 I'm with Matrix Industries and we are an energy harvesting company that has a technology that converts heat to electricity. Hopefully the LEDs are lighting up on this hat. This hat is basically converting the heat from my head and using it to light up the LEDs with no batteries or capacitors. I'm gonna walk you through a story about how we were able to take a R&D technology from the lab in academia and transition it into a viable business that today is earning us revenue and we're selling, you know, our first product. So I'm gonna walk you into how we were able to do that. It's taking a material science R&D technology is very difficult. So we'll start with what the company is, what we actually do. We have at the moment very high efficiency, very high performance solution that converts heat to electricity using thermal electrics. Thermal electrics are solid-state materials that officially convert heat to electricity. They've been around for a long time and we've been able to pioneer and innovate around this technology to create the world's best performing thermoelectric systems. Our first application that we launched two years ago is a smartwatch that I'm wearing here on my wrist. It's powered by my body heat and it allows me to power the watch without ever having to worry about charging it. And it's a typical smartwatch. It counts steps, calories, that kind of thing and it's all working off my body heat. To date we've raised around 30 million from top-tier investors so that's just really quick overview of what Matrix is about. So I'm just gonna take one slide here to tell you about kind of the background of the technology because probably a lot of you are not familiar with thermoelectrics. It's not a very common thing that you hear about every day. So in order to have a very good thermoelectric you need two things. You need a material that conducts heat really poorly like glass. Yet it has to conduct electricity really well like a metal and those two properties are not commonly found in nature. They actually kind of go against each other. So what we've done is we've taken properties, electrical properties of copper, thermal properties of glass and combine them together into our own material that we call the Matrix Gemini. And what it is is a material that is a bulk nanostructured material with nanostructured defects that slows down the movement of heat yet allows the electricity or the electrons to go through without impeding the motion of the electrons. So that's the reason these two features are important is you want to maintain a temperature difference in order to generate a voltage, in order to maintain a large temperature difference so that you can get a large voltage. You want a material that has a very low thermal conductivity. All right so how do you take this basically R&D project that my co-founder Douglas and I worked on when we were PhD students and converted into a real viable business. It's a really hard thing to do as you can imagine. When we first started out we were really naive. We thought this material could do so many things. It has so many great applications that we could go into but then you kind of get you know hit in the face with reality. In terms of building a business you've got to find your product market fit and that's a really hard thing to do especially when you know you're starting out and you think you can do all these different things. So the answer to finding product market fit for us at least was to go out and actually talk to and engage with customers. This was critical right. You can't just sit in the lab and dream about all these different opportunities and applications. You actually got to go out and see if the customer will actually buy what you're trying to sell because if there's no customer there's no business. So we went out and we thought well let's talk to the automotives. You know there's so much heat from the combustion of a gasoline in a car that you could recycle and turn into electricity for the vehicle save on fuel efficiency. None of the automotives cared. It wasn't that big of an impact. It wasn't that important of a problem to solve for them. We went out and talked to companies that were making steel or glass where there's tons of enormous amounts of heat that you could recycle and generate power to maybe lower the apex of the plant and again there just wasn't that pain that pain point for them. It was only really when we went and talked to wearables companies that we really got their interest. They're like wow if you can do that that's pretty cool and so we decided let's make a smartwatch and in fact let's go and see if we can license the technology to all these different wearables companies. Turns out that that's also very hard to do especially when you're just starting out and you have absolutely zero credibility. My co-founder and I are first time entrepreneurs and no one believed that what you know what we were trying to sell so we were like let's let's just do it ourselves and that's sometimes what you have to do and and that's what we did. Another thing is once we started looking at wearables and found that there was a pain point and a need for our technology we looked at other different types of markets that this technology could go into. Smart agriculture where you're putting sensors in the ground that are monitoring water content things like that where you don't have to charge or replace a battery. Smart cities where you want to deploy thousands or even millions of sensors but you're not going to go around changing a million batteries. Same with smart factories so the motto for our company really eliminate charging and enhance efficiency and we really wanted to look at energy harvesting as the place for our technology to kind of live and find solutions for. So our first product was the smart watch as I alluded to. We launched it on Indiegogo as a crowdfunding campaign two years ago. We raised 1.7 almost 1.7 million dollars. The watch right now manufacturer.foxcon we've shipped more than 30,000 and it's something that's now given us actual credibility to the point where before we would go and try to find you know customers or businesses to you know actually make interest you know make our technology interesting to them. Now they were coming to us and reaching out to us and wanting to partner and we've actually grown the business beyond just the wearables and we've got partnerships with other companies because we were actually able to manufacture and provide a full solution product and it sort of just you know our credibility went from zero to you know a finite number. So what is our kind of key innovation or innovations? We really have three kind of fundamental pillars or technology foundational pillars. The Matrix Gemini is the actual thermoelectric, very high efficiency, low cost. We have the Matrix Mercury which is something that we actually had no idea when we started the company that we'd get into. It's a boost converter. It basically boosts the small voltage coming off the Gemini to a large usable voltage and when we looked at the market for boost converters initially they were awful. They were super inefficient. They'd throw away two-thirds of the energy output from the thermoelectric and they had very high turn-on voltages. Our boost converter has the world's highest efficiency and lowest turn-on voltage that enables a lot of the different applications that we're getting traction in beyond just wearables and going into IoT and sensors. So this was actually an innovation that came after the fact that we had no idea we'd do, that we actually ended up doing just because it provides the full solution for our technology and our partners. And then the Matrix Luna is also a new development that is able to store heat. So these three things combined together allow us to actually capture temperature fluctuations in the air, in the environment, to generate power. So you actually don't even need an obvious heat source. You can actually put this thing outside and the temperature variations from the day and the night are enough to generate power. And again, we want to use this for IoT and sensors. So we call it the power station. It eliminates charging. It's practically always on and with zero maintenance. It enables all sorts of different sensor and beacon platforms. Going back to the applications I mentioned before for smart ag, IoT, smart cities, that kind of thing. Again, this type of technology only came about from kind of the hard grind that we were in for the development of the watch. And as soon as we moved from this kind of narrow thinking from the lab where we were just focused on the material and just the small little component and really thinking about the entire system, the holistic picture, that's when we really kind of became a company. As I mentioned, we actually got inbound interest for the first time. People are coming to us rather than the other way around. So our technology has a solution for many different types of partners. We're really focused on wearables and IoT. We want to go in beyond just the watch or this funny looking hat. We want to go into smart cities, smart agriculture, smart factories where you wanted to deploy millions of sensors, but you're not going to replace a million batteries. We already have made some headway into those markets with some of our beacons and HVAC sensors. And again, it all came just to kind of summarize and wrap it up. It all came from the idea that you had to provide a solution to your customer. You had to find what their pain point is and solve it for them. And you couldn't just, you know, when we again, when we were starting off, we thought we could go into so many different applications. We could do so many different things with this, just one little component material. And it was only until we realized that we had to build a full solution that people began to become interested in what we were doing. So I thank you for your attention. And I hope you're enjoying Slush.