🇺🇸 November Update

by David Cohen-Tanugi on November 5, 2024

Dear Advisors,

In October, we worked closely with our new cohort of Fellows to define new startup projects to advance through the PV venture building process. In parallel, Hyperion and Vertical Horizons have continued to gain traction.

Happy reading,

David and Gene

By the numbers

Since April 2023:

• ☕ 634 ecosystem interactions
• ​🧪 87 technologies assessed
• 🧑 58 customer discovery activities
• 💡 94 venture ideas
• 🏫 6 team projects created
• 🤝 11 cross-campus conversations initiated

🍁 October highlights

♻️ David narrowed down a list of venture concepts to address intelligent critical minerals recycling through a combination of customer discovery, secondary market research, academic literature reviews, and regular brainstorms with professors Jeffrey Grossman and Elsa Olivetti in MIT's Department of Materials Science & Engineering. We are converging on the concept of rapid in-line characterization of metallic powders to dramatically increase the effectiveness of recovering copper, gold, and palladium from electronic waste.

🎤 The Fall 2024 cohort of PV Fellows articulated the core vision behind their startup projects during our share-out session #1. In subsequent sessions in November and December, Fellows will share their progress on refining their startup's mission and its business concept.

⚡️ PV Fellows Jenn Turliuk, Nidhi Verma, and DeAndrea Salvador conducted landscape assessments and customer discovery for MIT startup opportunities in grid tech. In particular, PV participated in National Grid's NextGrid Alliance Summit (thank you Badar) as well as the DERVOS mini-conference organized by the Distributed Energy Resources Taskforce. Nidhi and DeAndrea also conducted an MIT TLO search for patents aligned with their business hypothesis.

🪵 David co-hosted a private fireside chat with Professor John Hart, Head of MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, on the future of manufacturing.

☢ PV Fellow Shon Mackie and his teammate executed on a neutron diagnostics consulting contract with secretive fusion startup Helion Energy.

🚢 PV Fellow Jacob van de Lindt carried out extensive market discovery with maritime professionals to inform his nuclear-powered cargo ship technology concept, and participated in a founders retreat hosted by VC fund Fifty Years.

🔍 We’ve continued publishing our research notes on our internal website (password: mit venture studio).

👀 November: Sneak Peek

👥 We are finalizing our hiring process for Proto Ventures' first geothermal venture builder.

✏️ PV Fellows will refine their core mission and develop 1-3 potential business concepts that leverage their key insight or core technology, with guidance and structure from David.

💰 We need funding to build upon Proto Ventures' success and scale this program! We will continue fundraising, with an emphasis on family offices that want to support a unique and impactful model for impact through tech translation.

📖 We're working with Fiona Murray and visiting doctoral student Constanze Coelsch on a manuscript for a journal article describing the Proto Ventures model.

🤝 David will work with a group of MIT Sloan Fellows to potentially organize a fusion supply chain summit at MIT, bringing together fusion companies and large original equipment manufacturers to pave the way for new supply chain partnerships and initiatives. If this piques your interest, please drop me a line: I'd love to chat about it.

🧠 What's On Our Mind

🫣 The US general election, obviously.

♻️ A key challenge in the metal recycling sector is rapid characterization of inbound materials. What's in here? How should we process it? What contaminants are inside? Interestingly, many of the best methods today involve plasma & fusion science:

• Neutron activation analysis for quantifying copper content in scrap metal
• X-ray fluorescence to determine elemental composition of a material surface
• Laser induced breakdown spectroscopy identifies the composition of a metal surface by creating a plasma and characterizing the resulting emission spectrum

How can we do better with MIT tech?

One final thing... can you think of any conferences, events, or podcasts that might be interested in featuring us as a speakers or panelists? We'd love to keep spreading the word about Proto Ventures!

Confidential | Do not distribute without permission