MIT 100K Accelerate Finals
Diabetes reversal, collaboration tools for police departments, power plant condensers, and more!
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Note: I did a full write up below on the eight 100k finalists who pitched, but will be sending a separate recap on the additional twelve semi-finalists who had startup booths at the tradeshow. Stay tuned next week for info on the awesome semi-finalists!
The MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition is one of the most well known startup events in Boston. Past participants include startups that have gone on to become household names, including companies like HubSpot (2006), Akamai (1998), and Harmonix (1995). The event is one competition with three independent contests that run between September and May. On Thursday was the second event, Accelerate, where eight finalists presented live for the chance to win $10,000.
Great job to the founders who pitched in front of a sold out crowd at the MIT Media Lab. Eight finalists were selected to pitch and the winner was chosen by an audience vote. Starting with the winners and in no particular order following, below are the eight finalists from this years MIT 100k Accelerate Competition.
Vizzhy
Vizzhy took home the $10,000 prize for pitching their full stack diabetes reversal program. The cofounder Harsha was inspired to start the company after her own mother’s diabetes diagnosis. Vizzhy is developing an AI model that combines gut genomics, precision nutrition, and other factors to build targeted treatment for patients with diabetes by focusing on the root causes of insulin resistance. They are also taking a holistic approach through an ecosystem of caregivers and advisors.
Vizzhy estimates there are half a billion patients with diabetes, and over 6.5M deaths last year alone from diabetes and it’s complications. Fortunately a 30% change in diet can reverse diabetes, and Vizzhy is working to help patients navigate this journey. The company is starting in India where they see the most white space in the industry. They’ve already launched their app for IOS and Android and are opening their first diabetes care center in Bangalore this May. They also have 1,500 registered patients on their waitlist and and endorsement from the Obesity and Metabolic Surgery Society of India, a group of 500 doctors. The founding team is made up of expert health tech entrepreneurs and graduate students from MIT and Harvard. Vizzhy has made some really exciting progress, including the reversal of Harsha’s own mother’s diabetes as part of their POC program!
Multitude Insights
In second place was Multitude Insights! Founder Matt White spent eight years in the US Navy, where he and his colleagues had access to cutting edge technology to solve the most pressing intelligence issues. But from speaking to his friends at home serving as police officers, he learned that public stakeholders at home did not have access to the same level of technology. Law enforcement data is heavily siloed, and police forces as close as Boston and Cambridge are not equipped with tools to share information effectively. About 54% of violent crimes and 83% of property crimes are left unsolved, and Multitude Insights believes these statistics can be improved with better collaboration technology.
Multitude Insights is building intelligent collaboration tools for public safety stakeholders, and their first product BLTN (“bulletin”) automates information sharing between police departments using NLP. They are deploying the public beta for this product at the end of the month with four police agencies in the Boston area, which will likely grow to close to 220 police users. Multitude Insights has also gained authorization from the FBI to handle criminally sensitive information, paving the way for them to work with more agencies following the beta. With a founding team that includes a lawyer and a PHD in computer science, this expert team is excited to a serve a market they view as a $365B industry.
Mesophase
In third place was Mesophase! Over 1 billion people live without electricity, and global energy demand is expected to increase by half over next 30 years. Mesophase is building technology to more efficiently meet these growing energy needs.
Mesophase is commercializing a highly efficient surface design for power plant condensers. Their technology uses nanotech and scalable materials to enhance condensation by over 700% compared to traditional condensers. This improvement unlocks over 80 GW power capacity from existing power plants, eliminating the need for ~100 fossil plants and reducing CO2 emission by 0.5 GT/year globally.
Mesophase is targeting geothermal power as their beachhead market due to the strong need for efficiency in this category and a a 13% YoY growth in geothermal power. For GTM, Mesophase plans to partner with existing condenser producers and leverage their sales channels to achieve scale. Geothermal power alone represents an $800M market, and Mesophase is on a mission to bring enhanced condenser technology to every power plant.
Candelytics
Candelytics is an enterprise SaaS company building the digital infrastructure to support web-based 3D data visualization, analytics, and collaboration. Targeting both government and commercial use cases, Candelytics has built a web-based platform to perform advanced 3D analytics and share insights with anyone from anywhere in the world.
Candelytics leverages data from LIDAR scanners to enable the digitization of physical world. The Candelytics software is hardware agnostic and compatible with any LIDAR device. Use cases for this technology are broad. The company’s differential analysis capabilities allows insurance or construction companies to track physical asset changes over time. Meanwhile, their optical recognition capabilities can be leveraged by humanitarian or military agencies to identify and locate land mines.
Candelytics has already been granted two contracts by the US Air Force worth $1.5M. This startup is well on their way to democratizing access to 3D data and helping clients better see and understand the world in full 3D like never before.
Razor Sharp
Razor Sharp is on a mission to “shave the planet.” The founder is an MIT PHD in material science, who has spent the last year understanding why traditional razors fail and focusing on how to make the most durable razor blade using innovative methods.
The average consumer spends $87 per year on razors, but the typical razor only lasts two weeks. In order to have fewer razors end up in landfills, Razor sharp wants to increase the average razor lifetime from two weeks to one year.
Razor Sharp has built an innovative new razor with a single, long lasting blade and an interchangeable handle. They are currently fundraising in order to bring this innovative blade to market and disrupt a $10.2B industry.
Woneway
If you’ve ever planned a multi destination vacation, you know the pain of booking a series of one way flights throughout a given region. Woneway sees these types of vacations as a $62B market. They’re building an economical low cost search engine that creates custom multi destination trips for millennials and Gen Z.
How does it work? Simply enter your travel window and budget, and Woneway will surface a list of multi destination trip options within their platform. Woneway estimates they can save users an average of 18 hours by eliminating the need to plan out alternate routes and compare airfare. They plan to monetize by charging a 7% fee for customers who book a trip option within the Woneway platform.
Woneway has already developed a working prototype and secured partnerships with nine travel influencers in advance of their launch.
Gondwana
Gondwana is on a mission to lower the cost of healthcare with software that helps employers find the right insurance for their employees. Gondwana is a health insurance comparison software that uses newly released price transparency data to help employers reduce the $1T spent on employee health insurance.
Gondwana plans to serve as a lower cost alternative to the estimated $5B that large self insured employers spend on health insurance consulting today. Using publicly available data recently made public through a government mandated pricing rule, Gondwana takes data from hospitals and insurance plans and combines it with employer provided inputs like employee claims and demographic surveys. The Gondwana ML tool can then recommend new plans to employers, or suggest adjustments to the current plan.
Gondwana plans to charge employers 10% of the savings when they help employers switch plans, and a flat fee when helping employers renegotiate an existing plan.
CashEx
I also wrote about CashEx in my recap of the MIT Fintech Conference. Migrants send about $80B to Africa each year, and about half of that comes from the US. But sending money to and from Africa is expensive. This is because Africa has the highest exchange fees in the world (~10%). Many new platforms advertise low fees, but simply hide fees within the exchange rates. CashEx solves for these issues by matching transactions so that money never crosses borders, creating free money transfers for migrants.
How does this work? An example - a migrant who has US Dollars in the US and wants to send them to Nigeria, is matched with a business in Africa and that has Naira and wants to send dollars to the US. These transactions are matched, and the US Dollars are sent from the migrants account to the business account, while the Naira would go from the businesses account to the migrants account. The dollars stay in the US, and the Naira stay in Nigeria.
CashEx doesn't charge migrants, and instead charges businesses a small 1% fee. More importantly, they've gained some exciting traction already having processed $402,850 for 621 users with their initial prototype. They also received a $30k Grant from the Social Innovation and Change Institute at Harvard, and secured Goodwin Procter to help navigate regulatory compliance. They have also secured a number of exciting B2B partners including PrepClass, MultiTexter.com, bhmUK, and formplus.
I hope you enjoyed reading about each of these startups! If you want more of these recaps directly to your inbox, subscribe below. Next week I’ll be sharing a write up on the additional twelve semi-finalists involved in the 100K Accelerate event.