 Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. My name is Matt Cannon and I'm pleased to welcome you to the Tomcat Center winter innovation showcase. If you haven't attended one of these events before we feature startup companies that have originated at Stanford and that we have supported at the Tomcat Center through our innovation transfer program. We'll hear from the CEOs of three companies today and as you can you can tell from the announcement of the event they're they're working in very different industries. But they share a common thread in that they are all building businesses that have the potential to have a significant impact on energy and sustainability. That's a common thread for for all of the teams that we have supported at the Tomcat Center over the years and I should take this opportunity to say that the innovation transfer program is just about 10 years old. We were just talking beforehand about having a birthday celebration, perhaps sometime this year. And in that period, we've supported just about 100 teams. There are about 75 active companies that have come out of the work for those teams. In addition to six acquisitions and a few mergers. Today, we're going to hear from the CEOs of, oh yes and and Donica has a link to our website where you can learn about any of the other ventures that have come through our program. So today we're going to hear from the CEOs of companies working in transportation and heating and cooling and in electronic repairs. Our goal is pretty simple. We're just here to hear their story to learn more about the companies and be inspired and to allow you an opportunity to connect with them if you see any opportunities to work together or to invest. So what we'll do is we'll hear from from each person about 10 minute presentation, and then there will be about five minutes for Q&A after that. If you have a question you would like asked that that comes to mind during the presentation, please submit that through the Q&A feature. I will do my best to accommodate questions, but usually there are questions that we don't get a chance to get to. However, the speaker can follow up with you individually afterwards. And we encourage you to reach out to us at the Tomcat if you would like help in connecting with any of the speakers today. We encourage you to join the LinkedIn Tomcat networking group where many of the of the ventures that we've supported over the years can be linked to. Okay, so we'll start today with David Manasabas-Jono, who is the CEO of AeroMutable. AeroMutable is developing flow control technology to dynamically modify the aerodynamic behavior of heavy trucks to improve their efficiency. One fun fact to sort of kick off the presentation by David, heavy trucks in the US annually log about 300 billion vehicle miles driven. So with that, David, I will turn it over to you. Thank you. So my name is David Manasabas-Jono, and I am the co-founder and CEO of AeroMutable. At AeroMutable, we're bringing aerospace technology into the trucking industry and their initial products and device that attaches to the back of a semi, and it's able to provide three times the fuel savings than any of our competitors because we have an active system. The key to our technology is that we dynamically optimize the vehicle performance based on real-world conditions. In the US, the trucking industry moves around 80% of the commercial and consumer goods. And to do this, it actually goes over the road for over 448 billion miles per year. Through this process, the trucking industry is responsible for using around 30% of the total US fuel, which translates to emitting 654 million tons of CO2. When the modern semi-truck was introduced, particular emphasis was placed on having a big engine to make sure that it can carry really heavy loads. A significantly spacious cabin to make sure the drivers can sit there for 10, 11 hours every day. A big trailer to make sure that many goods can fit in there and that they can be carried from point A and from point B, and a flatback to make it easy and efficient to load and unload. But nobody really thought about their dynamic efficiency at the time, and over 65% of the total energy used by these vehicles on highway speeds goes towards their dynamic drag. And that flatback that was so useful for loading and unloading, well, unfortunately, it actually creates an aerodynamic nightmare. It has the propensity to create a turbulent wake, which causes a low pressure, and it takes a lot of energy out of the system through drag, making it one of the lead contributors to drag for those vehicles. They're immutable. We are developing a device that attaches to that very back of the semi, and in a real trucking road is able to provide up to 16% of fuel savings. Our patent vending technology leverages our deep understanding of ground vehicle aerodynamics with our systems ability to measure its surroundings such that we can modify the aerodynamic profile of the vehicle and improve its performance. The way how we do it is by creating virtual surfaces made of air that are able to actually streamline the vehicle. And through this vehicle streamlining, we're able to improve the fuel efficiency by containing the wake, stabilizing it and increasing the pressure on the inside of this wake. In that way, being able to decrease the amount of drag that's being generated and decrease the amount of energy needing to move this vehicle from point A to point B with all the goods that we want. In the US, there's around 2.8 million long-haul tractor trailers in operation. And from those 2.2 million of those are the ones that have a square flatback, which is the platform for which we've been developing our device. And this gives us a $15 billion market in direct sales for this product alone. After spending a lot of time and continually doing customer discovery, we've talked to hundreds of people on the trucking industry. Everywhere from trucking companies, trucking associations, trucking tech companies, suppliers, OEMs, drivers, operation managers, maintenance managers, company owners. Really you name it and we've talked to somebody with that title within the trucking industry. And after really looking at all this data, the conversations that we've had, the questions, the pain points, we've realized that our beachhead market is a $5 billion life, composed of the refrigerated tractor trailers. And one of the reasons is because they have a ratio closer to one to one between tractor and trailers, which make them especially interesting for us, since we will be able to give our customer the value that's being created for every mile that their vehicles are driving. In this space, there's a few other products that are competing for becoming the industry standards, starting with the trailer tail, the top kit, and the bracket tail. But looking at them side by side with our device, you can see that we can provide three times more fuel efficiency that are nearest compared. In addition to that, our system has a low operational impact, since it does not force the driver to do anything outside of what they ordinarily do by opening and closing doors. In addition to that, our system is able to provide true stability improvement, because we are a dynamic system that actively senses what's happening around the vehicle. It uses their injection to control what's going on. And in addition to improving fuel efficiency, it also increases its stability and safety. By decreasing fuel efficiency, our technology focuses in decreasing carbon emissions in addition to improving profitability. And by looking at what will be the impact of this on the environment, looking worldwide on full adoption today, we would be able to save 400 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent. But taking a closer look to something closer to home, if you may. In one year in California, just looking at a 10% market adoption, our technology is able to reduce the carbon emissions compared to the equivalent of removing 66,000 gasoline power vehicles. From the energy perspective, our technology is saving enough energy to power almost 39,000 American homes every year. And with this 10% adoption in California, once we reach that milestone, our technology will decrease the amount of carbon emissions that are equivalent with carbon sequestration by 364,000 acres of US forestry. To bring this technology and this product to market, we put together a great team, starting with my co-founder and myself. We both hold PhDs in engineering from Stanford University, as well as certificates in innovation and entrepreneurship from this time for graduate school business. In addition, we put together a technical advisory board with experience in trucking, business, entrepreneurship, as well as engineering that are helping us bring this product to market. To date, we've raised over $800,000 in non-diluted funding, as well as a 2.4 million venture capital round. We've been supported by both private as well as public institutions. And we are really working with the trucking industry to help them decrease their carbon footprint while increasing their profitability. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much, David. I'll start actually with just a question about how you got into this space in the first place. So how did you become aware of this technical challenge and then the business opportunity? Yeah, you know, it was a combination of events. The way I got involved into trucking and trucking or dynamics was through my PhD. When I started looking at different topics that I could study in depth in order to work towards my doctoral degree, I realized that I wanted to work on something that had impact and that was technically challenging. And aerodynamics of semi-trucks and heavy vehicles really met both of those standards. First off, because on the impact side, a lot of these vehicles, particularly the trailers, almost commoditized. So it always has the same shape. It always has the same length with small variations, of course. And this allowed me to be able to focus on improving its effectiveness and be able to create an impact that will continue to go through the entire industry rather than just focus on one particular model or one particular car. So on the technical side, with a background in mechanical engineering and aerospace, and with a lot for fluid dynamics, the idea of studying the fluid dynamics of heavy vehicles through the use of computational fluid dynamics was highly appealing. It seems it's a very challenging type of flow where it has a high Reynolds number, but a low Mach number. And in addition to that, having separation and having wake structures that are not easy to simulate really made it for a fun and challenging problem. And when I got to start working on that, that was really what I was looking for a nice challenge that had some impact and that will allow me to continue really challenging myself both academically as well as from the climate impact point of view. On the other side of your question that was the business, the business side. I started to get involved on the business side towards the end of my PhD when I realized what was the impact that modifying the air dynamic behavior semi trucks could have. And really conversations with members of the top get center with Brian, as well as being a part of the Stanford technology ventures program. Excel fellows at the time and doing igniting the graduate school business they all contributed towards helping me realize how to find that value proposition and select the potential customer segments to go after. Thank you. That's a great sound bite you're sort of a poster child for the entrepreneurial community in the heart tech space here at Stanford. So thanks for sharing that. There's a few questions on the business side from from the audience I'll get to those in in just a minute. But I wonder if you can tell us a little bit more about the device or the actual technology with sort of the footprint of it on the on the vehicle. And you mentioned that, you know, very little operational burden on the driver but maybe just tell us a little bit more how it works we can sort of understand, you know, when it's operating what what's happening. So we use something quite unique when it comes to the back of semi trucks. And it is an add on to the back of it. Effectively our product replaces the back doors of the vehicle. And within that back door packaging. It has all the brains and all the mechanics that it needs in order to be able to inject air in the four corners of the vehicle top bottom and the two sides. Our system is able to select, where does it need to introduce the air in order to better modify the air dynamic behavior of the truck by measuring its environment. In that way being able to not just modify the air dynamics but modify them specifically for that particular condition, where that vehicle finds itself, in order to improve the fuel efficiency not just at a particular cruise I think it's traditionally done when it comes to passive systems that just deploy, but it's able to continue to optimize its behavior through the entire operation so if there's wind. It's able to compensate for that if there's other cars passing it's able to stabilize the back. And if it finds itself in a position where it's just cruising down the road with very little interference. It will maintain a condition that will improve fuel efficiency through the entire drive. Yeah, this is a good segue I think to some of the business question so. So what do you see is the major barriers to to market entry and sort of what's your strategy for for overcoming those. One of the big barriers in trucking as a whole is the fact that this industry has been plagued with half baked solutions to help them improve their bottom line. Anywhere from magnets on your fuel line to different kind of magical oils to make your truck go faster. There's a different level of accepticism from the trucking industry to adopting new technologies, particularly technologies that use ideas that have not been working that industry before. And one of the ways have we been working towards overcoming those barriers is really working with the trucking industry. We're members of the California Trucking Association. We've worked with multiple fleets around California to really build that trust. Be able to work with them during our development such that they can see what we're doing, how we are making progress, what are we focusing our efforts on and really taking their input when it comes to user friendliness when it comes to features on the product. As well as when it comes to looking at what is important for them. And one of the ways how we plan to enter the market, as we don't have a product out there yet is through pilots. So working directly with trucking fleet so they can try it they can see what it does for their operation. And then after they tried it, they can start to purchase it and that way it's almost risk free approach for them to be able to take a look. And then be able to see what it actually means for their operation because for many of this trucking companies, the values that you get from wind tunnel tests or from track tests. They're appealing but they don't really tell them what's going to happen to their own operation so we want to really cross that that chasm and be able to show them what it means for their operation so they can really extract all the values that technology is bringing to their operation. So it primarily will be sort of retrofits to existing trucks or this will be incorporated into new vehicles that a company is buying. So at the very first stage of our rollout to market we expected to be an add on system that will retrofect into existing trailers. So we plan to follow a similar path to what skirts have done. And just to make it short, the idea is that skirts used to be a retrofit that leads will get because of legislation at some point. After that leads will start requesting that directly from the dealerships of the dealership will buy third party skirts to put them on, and then the OEMs will start just build them in 1000 selling the trailers with it. So that we plan to follow start by creating that demand from the fleets, be able to give them the parts that they need create a service network so they can make sure that everything continues to operate appropriately through the life of the device. And at the same time start building relationships with OEMs. So, at some point, our device will come standard on the trailer. And last question the last 30 seconds or so here. What are you looking for in terms of talent or partnerships or investment etc. Yeah, you know, right now we are continuing to hire new people we're actively looking for in their dynamics engineer to come and join me to continue developing this technology. In addition to that we are looking for partnerships. Like I said we like to work closely with our customers. So being able to continue building that database of customers people who are interested in new technology forward thinking leads that can see themselves being one of the first companies that are going to showcase this technology. We're always looking for for those partnerships as well as for the talent to help us continue bringing this technology to market. Well, David thanks thanks so much for the deep dive into the exciting technology and really exciting business opportunity so thanks for for joining us today. Thank you. Okay, and I so this will be important later so I'll just point out so our mutable is in San Diego. Now we are, we are moving up the coast to a company headquartered in San Francisco. And our next speaker is Phil Krenner, he is the CEO and founder of arch arch offers a software for HVAC profession professionals to really help automate the creation of system designs and proposals, turning leads into increased conversion rates. And just as a is a fun fact about HVAC and I'm sure we'll hear more statistics, but about half of the energy in homes in the US is used for heating and cooling so Phil thanks for for joining us today. Awesome yeah thank you so much Matt and wow David really really cool what you're building so now we're going from a deep tack to low tack here. But yeah let's dive right into it so so most of your homes are still heated and with oil and gas furnaces which are already see terrible for the environment. In fact, you know residential homes are responsible for 18% of all carbon emissions in the US. You know, however there's this technology out there called heat pumps and heat pumps are three to five times as efficient as oil and gas furnaces are fully electrical way lower carbon emissions and yet they're not very widespread they're in less than about 15% of all of the residential homes. The cool thing is, you know, a year ago when or even two years ago when I was talking to people about heat pumps everyone's like hey I don't know what this technology is. Since the IRA, I feel like everyone's talking about heat pumps maybe it's just me, but it seems like this this technology has been really taking off and another fun fact here. Heat pumps were invented before the Civil War in the US so they're actually quite quite an old technology and the more surprising it is why there are not more of those installed in the US. Um, yeah, my name is, is, is Phillip Kriner, and I'm co founder and CEO of Arch, proof about my background grew up in Germany in a small strawberry farm spent most of my life in robotic solar installation and built the largest solar power plant in the world in 2018 in Abu Dhabi, and then came to the US, the DMA and the masses of environmental science at Stanford love looking back on that time. And that's also when I learned about heat pumps in the class, what was it called understanding energy, and ever since have been poking around in that space and connected also with my co founder Sasha who's a software engineers third time founder. And together we, we launched Arch, and we're building the end to end platform for a trick installers that helps them to become more efficient and provides also more transparency to the homeowners. So everything all around sustainable heating and cooling, but now I mentioned how great this technology is, and I want to develop it deeper and take a step back, you know, why, why is it not more widespread of the must be obvious reasons right. So there's more than three. There's also more than six there's like, we have a list of and that's ever growing than more than 40 issues. And we bucket it in both in two big buckets one is the homeowner side and one is the installer side on the homeowner side. The heat pumps are way more expensive. They have their double as expensive as the average gas furnace. And that combined with a lot of uncertainty around the savings makes it virtually impossible for the most majority in the US to actually invest in those heat pumps. At the same time doesn't install a shortage, the average, or not the average but some of our customers a queue time so how long the homeowner actually has to wait for it. It's actually 13 weeks. We had a single homeowner who had a really good experience with swapping their their heating and cooling system and shifting gears going on the installer side there's also a bunch of issues. So let's say someone wants a new heating system they call the installer the install picks up, ask a few basic questions based on these questions. The visitor team is dispatched and visits the home takes around one to two hours. They take some measurements they go back. They spend another hour hour and a half all in on creating a rough system design creating a quote and sending it to the customer. So never they now spent around four to five hours. They have a sales conversion rate of around 30%, meaning 70% of the time actually wasted the time and even more important 70% of the time that didn't generate revenue. They have a lot of highly manual processes from inspecting the home to actually making the load calculations and these processes and lastly they're also exploited by manufacturers. I called carry the largest US based manufacturer of heat pumps. I told him look I'm starting this company. I want to order 2000 heat pumps next month what's my deal what deal can you give me and off the bed I got a 40% discount. It also shows us there's a lot of opportunity actually decrease the cost on the equipment side as well. And so, yeah, what is it more in more detail what we are building the arch installer platform has three main modules it's a design and engineering module the sales engine and the financing solutions. So let's start with the design and engineering. So in the first sub we're building basically this digital twin of a home. We're sourcing a bunch of different data sources. So based on the digital twin and based on the digital twin, we are estimating the heat load for the entire home but also for each individual room. Based on the digital twin we then optimum like size the entire atric system, optimal. So basically reducing the upfront cost by having like the smallest possible system and just as big as necessary. The sales engine engine the sales engine has two modules one it pre qualifies the customer so it qualifies gives them a lead score tells them hey hey this is actually a good customer you should focus on them. It automates the paperwork and it also tailors the messaging from the proposal to the individual homeowners needs. And lastly because he comes are more expensive in order to actually get more or give more access to more households in the US. We need also more financing solutions and more especially more competitive financing solutions. So we're going to integrate with banks, we're going to connect the homeowners via the installer with multiple different financing solutions. And again one level deeper so we're using a lot of opens first data it's all publicly available and use advanced analytics, and then the first step create this this model of the home it's not really like action 3d model. It's more a heat load floor plan so to say. So we give the installer in the first step, a really 360 degree view off the home without having been on site. Right, that's all done on their computer from the office. And in the next step, we're done, we're done then recommending the best possible system. So we integrate with the European system will check their inventory. And we then match the available or incoming inventory with the needs of the individual home and perfectly size the system. We then integrate with third party providers to do a cost benefit analysis and basically predict what benefits are for for the home owner. And in the last step, it's all about actually closing closing the deal with the with the homeowner and really getting them you know not to buy a gas furnace but decide for for a heat pump, considering all the debates out there, making it a very appealing proposal that is tailored to their needs. And hopefully they they close the installer can actually close the homeowner very quickly rather than spending hours and hours. And yeah a little bit where we're at. We are currently a team of five. We are growing your venture back company have some some amazing partners some of them are the among the largest climate tech investors in the world. And yeah and now we're expanding our team with a senior full stack software engineers so if you're an engineer and you want to fight climate change at scale. You can reach out and check out our website at get urge.com as well. We have a lot of tailwind from the the IRA so it's super exciting time to be in this market. We got super lucky. I didn't expect the IRA to be signed. We closed the week before the IRA so got got very lucky on that end and with that I'm happy to open it up to questions Matt. Thank you Phil. So, I'm going to start actually something that's that's just just bugging me so so why are heat pumps more expensive is there's sort of a simple reason it's all technology spend. So that it's many the technology so it's like the compressor the compressor is just way more expensive than any gas room gas rooms if you think but it's basically just burning like gas it's basically just the, the module that actually creates the flame so that the heat pump itself is just inherently exactly more expensive that being said we're seeing actually not necessarily that the manufacturing cost drops but the efficiency increases. So there's a new tumor compressor now coming out that even increases the, or supposedly increases the efficiency of a heat pump by another 20%. So, while the material doesn't necessarily drop the output of the heat pump will actually increase. And so we are going the right direction. So we don't want to make the direct comparison to solar because solar, the, the learning curve was extreme. And we really wanted to buy less than like a 10th of the price. I think over like eight years. That's not going to happen with heat pumps but we are going to see an even like even more efficiency. So to answer your question the other, the inherent material is more expensive. And at the same time the Biden administration put a lot of incentives in place for manufacturers to actually invest in the man in heat pumps and the manufacturing capacity. So we are going to see that they're the pricing are going to dawn and the volume off gas runners was was just always higher, but now it's it's changing. I think two weeks ago, rewiring America announced that more heat pumps are now sold than the gas runners is for the first time ever in the US. Okay. And then kind of diving into the technology a little bit more. So you mentioned it kind of starts with creating this digital twin of the of the home. What, so what data do you need to access in order to do that so that it's, you know, it enables you to do an effective design and and what portion of homes, can you get that data for or what proportion of your customer base can you easily get that data for. That's the key question right and that's where a lot of our intelligence comes in and like creativity and how, how are we getting those data insights you know some of those data sources are like the obvious ones. It's like, you know, like the Google Maps of the world the silos of the world, etc. And then you can also even get more creative. You can actually look at infrared heat loss data, and that's more and more available you can look at lighter data and not just like think about, you know, now you know how the shape of the home. You can actually derive way more from from the lighter data than than just the shape of a home. And so it's really like a lot about data hacking. How our team spends all the time on just like finding the different data sources and actually being very creative of gathering and getting these insights. And over time these feed into our models that then becomes smarter and actually identify okay with these different data points. This is what the outcome is this is what the digital twins that's what the heating loads are. Okay, it is quite a creative task. And the, so the idea is to build digital twins for just a huge number of homes and basically have a big database of that that that you can then leverage immediately when you're engaging a an HVAC installer or do you or do basically do they come to you telling you which homes or which neighborhoods they're, they're operating in. It would actually be the, the homeowner. So we are a white label integration into any installers website. So a homeowner would actually sign up and request a course at the type in their address, and they give them access to, if they have a utility account they give us access to utility account. And based on these information, we then start sourcing all types of information about the homeowner but also the home itself. And then the install basically triggers the process of actually conducting the analysis. So from the computer that would just be like Kate. And Matt needs requested a requested a proposal. So let's analyze this home let's see what data is available. That's when we are automatically sourcing tell the install hey this is the data that is available here's something we're missing so we might need to fill in the gaps. But as we are analyzing more homes, we are actually getting smarter and can actually fill more of the gaps with like, I mean it's a buzzword I know but it's actually artificial intelligence that starts filling the gaps over time. Okay, so you so you have to market to homeowners then to get them to sign on first is that the. So it's actually the so there's there's so much demand right now. So homeowners are going on the installers website. And the, the homeowner actually never notices that they're interacting with us. Okay, we're only interacting with the, with the installer. And so the install is just using our software tool to actually conduct the analysis. We always use that the parallel. We always use like Aurora solar, not the thing Tomcat company as a role model so we are basically Aurora solar for for heat pumps and in fact we are we are extremely close to the to salmon and Chris. Great. And what about competition in this space. What are your competitors and sort of how are you differentiated. And so a lot is popping up now. I think it's a lot of momentum in the space. I think there's even like other Stanford companies there. They're doing something similar. Yeah I mean honestly it's an exciting space it's it's kind of a white space the industry has been doing things for the same, like for the same processes for the last 20 years. You know the company I cool clock. They are a really good load calculation tool, but they use none of the intelligence so it's a very manual process so it's still the installer needs to plug in the information, the R values of the end of the relations of the home for example, and then cool clock allows you to do the load clock but not none of the software tools today are really using any of the intelligence in the market. We are seeing more to pop up and honestly I think it's exciting we need all hands on deck so the more he comes out there, the better. I think there's not not really a loser out there, as long as we all win. And then maybe it's sort of last question if you can kind of give us a sense of where you are in the deployment of the product. Yeah, so it's out in the field now we just launched it. We did like spend a lot of time just testing different models tested a lot of demos, and now just started field deployment. Fantastic. Phil, thanks a lot for for sharing the story with us it's really exciting. And we look forward to to seeing how how arts grows. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks. Okay, so our, our final for our final speaker, we are actually going to a new continent. So, Sarah Johnson is the founder and CEO of revivo. And revivo is a basically a marketplace and a and a funding platform for quality spare parts and accessories for electronics repairs in Kenya. Electronic waste just to just to kick things off before I turn it over to Sarah is the fastest growing global waste stream. Yeah, it's growing particularly rapidly in in the developing world so Sarah thanks for joining us today. Awesome. Yeah, excited to be here. Let me just pull up my presentation. So as was mentioned I'm I'm Sarah I'm the founder of revivo were a platform for repairs focusing on emerging markets. I think it's always good to talk a little bit before I jump in about my own story and how I how I got interested in this topic. So I've been based here in East Africa for about six years total now. And a lot of that time I was working in the off grid solar industry in the in the product side so I was leading the solar product team for a company called B box. And my team was developing electronics ranging from radios to televisions to smartphones basically the whole suite of appliances that you need in your house. And we were selling millions of them per year across across the African continent. And I loved that work I think a lot of those products you know can be life changing. But I also started to realize that there was a problem here. A lot of these products were getting pumped out or getting sold and increasing volumes. And they're often just isn't the right maintenance and repair ecosystem in place. The electronic sector is actually growing more quickly in Africa than anywhere else this is a growing problem here. Because it's growing so quickly. There's also some pretty significant environmental impacts that come from this. So, if we look just at greenhouse gas emissions, over 1.5% of global emissions come from producing consumer electronics. So just the production. And then you waste as was mentioned is also the fastest growing global we stream in the world here in Kenya only about 10% of you waste is actually properly handled. And the result is that has major negative impacts both on the environment and human health. And as the electronic sector grows here often the, the length of time that products stay alive is decreasing affordability is a major issue and so companies are trying to push the cost down down down. And the result unfortunately is that products are dying more and more quickly. So I became really interested in this and how we could build a stronger a stronger repair ecosystem that starts to tackle this. You know if you can double the life of a smartphone you've effectively cut its emissions per day of use and half similar with you waste so repairs and maintenance have a big, big powerful tool to dissolve this problem. I went to business school at Stanford I just graduated this June, and I spent a lot of my time there just exploring this problem. So we interviewed hundreds of repair shops close to 1000 customers that we're looking for repairs in this region, hundreds of stakeholders, not only in Africa but really across the world that are looking they're working in the repair and refurbishment space. And one of the things that we found is that there's actually huge demand for repairs. So there's about 50 million people, and yet there's 74 million electronics repairs that are at least attempted every year. So there's a big demand to get products repaired. And a lot of this is driven by affordability. If I have a smartphone, if I have to buy a new one that's the equivalent to a month's income for the average Kenyan, getting it repaired is about 10% of that. So there's a big economic drivers to try to get repairs, and yet 94% of people said they face challenges in getting repairs. So big demand for this powerful tool, really painful process like pretty much universally across the board for everyone involved. The vast majority of these repairs are done by tiny repair shops like Fred's communications here that are run by one or two repair technicians, they're semi formal or informal, maybe do five to 20, 20 repairs per day. And we really believe at Revevo that the way to solve this sort of repair challenge and make repairs accessible is by helping all of these small businesses to grow and thrive. And by solving their biggest challenge. The biggest challenge of these small repair shops is accessing spare parts. So if I'm Fred over here and somebody comes to me with a Huawei Y3 phone, it's not charging. I need to buy a new charging port. I somehow have to find that spare parts among hundreds of thousands of skews hundreds of thousands of different parts, hundreds of vendors, super variable price, super variable quality. The repair shops really struggle to find the parts they need to actually be able to repair devices. Price is a big challenge, you know, some vendors charge up to 50% more than others. Quality is a major issue. And also they struggle to maintain the working capital to actually be able to keep basic parts of their shops so that when customers come to them they can, they can solve the problem relatively quickly. And that solves these challenges where a B2B marketplace for electronics, spare parts, refurbished devices, as well as electronics repair tools and accessories. So basically everything that our repair shop might need to buy. We provide aggregated products. So it's easy to go on our site and see products across hundreds of vendors, well, 10 vendors now eventually hundreds of vendors. We also offer the best pricing so they can be sure they're getting the best price guaranteed quality because we vet all of our vendors and they all have to sign up to a quality guarantee where if there's an issue they have to reimburse the client, which is not the norm at the moment. And we also offer embedded financing through the site. We launched about seven months ago when I graduated, and we're already seeing pretty significant traction. So we've sold actually now we're almost up to about to cross the 30,000 product mark through our site. We have 10 suppliers on boarded with a little over 3500 product listings. And to sort of show the value we add on the supplier side we've had 100% retention there. Over 400 active customers purchasing parts through our site, and we're growing about 40% every month so growing growing pretty rapidly. Our traction is also reflected in in the experience of our customers I think it's important to come back to. So one of the repair shops we work with said I love review Kenya because of quality spares affordable prices and the latest loan feature. I've achieved a lot because my clients are happy and refer others to come to us. It's also an important moment globally for for sort of repair and refurbishment industry there's increasing attention being paid to it. I will say particularly outside of the US. There's a number of successful repair and refurbishment companies that have really popped up recently shown the sector's potential, everything from back market you break I fix I fix it. So I think it's a great opportunity to operate in the States and increasing number of countries are passing extended producer responsibility and right to repair laws. Europe is really leading the way with a lot of these but India's also passed some pretty innovative laws, and Kenya actually is, I think imminently going to pass some extended producer responsibility laws and you know the solar sector I used to work in is already getting together and thinking a lot harder about the waste sector. I think we sort of extend extend the life of devices I think this is a really exciting time. And also, you know I mentioned affordability is a big, a big driver for repairs here in Kenya, but even outside of Kenya. You know the rate of innovation for a lot of standard electronics is slowing down and we're starting to see that drive increasing increasing demand for for refurbishment and repair is the the allure of the the next fancy iPhone is slightly less than it used to be. This sector represents a huge opportunity from a from a financial standpoint. So in Kenya alone, the electronics repair and refurbishment market is about a billion dollars. And that's, you know, for a relatively small country and then if you if you look across Africa is close to 26 billion. And that number is only going to grow as as the electronic sector continues to grow on the continent. It's growing growing quite rapidly. I have an awesome team all based here in Nairobi. So I talked a little bit about my background I also have my, both my bachelors and my MBA from Stanford. Urbanis is our head of operations he's got lots of multinational sort of large scale logistics and operations experience. And then Rita and Karen are our two associates, both young but wickedly smart and and super hardworking so amazing team a lot of fun to work with. Yeah, that's that's us. I will say a couple things about ways I'd love to connect very quickly. And so we are fundraising at the moment, we're raising a pre seeds happy to connect to anybody on that. And we're also still looking for an intern this summer through Tom Katz. So if anyone loves the idea of coming to Nairobi, it's a beautiful city, any weekend you can go to the beach, go hike a mountain, go on a safari reach out I'd love to chat with you about about interning with us. Fantastic thank you Sarah. This is really impressive, particularly sees such such rapid growth. Actually I want to start this off it's a 40% growth. We, you know what does that mean for sort of growing your team and growing your business. What are your plans for the next year or so. Yeah, so there's there's a couple pieces there part of it. Our biggest bottleneck right now is that we're still our MVP was in Shopify. And we're in the process right now of transitioning out of Shopify and Shopify just has like major technical constraints on how quickly we can grow it means a lot of our, a lot of our business is still in in spreadsheets. Priority priority number one and the Tom Katz grants actually has helped us develop our new website that's going to allow for a little bit more automation in a couple, a couple key places. And then we are as soon as we as soon as we close this round we've got a number of hires that we're looking to make in both the product and the operation space, in particular going to be looking for an awesome awesome product manager to come come join our team. And so I can kind of understand the, the, the full supply chain here so the suppliers who list their products on your site. Where are they sourcing all of those, those parts from. Yeah, so there's there's sort of three, three groups of suppliers. So the biggest at the moment are importers who are importing third party aftermarket parts, mostly from China, most of those are produced there. Also just a lot of the devices that are sold here are by Chinese brands are produced in China. So that's where where a lot of parts come from. So that's the first bucket of suppliers. The second one we work with e-waste recyclers to actually refurbish parts from old devices that are that are given to them for recycling but still have good quality parts. So we we harvest and then refurbish parts from them and resell those and then sort of the newest category which we're in the process of developing some partnerships with is is the original device manufacturers. So we're looking at a couple sectors actually partner with them. And not only is that like a great, I think a great source of parts, but also we're working on building out in our platform or resources for the repair shops we work with so things like repair guides information on how to like do key parts repairs how to build a strong repair business. So we're launching a sort of blog around that next week, but by partnering with the device manufacturers we can also get repair guides from them on to the site as well and start building up that that section of the site. And have you found it easy to get traction with the with the manufacturers in the sense that at some level I guess this is maybe affecting the business of new sales for them, but but making their customers happier so so how does that. Yeah, so we're starting with, I don't know, I guess you call it like the easier sector so a lot of the companies are talking to you right now or in the solar space so the companies like the one I used to work with that have a sort of inbuilt commitment to sustainability are thinking a lot about the waste right now and so our proof of concept is is going to be sort of in that in that space probably their appliances so like radios and TVs and things like that produced produced by them. And I do think that the you know the phone companies and things like that are going to be more challenging. The market here is interesting and that there's a lot because there's a lot more demand for repairs is actually a big factor in people's purchasing decisions. So there's research that shows I'm much more likely to purchase an electronic if I know that I'm going to be able to get it repaired. The incentives for for some of the original manufacturers are a little different and they do recognize that they know that repairability is is important. They focus you know when they launch new products much more on warranty much more on things like that than they would in the US. So I think the incentives might be aligned, but it will I think be a bigger cell which is why we're sort of starting with with some of the easier sectors. And this is probably too too early to really project ahead too much but I mean are you thinking ultimately of sort of integrating. And, you know, basically being the supplier and the platform that connects parts to to repair shops and maybe even integrating on the recycling end as well I mean is that sort of a vision ultimately for for review. Yeah, definitely we want to sort of be an end to end platform for these devices kind of throughout their life cycle right so I think there will be a big opportunity to collect products back. Yeah, our same channels refurbish them to potentially start sourcing certain parts ourselves. And then some of the other spaces we're looking at, you know another big pain point in the ecosystem is finding a good repair shop. We're going to know a lot about our repair shop so it might be able to be a connector for customers and their pair shops, and then also use those shops as a way to offer things like device insurance that makes makes repairs more affordable and protect potentially like warranty management itself once we partner with some of the device manufacturers. We could actually do in warranty in warranty repairs. Since those aren't accessible to the vast majority of people unless you're unless you're in you know Nairobi or a big city. And just a little bit about that connecting with the repair shop so I know you had this history in Africa but but when you were, you know sort of doing the customer discovery, how did you, how did you find and connect with with all of these, you know, one and two person repair shops. So it was a mix of some Facebook, honestly, like these these are guys that are just like super active on Facebook, they have lots of technician communities. And so we found some people that way we got up in early and early MVP and started getting some early customers so we could dive into their story with and then I also spent, you know, a few months back out here in Kenya and we would just, you know, for the first month every day, me and Rita one of our teammates would get into a car we'd kind of like drive an hour or two outside Nairobi and just stop and talk to repair shops all along the road. And then sort of come back so it's a lot of just like on the ground go out and sort of talk to people. They're actually everywhere. That's the good thing like every single town here has at least one repair shops all you kind of used to do is just like drive and you're literally going to get a run into some of them. Well thank you I should point out to everyone that I guess it's about four o'clock in the in the morning now for for Sarah so we really appreciate you taking the time to be with us and I want to thank David and Phil again as well for for sharing this event with us. The outset, you know, one of the goals here is to make connections so so please join the the LinkedIn Tomcat network group. And if you want to follow up specifically with with David or Phil or Sarah, please connect with them and if we can help you in any way. Just let us know so thanks so much and we look forward to seeing everyone again at the next innovation showcase.