Forbes reporter Derek Newton spotlights Nwanacho Nwana '20, co-founder of education startup Valfee, a communications program aimed at engaging students with public speaking skills. “We truly believe that feedback-based learning is optimal for long term growth, and that the future of student learning is gamified,” Nwana tells Newton.
Wall Street Journal reporter Amrith Ramkumar spotlights MIT startup Presto, which is combining with a special-purpose acquisitions company and going public. “Presto offers several different technologies that it says automate restaurants and improve the dining experience,” writes Ramkumar.
Bloomberg reporter Will Mathis spotlights Osmoses, an MIT startup that has “created a membrane material thinner than human hair to reduce carbon emissions from industrial processes such as natural gas production.” CEO and postdoc Francesco Maria Benedetti explains that “we envision applying our technology to increase the sustainability of existing infrastructure."
Nene Anagbogu ’18 and Colin Webb ’18 cofounded Sauce, a startup that provides analytics and dynamic pricing for restaurants, reports Frederick Daso for Forbes. “We’re the perfect combination of restaurant, data and product,” Anagbogu and Webb tell Daso. “Our families started small businesses, and we worked in restaurants, so we know what our customers are going through.”
Nth Cycle, a company co-founded by Prof. Desiree Plata, has developed an extraction device that uses electric signals to identify valuable metals or black mass leftover from discarded electric batteries. “This modular system is easy to move and adapt and is far more efficient and environmentally friendly than the traditional methods of smelting or using a chemical wash to sort out the metals from the gunk,” writes Jon Chesto and Larry Edelman for The Boston Globe.
Brady Knight '16, Michael Farid '16, Kale Rogers '16, and Luke Schlueter '16 co-founded Spyce, an automated health food restaurant, reports Alie Ward for The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation. “I started thinking about how we are going to make healthy food more accessible, more affordable and more available and we had this idea that if we used automation, we could help make it a lot more efficient therefore more accessible,” says Faird.
Biobot Analytics, a startup founded by Mariana Matus ‘18 and Newsha Ghaeli ‘17, has raised $20 million in funding for its work with wastewater epidemiology, reports Carey Goldberg and Janet Wu for Bloomberg News. “This past year, wastewater epidemiology changed from being an obscure niche area of science to becoming a central pillar of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” says Matus. “And now, in the later stages of the pandemic, it’s becoming a central pillar of preparing for the next pandemic.”
TechCrunch reporter Mary Ann Azevedo spotlights Adam Marcus ’12 and Nitesh Banta, the co-founders of B12, a digital platform designed to establish, run and grow professional services firms online. B12 is focused on helping “smaller professional service organizations such as law and accounting firms or mortgage brokerages more easily accept online payments and build a digital presence in general,” writes Ann Azevedo.
WCVB-TV spotlights two MIT startups, True Moringa, a beauty and wellness company that uses the oil from Moringa trees grown in Ghana to directly benefit farmers in Ghana, and Sourcemap, which traces supply chains and provides transparency about where goods are stemming from. Says Kwami Williams ’12, co-founder and CEO, of his inspiration for True Moringa: “I started to ask myself, if aerospace engineers can help put a man on the Moon, then what can I do to help put more food on the table for families” in Ghana.
Drew Houston ’05, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, speaks with Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner about his favorite courses and extracurriculars activities at MIT, his first computer, and the future of work at Dropbox during a recent visit to MIT where he announced a gift that will endow a professorship in the Schwarzman College of Computing. “I loved studying computer science, and I loved things like distributed systems and operating systems and algorithms,” said Houston of his time at MIT. “Those were my favorite classes. I had grown up tinkering under the hood of my computer, trying to figure out how it worked.”
Forbes contributor Frederick Daso spotlights Fitnescity, a startup founded by MIT graduates that offers “a streamlined online platform to help consumers select lab kits, get tested, and display their data on a digital dashboard.” CEO and co-founder Laila Zemrani MBA ’13 explains that: “Fitnescity was founded to give people access to the information they need to improve their health and wellness.”
Noubar Afeyan ’87, a member of the MIT Corporation, speaks to Guy Raz of NPR’s How I Built This podcast about his journey toward co-founding Moderna and becoming a part of history through the rapid creation and production of vaccines for the Covid-19 pandemic. “The reality is when you have a pandemic and you’re a public company and you have material data, our sense was that we at a high level had to put that [information] out there,” says Afeyan. “One of these things we learned, because none of us had been in this situation before, is that we are going to get criticized no matter what we did. So, we just had to do what we thought was right.”
Ayr Muir ’00, SM ’01 speaks with Washington Post reporter Trisha Pasricha about how the goal behind his plant-based restaurants, Clover Foods Labs, is to use plant-based foods to help mitigate the climate crisis. “The overarching mission is global warming. And what we’re trying to do is help meat-lovers eat more meals that have no meat in them,” Muir said. “The more success we have with that, the greater impact we have on the environment.”
Boston Globe reporter Pranshu Verma spotlights how innovators in the greater Boston area, including a number of MIT startups, are “aiming their moonshot ideas at a climate crisis that has only gotten worse and made their task all the more urgent.” “That’s our purpose,” said Katie Rae, CEO and managing partner for The Engine. “We are here to back those super ambitious companies that are taking a big swing.”
Rebekah Huang, a seven-year-old from Belmont who participated in a program sponsored by the Lemelson-MIT program aimed at teaching children about innovation, took second place for her age group at a global invention competition for her device that keeps chairs from tipping over, reports Diana Bravo for The Boston Globe. “You can buy special types of chairs that don’t tip over easily, but my suction holder string can be put around any chair you already have at home,” says Huang. “So my invention is much more convenient.”