MIT 100K Launch is this Thursday, May 20th at 6pm! We wanted to give you a preview of our fantastic Finalists who will be competing for a $100,000 prize and $25,000 runner-up prize. These 8 teams were selected from more than 80 applicants for the Launch Round of competition. We are excited to see each team pitch and compete live on zoom for our panel of judges! Comment which team you think will win the $100K Prize! And don’t forget to register for a free ticket here.
Many thanks to our finalists for sharing more about their startups and teams with us!
AZEKI ROAD
At AZEKI ROAD, we are building tech-enabled solutions that ease the global, direct-to-consumer operations for luxury and premium brands based in Africa. Our aim is to serve as the operational infrastructure these brands and creative founders need to capture more of the value that they create at scale.
Team: Ogbogu Ukuku, Anais Callejon, Matilda Ceesay
Fun Fact: This Vogue article written by Ayodeji Rotinwa, highlighting Nigerian designers and their efforts to take back and redefine what ‘African design’ means, is a big reason why we decided to tackle this problem. It was the experiences of those featured that inspired our goal to give African designers and brands the means overcome the limitations placed on them by others and change the narrative of what can come from The Continent.
CANDELYTICS
At Candelytics, we believe that 3D data is the future. We are a 3D analytics startup building the digital tools that will support the coming revolution in 3D data. As evidenced by LIDAR sensors on the newest iPhones, hardware advances are about to make 3D data more ubiquitous than ever before. However, the digital infrastructure to make this complex 3D data truly usable is still sorely lacking. That’s where Candelytics comes in; our digital solution will make 3D data more accessible, intelligent, and impactful. In essence, we are building the “Palantir of 3D Data”.
Team: Clark Yuan, Bryan Lee, James Parker, Derek Marchant, Frank Yu, Evan MacRae, Michael Pena, Nithin Parsan, Siddharth Muppalla
Fun Fact: Despite coming together as a team in June 2020, Clark, James, and Bryan didn’t meet in-person until late January 2021 while conducting technology demonstration with the US Coast Guard in San Diego. The logistical challenges of launching a startup during COVID-19 were certainly difficult, but it also forced the team to communicate more frequently and clearly.
MACH9 ROBOTICS
Mach9 Robotics is a remote sensing startup creating the Google Street View for subsurface utilities. The lack of information about the position of subsurface infrastructure leads to unintentional damage, causing over $50 billion in damages in the US and thousands of fatal accidents globally each year. In order to fill this information gap, Mach9 is producing mobile mapping platforms, based primarily on ground penetrating radar, to acquire very rich information about infrastructure health. Our new machine learning approach analyzes large-scale, subsurface datasets 100X faster than the existing state-of-the-art geotechnical data analysis tools with greater accuracy.
Team: Alexander Baikovitz, Charles Lindsay, Haowen Shi, and Joshua Spisak.
Fun Fact: Our team is on the search for a secret, hidden tunnel that is somewhere under one of our friends’ neighborhoods.
OSMOSES
Osmoses is developing new membrane technology for industrial gas and vapor separations. Effective membrane separation technology has the potential not only to reduce the energy consumption of chemical industries and accelerate the adoption of green alternative energy sources, but also to enable greenhouse gas mitigation technologies. By replacing existing energy-intensive processes with membranes can reduce annual U.S. energy costs by $4 billion and eliminate 100 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Deploying efficient membranes for the purification of hydrogen and natural gas would accelerate the replacement of coal for electricity generation, while implementing membranes for carbon dioxide separation from flue gas can reduce the cost of carbon capture by 50%.
Team: Francesco Maria Benedetti, Katherine Mizrahi Rodriguez, Holden Lai
Fun Fact: The founding team was born in 3 different continents and because of that we are lucky to speak 6 different languages, including Cantonese, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian, German, and English. We are excited for to expand and to add new hires who hopefully add to our geographic and linguistic diversity!
ULTRANEURO
UltraNeuro is building an ultrasound enabled smart sleeves to reduce neuropathic pain for 30M Americans and 1/10 people worldwide. UltraNeuro is a NeuroTech company building an ultrasound transducer array into a smart fabric weave (worn as a sock, glove, or sleeve) to activate degenerated peripheral nerves using neuromodulation to curb “false alert” pain for the 40M Americans with peripheral neuropathy (PN). We are implementing at the intersection of the top two markets for “post-pharma” pain management strategies: the $40B medical apparel and $25B personal massager industry.
Team: Sami Jitan, Christine von Raesfield, Dr. Albert Kwon, Thil Arachichi, Mahdi Ramadan
Fun Fact: Two of our co-founders have launched and scaled medical devices for the COVID-19 Pandemic and for emergency first responders.
RESOLUTE
1 in 5 Americans will develop skin cancer by the age of 70 and Sunscreen is the critical step in any skincare routine to prevent skin cancer or premature skin aging. However, consumers, especially people of color, are forced to compromise with sun protection, toxic chemicals, or looking natural. Our patent-pending process for tinting the active mineral filter brings a cosmetically natural sunscreen suited for all skin tones for a $14.2B market ripe for innovation.
Team: Sophie Ni, Parul Singh, Ankur Sharma, Andrea Florez, JoEl Meeks-Matous , Jacopo Samson, John Harrold
Fun Fact: The Resolute team collectively speaks 9 languages!
SYNTHERA HEALTH
Synthera Health helps people maintain optimal blood iron levels through our mHealth app, personalized dosing of an OTC iron supplement, and a connected blood test, providing a complete treatment and prevention solution for people of all ages with iron deficiency (ID) and iron deficiency anemia (IDA).
Team: Heather Fraser, Javier Fernández Juárez, Grace Carlson, Costa Garagounis, Preeti Putcha, Michael Aspinall, Sumiran Thakur, Raphael Chew
Fun Fact: Co-founder Javier’s daughter and co-founder Heather’s dog coincidentally have the same name. Both are named Carmen!
VOLTHUB
Volthub helps electronic companies manage the procurement of Printed Circuit Boards (PCB), the core component of any electronic device. Our web platform enables more than 150,000 buyers and 20,000 sellers in the industry to find suitable business partners, exchange relevant manufacturing information between parties efficiently and automate processes in order to reduce the procurement effort by 40% and the time to order from weeks to hours in the $750B+ market of electronics manufacturing.
Team: Vincent Bedat
Fun Fact: Over the past year, more than 20 MIT students worked on Volthub through classes and internships
