🌸 March Update

by David Cohen-Tanugi on March 29, 2024

Happy spring! We are coming up on almost a full year since the launch of the Clean Energy & Fusion channel, and we have many successes and learnings to celebrate already.

In this month's advisory newsletter, we'll cover the progress of our first five Team Projects and early plans for Year 2.

Happy reading,

David and the Proto Ventures team

By the numbers

Since April 2023:

• ☕ 405 ecosystem interactions
• ​🧪 74 technologies assessed
• 💡 76 venture ideas
• 🏫 6 team projects created
• 🧑 28 customer discovery activities
• 🤝 7 cross-campus conversations initiated

March highlights

We advanced our Vertical Gallium Nitride and Superconducting DC System team projects by diving deep into customer discovery for the power grid and data center sectors, including:

🔌 A site visit at the regional grid operator, ISO New England, where we learned about the challenges facing control room operators as well grid planners tasked with managing the interminably long interconnection queue

📝 Customer discovery meetings with innovation and operations leaders at National Grid (a big thank you to Badar Khan for the introductions)

👥 Spending three days investigating current utility challenges and emerging startups at Distributech, the power distribution industry's annual conference

That's not all:

🚀 Our Satellite Propulsion project, led by Theo, interviewed in the finalist round of the prestigious Activate fellowship

🧿 Our Anti-Fouling Coating team project compiled a list of top market applications and started socializing a proposed roadmap with early-stage investors

 🗽 Our DC Power Distribution team project, led by Hee Yau, explored opportunities for a potential pilot system at Hudson InterXchange, a data center in lower Manhattan, in collaboration with Joe Minervini (formerly MIT PSFC) and John Brisson (MIT)

🦘We kickstarted an early conversation with the open innovation team at BHP, an Australian mining company, about piloting a co-ideation spring with our Critical Minerals team project (led by Tom). This team project has been exploring several technologies but hasn't quite settled on one yet

🏆 Our Vertical Gallium Nitride project, led by Cynthia, made waves at the Climate & Energy Prize and will be competing for the final $100k prize next month

📝 We worked with 2-3 principal investigators to submit grant applications to the Deshpande Center, which helps MIT faculty and students commercialize breakthrough technologies and inventions by transforming promising ideas into innovative products and cutting-edge spinout companies.

🎤 Dennis Whyte and I spoke to a full room at CERAWeek about the role of universities in creating new energy industries, with a heavy emphasis on Proto Ventures

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

April: Sneak peek

🎯 In April, we'll gain clarity on which team projects will enter the Build stage and spin out over the summer. The upcoming graduation for our PV fellows at Sloan will be a good forcing function.

🧙🏽‍♀️ I'll be kicking off a new Future Founders Guild at PSFC. For this new initiative, twenty PSFC researchers have signed up to explore entrepreneurship together. I'm hoping that some great Proto Ventures team projects will come out of this club!

🫰🏼Hee Yau and Cynthia will interview for the delta v summer accelerator at the MIT Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, Theo will hear back from Activate, and Cynthia will pitch in the finals of the Climate & Energy Prize.

👥 I will starting planning out Year 2 of my tenure at Proto Ventures. In addition to pushing our existing five Team Projects along, right now I am especially excited about teaming up on two new venture ideas with successful energy entrepreneur Titiaan Palazzi and with my former PhD advisor, Jeff Grossman.

What’s on our mind

⚡ MIT announced new directors for both the PSFC and the MIT Energy Initiative. Exciting! Let's make sure Proto Ventures is ideally equipped to partner with these two key energy institutions at MIT.

🤯 Did you know? Ireland, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and several global IT hubs are imposing moratoria on new data centers. There simply isn't enough power (or grid infrastructure) to meet their insatiable hunger for energy.

One final thing... if you've read this far, we'd really appreciate a 1-line reply on what you thought of this month's update or what advice (or questions) you'd have for us!

Confidential | Do not distribute without permission