🎂 Year 1 Update

by David Cohen-Tanugi on May 3, 2024

Dear Advisors,

The Clean Energy & Fusion channel recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. In this month's advisory newsletter, we'll share a "State of the Union" that reflects on Year 1 and presents our proposed strategy for Year 2 of the channel. We look forward to your feedback as always.

Happy reading,

David and the Proto Ventures team

TL;DR: At the one-year mark, our power converter and satellite thruster team projects are ready to move to the 'Build' stage, and we have a couple exciting new projects coming up the pipeline.

By the Numbers

Since April 2023:

• ☕ 445 ecosystem interactions
• ​🧪 76 technologies assessed
• 💡 80 venture ideas
• 🏫 5 team projects created
• 🧑 35 customer discovery activities
• 🤝 8 cross-campus conversations initiated

State of the Union

A year in to the Fusion & Clean Energy Channel, we are well on our way towards validating the thesis that a venture studio in clean energy is an impactful and new addition to the MIT innovation ecosystem!

We are seeing growing interest about the Proto Ventures model, both from within MIT and among corporate innovation groups and traditional private venture studios.

We have created five promising team projects, several of which seem well poised to become commercial, and we have strong momentum on both the technology and business fronts.

In the next year, the focus will be on spinning out the most promising existing projects, on crafting new team projects, and on continuing to demonstrate Proto Venture's value as a catalyst for translational thinking within the MIT research community.

Personally, I'd like to launch one of these startups full-time after my time at Proto Ventures comes to an end. Of course, this is contingent on finding the right people and the right idea that aligns with my own interests and skillset, so this will be a major focus of Year 2 as well.

Let's now review the current status and ongoing strategy for each of the Objectives & Key Results that we had defined together at the start of this channel.

🚀 Objective 1: Launch one or more commercial startups that leverage MIT research for clean energy

Key result: 1 or more high-quality proto ventures ready for commercial incorporation and external investment

Year 1 status: From 78 business ideas, we created five team projects. At the time of writing:

• Vertical Horizons is commercializing high-efficiency power conversion devices for data centers using vertical gallium nitride. The team was accepted in the delta v summer accelerator at MIT Sloan and the main fellow on this project, Cynthia Liao, intends to launch it full-time after graduation. The main challenge right now is that the primary PhD student on the project is ambivalent about joining a startup, which means that we haven't identified a good technical co-founder for Cynthia yet. This is an active area of focus.
• The Anti-Fouling Coating from Mike Short's Group is a licensing play (a "Tuna" in our taxonomy). We've compiled a comprehensive list of potential industrial applications for the technology and have started researching the technical requirements and physical environment associated with each applications.
• Hyperion Transport Systems is commercializing a more efficient and more performant satellite propulsion system. The team has successfully built their first custom-designed magnet coil (it works!). Theo was also awarded the Activate fellowship, which would provide 2 years of funding for the main fellow on the project, Theo. (Note: strangely, we are still awaiting confirmation from the Activate organization that they actually have the funding for Theo's fellowship). This team has also been invited to submit a full proposal to the Deshpande Center.
• PlasGRID is exploring direct-current superconducting microgrids for data centers. We have a techno-economic analysis (the numbers look promising), a high-level system concept devised in collaboration with PSFC researchers, and a strong set of technical advisors.
• The Critical Minerals project explored several opportunity areas, but struggled to catch the interest of any MIT PIs working on mining-relevant technology or to articulate a compelling startup thesis. This project will probably not go forward after the semester.

Year 2 strategy:

• Advance Vertical Horizons and Hyperion to the 'Build' stage and help them launch out of MIT
• Upgrade 3-4 venture ideas into team projects and get one all the way to launch (hopefully, the one I would personally want to found full-time in summer 2025). See below for a list of prospective projects.
• We'll also try to get a team from the MIT Climate & Energy Ventures course to work on the Microgrids for Data Centers project in the fall, and we hope to make meaningful progress towards an license agreement for the Anti-Fouling Coating with an industrial company.

🧠 Objective 2: Increase translational thinking among the PSFC research community

Key result: Get 75 MIT researchers to participate in activities related to potential applications of their research or to proto venture ideas.

Year 1 status:

41 PSFC researchers have directly engaged in translational activities with me. Highlights included:

• Collaborating with ten PSFC researchers on a new public report about commercial fusion opportunities
• Meeting with ~35 different PSFC researchers to learn about their work and its potential real-world applications

Year 2 strategy:

• Lean into promoting translational thinking about the PSFC graduate student and postdoc community by running a sort of entrepreneurship club, nicknamed the PSFC Future Founders Guild, and encourage the formation of new prototyping & commercialization projects that leverage their technical competencies for new energy applications.

🤝 Objective 3: Catalyze new collaborations between PSFC and other parts of campus

Key result: 15 new collaborations or connections between disparate parts of the MIT research community

Year 1 status: We've fostered 8 new connections across campus. See below for the full list.

Year 2 strategy: Continue to proactively connect researchers across PSFC and other parts of campus for strategically relevant collaboration ideas, and keep nurturing Year 1 connections.

📓 Objective 4: Establish a model for deep-tech venture building in a research institution

Key result: 1 publication (report, book, etc.), at least in draft form, that summarizes our learnings about the Proto Ventures process.

Year 1 status: We've iterated on the Proto Ventures model over the past year, rigorously taking notes along the way and reflecting upon what worked and what didn't. Our new public blog highlights some of our learnings to date, as do our LinkedIn posts. We have met with a few dozen research institutions, governmental organizations, and corporations that look to Proto Ventures as a model for venture building. Finally, we've created a 'venture builder support group' with peers in other venture studios to share best practices.

Year 2 strategy:

• Craft more extensive partnerships with local ecosystem players: The Engine, MIT TLO, MITei, Activate, Deshpande Center...
• Grow the Clean Energy & Fusion channel by hiring a geothermal energy venture builder
• Write the outline for a book about running a venture studio inside a research institution (perhaps in the form of a white paper), and identify an editor who'd be interested in publishing it.

🌧️ April Highlights

📋 In partnership with each of my team co-leads, I carried out extensive customer discovery, with a focus on power utilities and data centers.

🏆 Vertical Horizons, our team project developing vertical gallium nitride power conversion devices for data centers, was selected as a finalist for the MIT Climate & Energy Prize.

✉️ Hyperion Transport Systems, our team project developing a more efficient satellite thruster, was selected for the Activate fellowship.

🍕 Kicked off the Future Founders Guild at PSFC, an informal club for researchers who are curious about entrepreneurship to learn collectively and form new projects together.

🪨 Gene secured a commitment from a geothermal nonprofit, Project Innerspace, to fund a new venture builder focused on geothermal energy!

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

🌸 May: Sneak Peek

𝞭 The Vertical Horizons team will prepare for delta v by getting up to speed on the technology fundamentals and by aligning with the PI, Tomas Palacios.

💰I'll help the Hyperion project team secure funding to continue technology validation on campus.

🅿️ I'll act as a mentor and judge in Blueprint, a program run by The Engine for early-stage deep tech projects.

🛞 We'll update our Proto Ventures funnel by adding new projects and upgrading existing ones.

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!

Bonus Content

List of new connections we've fostered on campus and beyond:

• John Hart and Dennis Whyte: Started discussing a 'Solve for Fusion' event joint between Course 2 and PSFC
• John Boguski (PSFC) and David Perreault (Course 6) on power electronics for tokamaks
• Daniel R Cohn (MITei/PSFC) and Haruko M Wainwright (Course 22) started talking about plasma-assisted nuclear waste vitrification
• Daniel R Cohn and Scott Kemp (Course 22) started talking about plasma-assisted nuclear waste vitrification
• Jack Hare (PSFC) and David Perreault (Course 6) got connected about power electronics for electrohydraulic geothermal fracturing
• Lou Wainwright and Minhaj Malik (MBA / Bruce Power) started exploring a collaboration between PSFC and Bruce Power
• Lou Wainwright and Anastasios John Hart on business models for high-performance material discovery companies and additive manufacturing
• Dennis Whyte and the Deshpande Center - a potentially new source of funding for PSFC projects that are 1-2 years away from commercialization

Prospective new team projects:

• Critical Energy Materials from Waste with Jeff Grossman and Elsa Olivetti. Hoping to have an early technical proof of concept by December.
• Speeding Up Grid Interconnection with Titiaan Palazzi, a good friend and ex-CEO of Myst AI (acquired by Snowflake)
• Thermal storage system using molten salts for air or water heating when electricity is cheap with Mike Short et al. Hoping to have a techno-economic model and a lab-scale prototype by December.
• Opportunistic (work with MIT TLO and others to identify game-changing energy technologies with entrepreneurially-minded potential technical founders)

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