Wall Street Journal reporter Russell Gold spotlights how Form Energy, a startup co-founded by Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang, has developed an inexpensive iron-air battery that can discharge power for days. The batteries could be “capable of solving one of the most elusive problems facing renewable energy: cheaply storing large amounts of electricity to power grids when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing,” writes Gold.
Writing for The Boston Globe, Hiawatha Bray spotlights Accion Systems, an MIT startup that makes “small thrusters that use an electric current to turn a liquid propellant into a stream of ionized gas. The result is gentle but effective thrust that can be used to adjust a satellite’s orbit or slow it down at the end of its life, so it can fall harmlessly back to earth.”
Boston.com reporter Erin Kuschner spotlights Umamicart, an online grocery store specializing in products from Asian American- and immigrant-led businesses that was founded by alumna Andrea Xu ‘20. Xu called Umamicart the “culmination of what I’ve lived through my life.” She added that: “My parents are Chinese, and they moved to Spain in their early 20s. They worked in Chinese restaurants and [opened] their own Chinese restaurants and just worked hard for their entire life. So that’s the entrepreneurial inspiration for me.”
TechCrunch reporter Brian Heater writes about Inkbit, a CSAIL spinout, which is developing self-correcting 3D printing technology. “Its primary differentiator from the slew of existing 3D printers is a vision and AI system designed to identify and correct mistakes during the printing process,” writes Heater.
Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray spotlights Venti Technologies, an MIT startup developing self-driving cargo trucks for seaports. “The trucks can automatically transport containers to dockside, where cranes can load them onto ships,” writes Bray. “Or they can pick up containers as they’re unloaded, and move them to staging areas where they can be transferred to other ships.”
Nextiles, an MIT startup founded by alumnus George Sun, is developing smart threads, reports John Koetsier for Forbes. “We’re literally trying to sew the same kind of highway of data streams that you can normally find in a computer chip, but do that in clothing,” says Sun.
Boston Globe reporter Aaron Pressman spotlights MIT startup Superpedestrian, a scooter rental service. “Superpedestrian’s scooters, packed with sensors, GPS, and a cellular connection, don’t need to be parked in a dock,” writes Pressman. “Instead, the company scatters them around cities in convenient locations.”
Alumnus Mike Cassidy S.B. ’85, S.M. ’86 founded a company called Apollo Fusion, which makes electrical propulsion systems for small satellites, reports Tim Fernholz for Quartz. Apollo Fusion’s thruster were set to be deployed in space for the first time on June 29 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
CNBC reporter Catherine Clifford Oklo, a startup founded by Jacob DeWitte and Caroline Cochran (who met when they were teaching assistants at MIT), “is working to make micro-nuclear reactors that would power industrial sites, large companies, college campuses and remote locations.”
Ginkgo Bioworks founders Jason Kelly PhD ’08, S.B. ’03 and Reshma Shetty PhD ’08 speak with Boston Globe reporter Scott Kirsner about the inspiration for and growth of the company, which is focused on manipulating genetic material to get living cells to perform new jobs. Shetty notes that the Ginkgo Bioworks team is “dedicated to making biology easier to engineer."
Time reporter Alice Park spotlights how MIT startup BioBot is sampling and analyzing sewage for communities across the U.S. to help track the spread of Covid-19. “Over the course of this pandemic, the entire world has seen how valuable wastewater epidemiology is as a tool,” says Newsha Ghaeli, president and co-founder of Biobot. “Our long-term vision is that wastewater epidemiology becomes a permanent part of the infrastructure embedded on top of sewage systems across the country and around the world.”
TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey spotlights MIT startup ISEE, which is developing a robotic yard truck that could be used to move containers in shipping yards. Coldewey writes that the ISEE trucks could “transport containers (unmodified, it is important to note) to and from locations in the yards, backing the 50-foot trailer into a parking spot with as little as a foot of space on either side.”
Prof. Pierre Azoulay speaks with Forbes reporter Amy Feldman about his research showing that restrictive immigration policies are bad for U.S. entrepreneurship. “You have to think about those folks who didn’t get a visa to study in the U.S. and therefore won’t be in a situation to found a company later on,” says Azoulay.
A new study co-authored by Professor Scott Stern finds that stimulus measures enacted during the pandemic may have contributed to a surge in start-ups in America, particularly in Black neighborhoods, reports Quoctrung Bui for The New York Times. “The idea that the pandemic has kind of restarted America’s start-up engine is a real thing,” says Stern. “Sometimes you need to turn off the car in order to turn it back on.”
In an article for Commonwealth, Prof. Michael Cima and Prof. Fiona Murray spotlight the importance of invention and innovation, noting that “there is an immediate need for actions that will further the nation’s growth in productivity and inclusive prosperity, a measure of the extent to which all sectors of our population are empowered to contribute to the economy and share in its benefits.” Cima and Murray write that: “The power of inclusion is illustrated by the backgrounds and inspirations of the winners of the Lemelson-MIT Prize over 25 years.”