🇺🇸 January Update

by David Cohen-Tanugi on January 8, 2025

Dear Advisors,

MIT Proto Ventures is starting an exciting phase as we enter 2025.

For the first time, the program is running two simultaneous channels: we have inaugurated a new Geothermal channel, which will operate in parallel to the Fusion & Clean Energy channel. We're already seeing tremendous synergy between my own work and my new geothermal colleague, Andrew Inglis. It is quickly become clear how much more powerful that Proto Ventures model becomes when a community of Venture Builders can cross-pollinate ideas.

This spring will mark the two-year anniversary of the Fusion & Clean Energy channel, and we intend to mark this milestone by sharing our learnings and primary successes with the broader innovation & entrepreneurship community.

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Happy reading,

David

By the numbers

Since April 2023:

• ☕ 704 ecosystem interactions
• ​🧪 88 technologies assessed
• 🧑 68 customer discovery activities
• 💡 100 venture ideas
• 🏫 8 team projects created
• 🤝 11 cross-campus conversations initiated

❄️ December highlights

🌎 We welcomed Andrew Inglis, Ph.D. as the inaugural Venture Builder for the Geothermal channel, and adapted our internal processes & systems to accommodate multiple parallel venture building channels.

📙 We created a detailed outline for the university venture studio playbook that we intend to publish this year. The playbook will explain why a venture studio inside a research organization is a radically new model, why it is sorely needed, and how to build and operate an effective program.

💰 Vertical Horizons made strides towards raising a Seed Round, completing a fundraising bootcamp, pitching in Boston, New York, and the SF Bay Area, and receiving several terms sheets (please keep this information confidential). The company also submitted funding proposals to ARPA-E (alongside an industry partner) and to the Activate Fellowship for the founding CTO, Josh Perozek.

🎁 The Fall '24 PV Fellows presented their latest progress towards our venture team projects. The Fellows have made significant progress over the fall semester, and I intend to keep working with several of them in the spring, with the expectation that one or more will culminate in a full-time startup over the summer.

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

👀 January: Sneak Peek

♻️ I'll be refining a business concept that leverages MIT technology to address the growing reliance on critical minerals for the energy transition. Building upon extensive primary market research with automotive recyclers, scrap metal companies, and electronics OEMs, I will keep collaborating with my team of MIT professors to define an opportunity that addresses an emerging market need in this sector with differentiated, defensible technology.

⚡️ PV Fellow teams will continue refining their startup concepts over MIT's independent activities period, with an emphasis on primary market research and discussions with MIT faculty to leverage recent MIT IP.

🇮🇳 I'll be speaking at the Pune Public Policy Festival in Pune, India, on a panel titled: India’s Transition to Green Energy: Should India Follow or Forge Its Own Path? I look forward to bringing an MIT perspective to this very important question.

🇮🇳 I will also give an invited talk at the India Science Festival, the country's largest science event, on the topic of why many technologies never make it out of the lab. I will leverage my experience at MIT Proto Ventures to help answer this question for a new generation of scientists and innovators.

🎯 We'll finalize the list of channel deliverables that we want to complete by April, and we will work towards building these. Our draft list is as follows, and we welcome your feedback as always:

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🧠 What's On Our Mind

🤝 AI companies need a better way to offer virtual power plants to electric utilities. Data center developers (especially hyperscalers) want to deploy new sites right now, but they don't expect to have technologies for the next 5+ years to meet their own energy needs. In the meantime, they'd love to be able to offer energy efficiency and demand flexibility to electric utility in order to speed up their interconnection to the power grid. Why aren't more people working on this?

⭐️ New Jersey wants to become the Silicon Valley of the fusion energy supply chain, and they want Proto Ventures' help. The New Jersey Economic Development Agency, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and several other NJ-based fusion organizations are organizing a large conference focused on catalyzing a new fusion supply chain industry in the state. They reached out to us for guidance on strategic priorities based on our seminal report on the topic. I have to decide how much bandwidth to allocate to this at the expense of other PV projects.

🚗 We need cost-effective recycling solutions for electric vehicles. The rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) has created an urgent need for effective recycling solutions for end-of-life EVs. In conversations with auto recyclers, it has become apparent that traditional automotive recyclers don't know how to deal with EVs, and don't really want to deal with them. Yet recycling EVs is critical for recovering valuable materials like lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements from batteries and other components. Existing recycling processes are either inefficient, costly, or not designed for the unique challenges posed by EVs, leading to significant waste of materials and higher environmental impact.

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!

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