MIT Climate & Energy Prize - $100K Pitch Competition Finals
Ultrasonic laundry machines, microbe delivery, carbon accounting, and more!
Interested in startups? Join a growing community of founders, investors, and startup enthusiasts by subscribing for free below:
How you can help these startups: To spread the word about these amazing startups, consider helping me grow an audience by forwarding this to others and encouraging them to subscribe!
Happy Tuesday!
Sadly we are rapidly destroying our environment and in desperate need of more sustainable energy sources. But thankfully, there’s a ton of smart people innovating in this space and doing really interesting work to disrupt the status quo.
I’ve covered a bunch of amazing startup events in the past few months, but perhaps none has a more important and ambitious mission than The Climate & Energy Prize at MIT.
The Climate & Energy Prize $100K pitch competition seeks to empower university students to launch companies tackling the climate challenge. Previously known as the Clean Energy Prize at MIT, CEP is now the Climate & Energy Prize at MIT to be inclusive of all climate related problems and move the world closer to net zero carbon emissions. This competition also has an impressive history — over 220 Climate & Energy Prize companies have gone on to successfully launch and raise over $1.1 billion in follow-on funding.
Over 50 startups applied for this year’s competition, and five finalists pitched their business to the panel of judges and competed for the grand prize. Starting with the winners and in no particular order following, below are the nine finalists from this years CEP!
Ultropia
Ultropia took home first place and the grand prize of $100k! Ultropia is creating the first all in one ultrasonic washer and dryer by using targeted vibrations. Their research shows this type of machine has 20 minute cycles, meaning less water use and five times less total energy compared to modern machines.
Today, nearly five billion people still wash clothes by hand. In fact, the US is one of the few countries where washer and dryers are standard. Sadly, US washers and dryers produce 179 metric tons of CO2 annually, equal to about half of the trees in the US worth of carbon dioxide. While the average traditional washer uses 19 gallons of water per load, 2.3 billion people live in water-stressed countries. Moreover, one in six health care facilities have no hygiene service despite clean linens being essential to patient outcomes. Ultropia is using ultrasound technology to solve these problems, and is on a mission is to foster global accessibility to clean laundry processes.
How does this work? Ultropia uses ultrasound technology to both wash and dry clothes, enabling an efficient compact product that is affordable to purchase, ship, and operate. Cleaning works by using ultrasound to create vacuum bubbles that undergo a controlled collapse that expels the dirt out of clothes. The drying process uses ultrasound to atomize water droplets which dramatically reduces the heat required. What’s better, it works! Ultropia has tested their washer performance against traditional machines — their machine achieved similar results, but with incredible savings from the resources used to achieve these same outcomes.
The market size for this solution is staggering. Ultropia projects the 7.5B dollars is market of Americans without home laundry appliances to be $7.5 billion. What’s more, the global laundry appliance market is $66B and growing by 30% annually.
The team at Ultropia is projecting a customer cost of around $1,500-$2,000 per machine initially. At this price point, they plan to start selling to luxury customers in the RV and yacht market. As they scale, they plan to bring down production costs so that they can scale their product internationally at a lower cost.
The Ultropia pitch was delivered by co-founder Cody Birkland, an engineering masters student researching ultrasound at the University of Washington. Together with an impressive founding team of researchers and entrepreneurs, Cody and team are excited to change the way we wash clothes and make an impact on our environment. (https://ultropia.us)
IVU Biologics
Winning second place and $30k was IVU Bio! IVU Bio is a microbe delivery company focused on keeping microbes stable for 6-12 months, and delivering these to seed producers to administer on their seeds. In doing so, they can improve yield for farmers and have a major impact on the environment. IVU BIO believes they can reduce 5% of carbon emissions in the US with 100% land use.
By 2050 the world will have 9.5B people. This represents a 30% increase in the global population and a 70% increase in the required food production. Today, synthetic fertilizers are used to increase production, but these fertilizers account for 3% of global carbon emissions. Meanwhile, soil degradation is accelerating rapidly and it is expected that 90% of soils will be degraded by 2050. This means the world needs to change the way it is farming, and IVU plans to do this with microbes.
Microbes have many uses. They’re an energy efficient, low cost and green solution. But according to IVU Bio, we are not fully harnessing the power of microbes because we don’t know how to store and deliver them effectively. That’s where IVU Bio comes in — they deliver a microbial coating that seed companies integrate into their seeds. These seeds are then sold to the end-users, farmers, who realize a boost in yield and the ability to farm in unusable soil. This also lowers costs by reducing the reliance on fertilizers.
IVU Bio estimates the current market size in US at $2.6B. The beachhead market is soybeans, estimated at $200M. Because soybeans last a year, they see this as the best market to target initially. (ivobio.com)
Muket
Wining third place and $10k was Muket. Muket (pronounced MOO-KET) is powering the future of carbon-zero dairy and beef.
Cows are a major methane emitter. A 50% reduction in cattle emissions represents a 0.4 degree Celsius reduction in global warming, or avoid over 2B tons of CO2 equivalent.
For large retialers, carbon accounting is expensive, manual, and difficult to verify. Many companies do not have the time or resources to do this work on their own. Muket solves for this — they automatically baseline and monitor emissions across farms, while also providing data-driven emissions reductions recommendations. Their software platform collects data from the farms, tracks farm emissions, recommends the best reduction opportunities, procures solutions, and aggregates data for verification and monetization.
Muket not only benefits large retailers, they also provide value to cattle farmers. They do this by providing faster access to new revenue streams through grants and incentives, while also saving 100 plus hours per year in time saved on data compliance. They also introduce new capabilities to benchmark their performance against other farms.
Muket estimates the beef and dairy carbon accounting sector as a $12B market. They plan to monetize in a two phased approach. First, they will chargen retailers a $2,000 subscription fee per farm. In phase 2, they will move towards a value based fee structure and charge a 15% CO2 reduction fee based on carbon market value. They already have significant traction including a a paid pilot with a European farm.
Mesophase
Winning the audience choice award and $5K was Mesophase. If this sounds familiar, it’s because they also won third place in the MIT 100K Finals which I wrote about a few weeks ago.
Mesophase is building technology to more efficiently meet growing energy needs. Over 1 billion people live without electricity, and global energy demand is expected to increase by half over next 30 years.
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.
TerraTrade
TerraTrade is facilitating better adoption of power purchase agreements for corporations. Terra Trade is a two-sided marketplace that helps corporations combat climate change by making renewable energy more accessible, competitive, and transparent. The company hopes to reduce the reliance on consultants and intermediaries to accelerate the time to executing power purchase agreement deals.
I hope you enjoyed reading about each of these startups! If you want more of these recaps directly to your inbox, subscribe below: