The CITRIS Foundry welcomes the newest cohort of startup teams to its accelerator program, advancing such novel technologies as high-efficiency nanolayer battery coatings, precision immune therapies, and a “molecular condom.”
Following another highly-competitive selection round that attracted applicants from around the country, CITRIS Foundry welcomes six new startups into our program at UC Berkeley. The Spring 2018 cohort is commercializing inventions and innovations in battery production, interactivity on the web, drug discovery, human contraception, and energy grid flexibility.
Our program selects for the most interesting and potentially transformative technologies within a given sector. The Foundry’s thesis is built upon big leaps and rigorous science, rather than incremental improvements or fleeting buzzwords. We conduct months of technical diligence with each startup to ensure the technology and team are ready to meet the market. The entrepreneurial energy of the spring cohort is remarkable, including a duo who built their own battery fablab (Coreshell Technologies) and graduate student who ran months of hardware trials in Latin America to crack the nut of collecting granular, in-home energy demand data (Threestone Analytics).
The Foundry pulls from leading research groups and laboratories across the university system, including Berkeley Deep Drive, Doudna Lab, BWRC, and RAEL. Our newest founders have roots at UC Berkeley, UCSF, Y Combinator Labs, HP Labs, and UC Santa Cruz — including the Lokey Group, one of the world’s leading labs for macrocycle research. Our referral networks of faculty, alumni, and industry mentors remain the strongest channel for discovering these technical entrepreneurs.
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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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