Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E)

The Conversation spotlights Institute Prof. Robert Langer ‘74 who spoke at the 2022 Imagine Solutions Conference about his academic career and work applying his chemical engineering background to his research in health sciences. “I learned that if you’re not your own champion, nobody else will be,” says Langer. “So, I got involved in patenting things, and my students were very interested in seeing their work make a difference… My story is sort of one person’s example of how you can try to use science to help relieve suffering and prolong life.”

Bruce Anderson ’73, founder and CEO of MIT spinout 247 Solar, speaks with Bloomberg Baystate Business Hour host Janet Wu about the power of solar energy and growing climate concerns for the future. “We are facing dire circumstances here,” says Anderson. “We have no clue what the climate’s tipping point is where it all of sudden goes in a direction that we cannot recover from, no matter how much carbon we remove from the air."

Fast Company reporter Connie Lin spotlights how Algorand, an MIT startup founded by Prof. Silvio Micali, dimmed the lights in Times Square on April 21 to help conserve energy and demonstrate how cryptocurrency could reduce energy consumption. Algorand has developed a carbon-negative blockchain protocol and “utilizes a pure proof-of-stake consensus mechanism to verify authentic transactions.”

Satellite Bio, a startup co-founded by Prof. Sangeeta Bhatia, aims to create “tissue implants to ‘repair, restore, or even replace’ diseased or dying organs,” reports Ryan Cross for The Boston Globe.

Boston Magazine reporter Scott Kearnan spotlights Clover, a farm-fresh restaurant and food truck, created by Ayr Muir BS ’00, SM ’01. “Clover is so confident about its commitment to only using fresh-from-the-farm produce that, believe it or not, it doesn’t have a single freezer in its restaurants,” writes Kearnan.

The Boston Globe highlights Robert Buderi’s new book, “Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub.” Buderi features the Future Founders Initiative, an effort by Prof. Sangeeta Bhatia, President Emerita Susan Hockfield and Prof. Emerita Nancy Hopkins aimed at increasing female entrepreneurship. 

TechCrunch reporter Kyle Wiggers spotlights MIT startup Amplemarket, a sales enablement company, co-founded by João Batalha ’13, Luis Batalha and Micael Oliveira. “We’ve leveraged our combination of technical backgrounds and applied it to one of the oldest trades: sales,” says J. Batalha.

Newsha Ghaeli ’17 - president and co-founder of Biobot, a public health research, data and analytics firms that has developed and promoted wastewater surveillance technology - speaks with Vox reporter Muizz Akhtar about how wastewater surveillance can be used to predict and prepare for future pandemics. “Our vision is that this is a permanent infrastructure layer on our sewer systems, so that it becomes one of the core kinds of pandemic preparedness in this country and disease surveillance globally,” says Ghaeli.

MIT startup ReadySet, co-founded by Alana Marzoev PhD ’18 and Jon Gjengset PhD ’20, provides database infrastructure to help developers build real-time applications, reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “Rather than rebuilding these same broken systems, developers need solutions that slot into their existing infrastructure and achieve limitless read scaling,” says Marzoev. “With ReadySet, we aim to make the process of globally caching… query results as streamlined and automated as caching images in a content delivery system.”

Arun Saigal SB ’13, MEng ’13 and WeiHua Li ’BS ’14 MA ’15 co-founded Thunkable, an online platform developed to make building mobile apps easier, writes Ingrid Lunden for TechCrunch. “Saigal said that its initial focus was on consumers, which in itself is another big concept of the moment, that of the creator economy and users – not professional publishers and others – creating the content that the mass market is consuming,” writes Lunden.

TechCrunch reporters Christine Hall, Anita Ramaswamy, Connie Loizos and Mary Ann Azevedo spotlight Sribuu, an AI-powered personal financial advisor in Indonesia, co-founded by Nadia Amalia ’20. The company is aimed at helping “users make better money decisions with our wealth management tools and give personalized saving advice based on their financial habits,” they write.

Research engineer Paul Woskov speaks with Bloomberg Radio host Tom Moroney and Joe Shortsleeve about his work with Quaise Energy in developing a laser to drill holes into the earth. “There is a lot of heat contained within our planet. The amount of heat that is present, if tapped, could supply all of our energy needs for several million years,” says Woskov.

Cary Lin MBA ’16 co-founded Common Heir, a clean and plastic-free beauty company dedicated to creating “a high-impact line of skincare that had a low impact on the environment,” reports Geri Stengel for Forbes.

Ella Peinovich ’12 co-founded Powered by People, a wholesale e-commerce platform based in Kenya that connects small brands to global markets, reports Annie Njanja for TechCrunch. “We are providing these businesses with new visibility into the specialty retail market in North America,” says Peinovich.

MIT startup Volta Labs is developing a new instrument that can automate the processes used to prepare genetic samples, reports Emma Betuel for TechCrunch. CEO and co-founder Udayan Umapathi ’17 is confident that with the right programming, the platform could allow “liquids to be manipulated in even more complex ways, like using magnetic fields to draw certain molecules out of samples for further analysis,” writes Betuel.