificial videos often aimed at harming specific individuals — with high accuracy (>97 percent) and in less than 5 seconds. The team will assist platforms in responding effectively to false content hosted on their sites.
Fibulas
Founders: Xiaotian Ma, Ying Pan
Fibulas builds a Github for Life — a version control system for the cryopreservation of living materials such as cells and tissues. It will simplify and standardize the process of living sample preservation and digitization, affecting the teams working with $30 billion in National Institutes of Health grants each year.
FOSense
Founders: Peter Hubbard, Andrew Yeskoo, Linqing Luo, Kenichi Soga
FOSense’s fast distributed fiber-optic sensors provide dynamic detection for structural health monitoring. Their strain and temperature sensing technology responds to aging infrastructure challenges that are difficult to detect with current methods — at a fraction of the cost of existing systems.
Fully
Founders: Amy Gong, Grace Zhuang, Sebrina Zu, Zoey Sun, Grey Xu
Fully analyzes a company’s waste history to evaluate more efficient and sustainable service schedules for waste pickup. Their algorithm automatically generates summaries with visualizations that display recent waste data — reducing cost and improving sustainability.
GridWare
Founders: Timothy Barat, Abdulrahman Bin Omar
Gridware is building early-detection sensors for power grid failures and wildfires. Gridware uses small, sensor-laden boxes that can easily be installed to power poles. Gridware’s technology contains microphones and other sensors to collect information about the environment around a power pole, and it uses on-board AI/ML processing to note anomalies and report them to the relevant managers as appropriate.
HyperSpin Technologies
Founders: Adrisha Sarkar, Emanuel Druga, Olga Senderova, Ashok Ajoy
HyperSpin creates innovative new devices that can increase the signal (sensitivity) of NMR and MRI using a weak laser — without requiring the $1 million large superconducting magnets that these devices currently run on. Its work will allow more people to test for cancer and other health conditions in a faster, less-expensive way.
Netic Health / Neomotion
Founders: Mathias Vissers, Danny Kim, Nick Yersai, Wei-Kai Lin
Neomotion creates smartphone-based rehabilitation programs that use the on-phone camera vision capability to analyze movements in real time. Their work responds to the lack of affordable and accessible options for rehabilitation in the U.S., especially in lower and middle-income areas.
Nexilico, Inc.
Founders: Mohammad Mofrad, Mohammad Soheilypour
The human gut biome often has toxic interactions with certain cancer medications. Nexilico responds to this problem. It is advancing microbiome and precision medicine through a next-generation predictive computational platform that improves drug design as well as therapeutics clinical outcomes.
QPi Education
Founders: Vivien Macnguyen
QPi Education offers robotic programming kits paired with an online course to students. The next generation of STEM students will experience an alternative and hands-on way to learn coding skills and build robotics projects.
Qwasar Silicon Valley
Founders: Jennifer Roberts, Kwame Yamgnane
Qwasar Silicon Valley combines science, data, and technology to develop a learning platform designed for the 21st century that reduces the cost of and increases access to education. It enables companies, cities, and countries to upskill, resell, or educate people at scale.
Redvest
Founders: Silas Everett
Redvest streamlines the process of hiring and managing subcontractors in construction sites where inefficient time and money waste often occurs. It develops a workforce counter that uses multi-class object detection on an edge device to track people coming on and off worksites and trigger other sensors.
RePicture
Founders: Lynn Mayo, Aelisa Carr
RePicture is a virtual community where you can learn about engineering and STEM projects — helping people across the world, connecting with STEM professionals, and becoming part of a community that’s shaping the future. Their goal is to democratize access to job search results for STEM professionals and develop a new pathway to find positions.
Reveel Technology
Founders: Adrien Stern, Walid van Boetzelaer
Reveel is building a new platform to help creatives ensure that their identity is always associated with their work, so they can be credited and paid. By collecting and managing metadata, they provide artists, record labels, and publishers a chance of being discovered, played, and paid.
Root Applied Sciences
Founders: Sarah Placella, Rodrigo Almeida, Ken Yamaguchi
Root Applied Sciences is developing the first fully-automated, field-deployed DNA-based sensor network for airborne agricultural pathogens. Their cost-efficient sensors will reduce pesticide use, reduce crop loss, and prolong the effectiveness of resistant crop varietals.
#SmartCohort
Founders: Carla Mays, David Capelli
#SmartCohort research explores equitable mitigation and recovery options for regions affected by natural disasters such as fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc. Their goal is to address governance and infrastructure problems that often disproportionately harm diverse populations.
SMILE WITH JOY
Founders: Daniel Belay, Jordan Coffey
SMILE WITH JOY has formulated a toothpaste that regrows tooth enamel and inhibits bacterial infections that cause cavities. Better tooth protection will benefit not only people in general but also specifically pregnant mothers who cannot receive dental care.
Storx Technologies
Founders: Daniel Fong, Soheil Ghiasi
Storx Technologies’ breakthrough AI and sensor technology better monitors fetal health during labor and delivery. This effort helps mothers avoid unnecessary cesarean section deliveries and mitigates physician liability.
SuperpetFoods
Founders: Gina Myers, Thais Esteves, Maria del Mar Londono
SuperpetFoods makes a novel, highly nutritious, and sustainable pet food with Black Soldier Fly Larvae (BSFL). Their product addresses food waste issues, drastically lowering water use and methane & carbon emissions associated with protein production for pet food.
Triple C – Clean Clay Cookstove
Founders: Ronald Rael, Sandy Curth, Logman Arja, Tina Piracci
Triple C builds additively manufactured no-smoke ceramic cookstoves. Its digital 3D design methods address health problems that arrive from both indoor pollution in developing areas and clean cooking methods for disaster relief.
TuringCerts
Founders: Tina Lee, Jeff Hu
TuringCerts is a decentralized Smart Citizen Identifier Network for credential endorsements and proof of evidence that guarantees the integrity of records and makes verification more efficient. This streamlines credibility background checks for hiring so that better people can get hired faster.
Winko Solar
Founders: Akon Mubagawa, Mathieu Wing Hang Tse
The Winko Box is a single solar-powered box that delivers USB power, internet, and lighting to households in the most rural regions in West Africa. Their team is working to ensure the power of modern electricity is easily accessible to everyone.
YektaSonics Inc.
Founders: Navid Gougol
YektaSonics develops novel hardware-software co-designed ultrasound systems intended for a pure non-invasive therapy called High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU). HIFU penetrates the body with acoustic waves that constructively build focal points for healing actions. The first of its kind, HIFU avoids the damaging side effects of current harmonic methods.
ZoNexus LLC
Founders: Alan Philip Kalarickal, Alpesh Khushalchand Shukla
ZoNexus builds tools for high-throughput materials characterization that will speed up materials discovery. This work seeks to modernize current battery technologies that rely on materials research from the 1990s.
Photo credit: Maher Hakim
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The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute drive interdisciplinary innovation for social good with faculty researchers and students from four University of California campuses – Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and Santa Cruz – along with public and private partners.
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