By Blaine Friedlander, Cornell Chronicle

A company that originated in Syracuse and is aiming to use agricultural waste to replace the petroleum-based plastic liners in coffee cups, takeout containers and other consumer products has joined Cornell’s Center for Life Science Ventures incubator.

RETRN Bio joined the incubator June 1 to conduct research and polish a business plan, with the objective of decreasing the world’s dependency on plastic.

Photo: Chris Thomas, the CEO of RETRN Bio, (left), Juan Hinestroza, the Rebecca Q. Morgan ’60 Professor of Fiber Science and Apparel Design in the College of Human Ecology, and Ryan Scheel, the chief science officer of RETRN Bio, discuss how to upcycle agricultural waste streams and process them into biodegradable polymers.

“We want to confront chemical pollution by helping the paper-packaging industry displace outdated plastics with a new class of biodegradable coatings for food containers,” said Chris Thomas, CEO of RETRN Bio.

“We want to replace that small amount of plastic now found on paper materials with a waste-based, tunable polymer fiber that will be recyclable, fully biodegradable and completely natural,” Thomas said. “It can be broken down quickly in the environment without adding to our pollution problem.”

The incubator will provide laboratory space for the company, business-plan development expertise and a wide array of campus research resources – including academic knowledge.

“RETRN Bio is finding a way to make their green plastic in a flexible manner to meet a variety of industrial and commercial needs,” said Lou Walcer, director of the Center for Life Science Ventures. “The specs for every product will be different, but whether you’re manufacturing a coffee cup or a takeout dinner tray, the bioplastic lining must be flexible enough to accommodate the process.”

RETRN Bio uses low-cost agricultural waste – such as plant-based, fibrous wheat bran left over from breweries, or papermill excess – to bioengineer and create natural, proprietary PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate) polymers that can be adjusted for different uses and manufacturing processes.

“Anything that originally came from a plant can be used because it is fiber-rich,” Thomas said. “The integrity and structural fibers of plants is what we use as our base material.”

Currently, food-container makers generally use polyethylene (PE) or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS), and other plastics, to line packaging.

But about three years ago, Thomas and Ryan Scheel, now the chief science officer for RETRN Bio, imagined a better source: biological components. They sought to turn agricultural waste – such as gigantic piles of fibrous bran leftovers from the brewing process – into bioplastic by using bacteria.

As students at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Thomas and Scheel took their concept to the Blackstone LaunchPad program at Syracuse University.

Last fall, through the Cornell Center for Materials Research, RETRN Bio partnered with Juan Hinestroza, the Rebecca Q. Morgan ’60 Professor of Fiber Science and Apparel Design in the College of Human Ecology, and his students to refine how to upcycle agricultural waste streams and process them into biodegradable polymers.

Hinestroza is a faculty fellow at Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. Funding came from the JumpStart program, which supports small business in New York, while working with Empire State Development’s Division of Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR).

“RETRN Bio not only has a solid scientific background,” Hinestroza said, “but an unshakable commitment to provide real solutions to solve the massive problem of plastic pollution.

“Working with them has been a great experience,” he said. “My students in the Department of Human Centered Design benefit by seeing how fiber science knowledge and skills can provide unique solutions to global challenges.”

Walcer said the goal for RETRN Bio is to earn outside investment and achieve self-sufficiency, while developing jobs in the life sciences and bringing economic development to New York.

“It’s all about scale,” Walcer said. “RETRN Bio will be here at the Center for Life Science Ventures to take their laboratory bench-scale processes, use our lab facilities, scale it up, make it into an industrial-strength process and greenify everybody’s coffee cup and many other consumer products.”

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kanvas-biosciences-announces-12-million-pre-series-a-to-accelerate-microbiome-drug-development-301857507.html?tc=eml_cleartime

R&D breakthrough for microbiome-associated therapies: Technology brings breakthrough resolution and context to host-microbiome interactions

PRINCETON, N.J., June 22, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Kanvas Biosciences, the leader in microbiome mapping technology, announced today a $12M Pre-Series A funding round. The investment will be used to further advance the company’s proprietary platform technology, which promises to revolutionize drug development for microbiome-associated diseases. The round was led by DCVC with participation from Lions Capital LLC, Cooke LLC, Uncommon Denominator, and Triple Impact Capital. As part of the investment round, Jason Pontin, partner at DCVC, will join the company’s board of directors.

The interactions between the microbiome and its host are critical to human health. The current gold standard for analyzing these interactions is to extract a sample, blend it, and sequence the genetic material in the sample. This strategy enables broad inferences about the composition of the sample, but little more, as information regarding biospatial localization and cellular function is lost in the process.To overcome this challenge, Kanvas has developed a revolutionary technology platform that enables highly multiplexed spatial profiling of microbial species. The platform not only determines the identity and function of these microbes, but also maps the host’s corresponding local response – all executed within a single, comprehensive assay.

With Kanvas’ proprietary technology, based on research first published in Nature by the company’s founders, researchers can profile both the microbiome and the host cells with sub-cellular resolution to provide critical context and unparalleled insight into complex host-microbe interactions. This platform can be applied to the discovery and development of novel, live biotherapeutic products, the identification of disease-associated microbes for diagnostics, and leveraging the microbiome to improve therapeutic responses.

“Our technology takes the gastrointestinal tract and the microbiome from black box to transparent and measurable terrain,” says Kanvas Biosciences co-founder and CEO Matthew Cheng, MD. “We are thrilled to drive forward the development of life-saving treatments for some of the world’s most common conditions.” While the microbiome has long been associated with inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer, emerging data indicate its intimate connection to a range of conditions beyond the gastrointestinal tract, including cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, and response to cancer immunotherapy treatments.

The raised capital will be used towards expanding Kanvas’ proprietary single-cell spatial transcriptomics platform and launching biological and R&D discovery platforms. To this end, Kanvas has already established partnerships with leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.

“This breakthrough technology empowers researchers to explore microbial communities in unprecedented ways, with profound implications for the health and biomedical industries. It fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human microbiome, allowing us to consider it as a distinct and druggable organ, opening uncharted territories in medicine,” said Jason Pontin of DCVC.

About Kanvas Biosciences
Kanvas Biosciences is building the world’s first microbiome drug screening and drug discovery platform to accelerate live biotherapeutic product (LBP) development. Leveraging its unparalleled ability to spatially map the microbiome and profile host-gene expression at single-cell resolution, the company is constructing the most comprehensive and robust microbiome data resource for future drug development. Kanvas Biosciences’ technology was initially developed at Cornell University and exclusively licensed. The company’s notable investors include DCVC, Lions Capital LLC, Cooke LLC, Uncommon Denominator, and Triple Impact Capital. The company is headquartered in Monmouth Junction, NJ.

SOURCE Kanvas Biosciences

By J. Edward Anthony 

CareTech Human, a startup developing a device to monitor urological symptoms at home, is joining Cornell’s Center for Life Science Ventures business incubator.

Many patients are accustomed to the benefits and convenience of at-home monitoring of blood pressure, blood glucose levels and other critical health metrics. CareTech Human aims to make it just as easy for patients to gather quantitative data about their urological health.

“Urological conditions are thought to affect as many or more people than diabetes. But when it comes to monitoring urological disease, nothing is available to patients or health care providers similar to at-home blood pressure monitors or glucometers,” says Dan Matsui, founder and CEO of CareTech Human.

The company is developing a small device that users can install above the waterline in their toilet bowl. The proprietary system, which combines the toilet-installed device with cloud-based machine-learning algorithms, continuously gathers diagnostically relevant measures of volume, frequency, flow and urgency. In the future, the company intends to expand the system’s diagnostic functionality with electronic nose technology to detect biomarkers in urine.

“We’re developing something similar to a smoke detector or a check engine light. It’s all about automation, convenience and continuous measurement – a passive tracking of health parameters that is hygienic and contactless,” Matsui says.

Urological symptoms – such as a sudden and intense need to urinate, difficulty beginning to urinate and waking multiple times at night to urinate – affect millions of adults in the U.S. and many more worldwide. These symptoms often arise from benign conditions such as overactive bladder (OAB) and benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH, or enlarged prostate). Even benign conditions may require treatment, however, and similar symptoms may indicate more serious urological diseases.

CareTech Human’s platform uses a secure internet connection to send objective, quantitative data to a patient’s authorized health care provider.

Doctors today generally rely on self-reporting to evaluate a patient’s urological health and assess their response to treatment. A patient may be asked to complete a short survey or to maintain a voiding diary over a period of weeks or months. Self-reporting methods are subjective and imprecise, and they rely on the patient to consistently record data. In-office quantitative uroflowmetry diagnostics require clinical infrastructure and are limited by a single assessment in an unfamiliar clinical setting that may not capture a patient’s typical symptoms.

Matsui hopes that the company’s system will eventually help doctors identify severe urological disorders and provide timely treatments that can improve patient outcomes and avoid medical emergencies and costly emergency room visits.

CareTech Human emerged from the eō Business Incubators in Ukraine, an entrepreneurship program founded by Charles K. Whitehead ’83, the Myron C. Taylor Alumni Professor of Business Law. Since CareTech Human graduated from the eō program in 2021, the company has continued to advance its technology through research and prototyping.

The Center for Life Science Ventures will provide CareTech Human with a New York state operations base, access to Cornell’s expertise in health technology and other resources, and mentorship and guidance on entering the U.S. market.

“Big ideas combined with great execution are rare, and well worth seeking out from around the world. That’s why we’re very happy to welcome CareTech Human to Cornell,” said Lou Walcer ’74, director of the Center for Life Science Ventures.

Source: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/06/turning-toilets-health-monitors-startup-joins-life-science-business-incubator

By Caitlin Hayes, Cornell Chronicle January 10, 2023

In 2014, Charles K. Whitehead ’83, the Myron C. Taylor Alumni Professor of Business Law, was invited to lecture at a premier university in Ukraine – a country that many in the U.S., at that time, might not have been able to locate on a map.

But Whitehead found the country fascinating. As the son of a U.S. diplomat, he had visited Ukraine as a child, when it was part of the Soviet Union, and he returned in 2014 just after protesters had ousted a Russia-backed president and installed a new government.

It was a country in transition, Whitehead said.

“Ukraine was fascinating, a place where the historical dynamics were Russian, Soviet, but the people were looking to the West to develop a new economy, a new platform for business, and a new social infrastructure,” said Whitehead, who specializes in business and finance law at Cornell Law School. “I met Ukrainians all over the country who were clearly entrepreneurial and thoughtful, with new ideas and research, but what they lacked was an understanding of Western business and the ability to position themselves for investors.”

In 2019, after repeated visits to the country, including on a Fulbright grant, Whitehead founded eō Business Incubators with the help of Ukraine-born Felix Litvinsky, managing director of Cornell’s Blackstone LaunchPad, and a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Competitive Economy Program in Ukraine. With physical locations in Kyiv and Kharkiv and providing support nationwide, the incubator gives Ukrainian startup founders the skills and positioning to attract national and global investment.

Through the COVID-19 pandemic – and now the war – the incubator has supported more than 100 startups, valued collectively at close to $110 million. The teams have brought in approximately $10 million in investment and earn around $1.5 million in annual revenue. And incubator graduates have won every major Ukrainian national competition as well as numerous international contests, taking the $100,000 grand prize at the Dubai 2020 global startup competition and excelling at Web Summit (Portugal) and the Consumer Electronics Show (Las Vegas), two of the world’s largest technology conferences.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the incubation program has expanded, pivoting back to the online format it used at the height of the pandemic.

“They’re committed,” Litvinsky said about the incubator teams. “Through thick and thin, they’re doing everything possible to grab that value, that knowledge, because they’re looking forward. The soldiers are on the front lines, and our teams are working so that when the war ends, we have a foundation, and we can rebuild.”

Building lasting relationships

The eō – Latin for “to go,” “to prepare,” “to advance” – incubation program typically spans 16 weeks and involves a six-day bootcamp covering the fundamentals of launching a startup, followed by weekly lectures, trainings and meetings with mentors, and a demo day where startups can pitch to each other, and to investors and potential partners. Teams are usually matched with two mentors, experienced entrepreneurs from all over the world – including many from Cornell – who can provide each startup with expertise tailored to their development stage and product.

Dan Matsui, Ukrainian founder of the startup CareTech Human, participated in the incubator last winter, just months before the Russian invasion. He said the program helped him clarify and describe the value of his product – an at-home device that aids in early disease detection.

“There are a lot of specifics: how people like information to be presented, how should we structure timing, how to pitch to present your value correctly,” Matsui said. “In describing our product, we can be super technical but the business presentation – that’s been our weak part.”

Matsui said the connections and mentorship have been essential and have provided specialized knowledge and contacts in the U.S., where he hopes to solicit investors and bring his device to market. He also hopes to deepen ties with Cornell; he visited the Ithaca campus in December to meet with Louis Walcer ’74, director of the Center for Life Science Ventures, for consultation on an application to Cornell’s incubator for life sciences startups.

“We’re super grateful to the United States,” Matsui said. “And my connections here are very helpful. From each meeting, we learn more about how to position a product, how to pitch it, where we can mitigate risks, and what areas to pay attention to.”

The relationships built in the incubator are meant to last, Litvinsky said. “We continue to support every single individual who went through eō,” he said. “And we have to give so much credit to the Ukrainians who are looking forward to victory and the opportunities ahead.”

Adapting to war

When the war began, Matsui, with his wife and four-month-old twins, fled Ukraine for Poland, but they returned to Kyiv in May. Aside from pauses due to blackouts, he said his team of about 10 people are working as fast and as hard as ever, while devoting time outside work to volunteer for the war effort.

Litvinsky and Whitehead spent the first days of the war frantically working from the U.S. to ensure their Ukrainian staff and teams were safe, providing information to those fleeing or in shelters and helping to procure medical supplies. Once the invasion slowed, they were able to pivot the incubation program online – they’d already made the transition once for the pandemic – and the cohort they’re working with now is the largest yet, with 32 teams initially enrolled.

Some things in the program have changed; frequent blackouts and air raids have required flexibility from the once-strict attendance policy. In online sessions, one participant keeps an AK-47 on hand in case of attack; others sometimes log in from dark rooms as they wait for electricity to be restored. Still more have left Ukraine and are logging in from different time zones. Whitehead visited Kyiv in October, when a Russian cruise missile struck just 300 meters from his hotel, and again in December during Russia’s then-largest missile attack since the start of the war.

Despite the dangers and complexities, the program’s success and flexible format have made it attractive to other countries as well. “For the same reason we’re able to pivot because of the war, we can also fairly easily move into other areas,” Whitehead said. “In Ukraine, eō’s success has shown others in the region who might think about a startup economy, and also global investors, that building this kind of ecosystem makes sense.”

Whitehead and Litvinsky have begun a program in Moldova, another nonNATO country bordering Ukraine, and have been approached by contacts in Georgia and Poland.

Back home, Whitehead used his experience developing the incubator to help design the Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship program at Cornell Tech in 2019. In 2020, he was selected by Ukraine’s Minister of Finance to serve on the supervisory board of a new national Ukrainian Startup Fund, which provides small grants to tech startups. He has also lectured across Ukraine, as well as worked with Ukrainian government officials to assist in setting up new financial and business platforms.

“Rarely do you get a chance to put into practice the things you research and lecture about,” Whitehead said. “Our work in Ukraine has given me that opportunity.” 

Plans are also in the works for eō Business Incubators to launch a venture capital fund devoted to Ukraine even before the war comes to an end.

The incubation program may have even more impact in Ukraine in the years to come, Whitehead said. “It teaches a way to think differently, to build business, to connect outside of Ukraine. These were all good things before the war,” he said. “In post-war Ukraine, this will go from being valuable to becoming fundamental.”

By Blaine Friedlander, Cornell Chronicle September 29, 2022

Two Cornell startup companies – Halomine, Inc. and Inso Biosciences, Inc. – have received nearly $3 million in New York state grants to thwart future outbreaks of infectious disease, including COVID-19 and its variants, and to help fortify the state’s expanding life science industries.

In total, 18 grants for companies and educational institutions were awarded $15.3 million from the New York State Biodefense Commercialization Fund, via the Empire State Development agency.

The state’s biodefense program – which grew out of the pandemic – was created to accelerate the development and commercialization of life science innovations that tackle infectious disease threats.

“New York state was hit first and hit hardest by COVID-19, and even as New York continues its progress in combating this virus and building back stronger,” said New York Gov. Kathy Hochul. “We’re taking measures to ensure we’re prepared for the future.”

Halomine, an antimicrobial coating technology company that graduated in June from Cornell’s Praxis Center for Venture Development incubator, received $2 million. Inso Biosciences, which develops genomic sample preparation platforms and is currently housed at the university’s Center for Life Science Ventures incubator, has received $955,000.

Laboratory sample prep is labor intensive, slow and prone to error, said Harvey Tian, Ph.D. ’17, the CEO and co-founder of Inso Biosciences. The biotechnology startup has developed an engineered microfluidic system, consisting of a benchtop instrument and consumable “chip” cartridges – roughly the size of the microscope slide – that can rapidly process samples to improve the sequencing sensitivity of novel infectious diseases.

The method provides a way to automate the handling of biological samples while maintaining precision, minimizing the use of manual pipettes and eliminate the need for more complex biochemical assays.

“What used to take hours in a laboratory, now can take minutes,” Tian said. “We’ve greatly accelerated the step in removing human material, which is critical in biodefense applications such as the sequencing and identification of novel infectious agents.”

This fall, Inso Biosciences will use the state funding to begin their product’s prototype development, as the company prepares to pursue and collaborate with potential partners in validation studies.

In addition to Tian, the Inso Biosciences co-founders are Adam Bisogni ’08, Ph.D. ’17, co-founder and chief scientific officer; and Professor Emeritus Harold Craighead, co-founder and scientific advisor, who is a veteran of technology commercialization with his co-founding of Pacific Biosciences (NASDAQ: PACB), a previous Cornell startup from his research group.

Halomine’s antimicrobial coating technology helps to maintain germ-free surfaces – such as stair rails, escalator handrails, food product conveyors and food preparation tables – by extending the life of chlorine-based disinfectants by days and weeks.

Normally, a chlorine disinfectant lasts up to 15 minutes, but the group’s main product, HaloFilm, is a spray-on, nontoxic chlorine extender that leaves a protective film, according to Ted Eveleth, MBA ‘90, the CEO of Halomine.

With the state grant, the company hopes to develop a new product, HaloAdd – an antimicrobial plastics additive – to create commercial food processing tools and medical devices such as catheters and ultrasound wands.

“Ideally, you want to make these plastic products embedded with antimicrobial properties,” Eveleth said, “but there are limited ways to do that. We think we have found the way.”

Pending regulatory approval, the product HaloFilm is nearly ready for commercialization, but the new HaloAdd has been proven-in-concept in the laboratory and the company looks to optimize the research, according to Eveleth.

In addition to Eveleth, Halomine officials are co-founder Mingyu Qiao, chief technical officer; and co-founder Minglin Ma, Cornell associate professor, biological and environmental engineering.

By Sara Baier May 2, 2022

When Kristina Hugar was working on her Ph.D. at Cornell, she wasn’t just doing science for science’s sake.

“I care very deeply about the environment and climate change, and I wanted to figure out a way to focus my career and life on addressing the defining crisis of our time,” said Hugar, M.S. ’12, Ph.D. ’16, whose dissertation research improved alkaline exchange membrane materials to make alternative energy sources more effective.

She, like scores of other clean energy entrepreneurs, have found at Cornell an innovative, powerful ecosystem that supports the transition to a sustainable and decarbonized economy.

, Click to open gallery view

Credit:Jason Koski/Cornell University

It was Cornell’s clean energy ecosystem that made Hugar’s vision a reality. As she was completing her Ph.D. in 2015, a Cornell colleague – Gabriel Rodríguez-Calero, M.S. ’12, Ph.D. ’14 – proposed they collaborate to commercialize her research. In June 2015, they founded Ecolectro to create a cleaner, cheaper and more scalable green hydrogen – a crucial step in achieving a decarbonized economy, Rodríguez-Calero said. “Hydrogen is a $150 billion market. Most people don’t realize that it’s used in the production of everything from fertilizer to peanut butter.”

The strong foundation startups have found in Cornell’s clean energy ecosystem has helped them attract significant outside funding.

Ecolectro recently closed a $4.5 million funding round led by Starshot Capital with support from investors including Toyota Ventures. And it just joined a new consortium aiming to create a Northeast research hub focused on hydrogen energy.

Dimensional Energy, co-founded by two Cornell faculty members and alumni, won $3.1 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) earlier this year – part of $7 million in federal grants awarded to Cornell researchers and startups to advance novel clean energy research. And in the agriculture sector, Capro-X, which upcycles dairy waste, has received $100,000 from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and $1.374 million in National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grants.

These and many other fledgling companies have leveraged support from Cornell resources such as the Kevin M. McGovern Family Center for Venture Development in the Life Sciences and the 76West Clean Energy Competition, which is administered by Cornell and funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).

“McGovern provided us with the kind of collegial environment you would associate with being a part of a much larger company and exposure to vital connections,” Rodríguez-Calero said. “And participation in 76West gave us the opportunity to communicate the potential impact of green hydrogen to a larger audience.”

New resources for clean energy

Cornell’s clean energy ecosystem includes new programs designed to support entrepreneurs working toward climate solutions.

Diversity in ClimateTech recruits, educates, inspires and supports capitalization for clean energy founders who are Black, Indigenous, people of color and women. The ClimateTech Prototyping Hardware Accelerator at Rev: Ithaca Startup Works provides clean energy entrepreneurs with state-of-the-art prototyping lab space and materials, one-on-one mentorship and networking opportunities. Both programs receive funding from NYSERDA.

The 2030 Project: A Cornell Climate Initiative, launching this year and housed in the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, will harness Cornell’s strengths in collaborative scholarship and entrepreneurship and aims to mobilize investors and collaborators to accelerate the development of large-scale climate change solutions.

“With the 2030 Project, we aspire to translate transdisciplinary research and expertise across Cornell into solutions and actions for a safer, healthier, decarbonized world,” said Benjamin Z. Houlton, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and a co-chair of the initiative. “As we respond to urgent climate challenges, entrepreneurs and innovators working on clean technologies and carbon dioxide removal are essential partners in our efforts to demonstrate and scale breakthrough solutions, with a focus on inclusive pathways for a better, brighter future.”

And in 2021, the College of Engineering hired David Putnam, its first associate dean for innovation and entrepreneurship.

“Our aspiration is to be the first college of engineering that consistently comes to mind when people talk about who does entrepreneurship right, including in the clean technology space,” said Lynden Archer, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering. “Our faculty are involved in a range of groundbreaking initiatives, including researching wireless charging for electric vehicles, developing cost-effective batteries that use earth-abundant materials like aluminum and zinc, and pioneering photocatalytic processes that convert carbon dioxide emissions from power plants into a low-carbon, synthetic jet fuel.”

Offering support to emerge from the lab

In 2016, two Cornell engineering professors each applied separately for funding from NEXUS-NY, a clean energy business accelerator funded by NYSERDA. NEXUS-NY recognized the similarity of their ideas and introduced them.

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Credit:Dimensional Energy

From there, the professors – David Erickson, the S.C. Thomas Sze Director of the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Tobias Hanrath, the Marjorie L. Hart ’50 Professor in Engineering in the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering – co-founded Dimensional Energy with NEXUS-NY mentor Jason Salfi ’92.

Dimensional Energy uses its innovative reactor, based on Cornell research, to harness sunlight and hydrogen produced through electrolysis to transform captured carbon dioxide into energy-dense synthetic gas. This “syngas” can be converted into products typically reliant on fossil fuels. The startup’s first offering is a low-carbon and high-performing jet fuel.

As Dimensional Energy gained traction and hit technical milestones, Cornell offered the support it needed to emerge from the lab, says Salfi, CEO and co-founder. “McGovern provided space on campus to do catalyst research and safely test our reactor, allowing us to accelerate our growth and ability to pilot our tech in the field – a pilot funded by a seed round largely filled in by our extended Cornell family,” he said. “Having coworking space at Rev that is networked nationally signals Ithaca and Tompkins County’s commitment to building a vibrant startup community.” The startup also received valuable support from the Academic Venture Fund through Cornell Atkinson.

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Credit:Cornell University

That strong foundation has attracted strong funding opportunities. Dimensional Energy has received over $6 million in grants from the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and Solar Energy Technologies Office, closed a $3 million seed round and competed as a finalist in the $20 million Carbon X Prize competition. The startup plans to use its most recent $3.1 million in funding from ARPA-E to 3D-print ceramic components for its reactors that can run on low-carbon electricity sources.

Meanwhile, Capro-X, co-founded by Juan Guzman, M.S. ’14, Ph.D. ’17, and Largus T. Angenent, a former Cornell associate professor, is working toward elevating sustainability in the dairy industry by upcycling a byproduct of Greek yogurt.

Capro-X’s fermentation technology is based on research conducted in Angenent’s Cornell laboratory. WheyAway, the startup’s biotech solution, uses naturally occurring nonGMO microbes to turn the waste into clean water and environmentally friendly chemicals used in consumer products.

Each cup of Greek yogurt produces three cups of acid whey waste that needs to be trucked – increasing greenhouse gas emissions – to other farms for feed and fertilizer or wastewater treatment plants for processing. New York is the largest producer of yogurt in the country, and its producers create 300,000 gallons of acid whey waste daily.

The company projects that by treating just 10% of the acid whey waste produced in New York, it can yield 500,000 gallons of environmentally friendly chemicals annually and prevent 10,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions caused by trucking the waste to other sites. Capro-X won a $250,000 prize in the 2019 Grow-NY food and agriculture competition, administered by Cornell’s Center for Regional Economic Advancement.

“Looking back, the opportunities and experiences that I was afforded as a student gave me a strong foundation to build a science-based startup from scratch,” said Guzman, CEO. “Cornell’s entrepreneurship ecosystem really makes this area ideal for growing a new company.”

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Credit:Allison Usavage/Cornell University

The company is now fundraising to continue growing its team with the goal of marketing their green chemicals later this year, and installing its first commercial system in 2024.

Ecolectro’s new funding will advance the commercialization of its next-generation technology, which eliminates the need for the rare metals found in today’s fuel cells and electrolyzers, making green hydrogen production cheaper and reducing reliance on rare metals.

Its technology illustrates the power of Cornell’s clean energy ecosystem. The tech grew out of collaborative research in the College of Arts and Sciences in the laboratories of Héctor D. Abruña, the Emile M. Chamot Professor of Chemistry, and Geoffrey W. Coates, the Tisch University Professor of Chemistry, with whom Hugar completed her graduate research. Both professors are scientific advisors to Ecolectro – Coates is also a scientific co-founder – and Cornell Atkinson fellows; their laboratories are part of Cornell’s Center for Alkaline Based Energy Systems.

“I am a big believer in the power of Cornell’s networks,” said Rodríguez-Calero. “We have leveraged these to find investors, development partners and employees, many of whom attended or are affiliated with Cornell.”