 For those of you who have been to a showcase before, welcome back, thank you. If you haven't, if this is your first one, what we do is we feature three teams who are current or past awardees of our Innovation Transfer Grants. So these are innovators working to commercialize and implement inventions and business model innovations and products that impact sustainability and energy. And we're always fortunate to have a really interesting mix of different products addressing different problems today is no exception. We have innovators who are working in the built world that most of us work and live in and then all the way to innovators who are working in the sort of barren, decorated landscapes in the natural world as well. So before we get started, let me just say that the main goal is to give these teams a chance to tell you about their company or their product, where they are, where they're going, what they might like in terms of help or partnership to inspire you, to give you examples of teams that are tackling really important problems and also for them to make connections as much as possible. So to that end, we do have a LinkedIn group that all of our speakers are part of, that's a great way, Tomcat LinkedIn group is a great way to connect with them and we will post that a little bit later in the showcase. Before I turn it over to our teams, I wanna make two really quick Tomcat specific announcements. The first is that we are launching a new program, just this fall quarter called Tomcat Solutions. This is a program that's gonna run in parallel to, so in addition to our innovation transfer program, basically what it is, it's a program where we will support teams through up to three phases of development, so extensive long-term support for teams who are working on developing solutions to specific problem areas and the two big problem areas that we've highlighted this year are tropical deforestation and the abatement of greenhouse gases specifically in the developing world. We're really excited about this program and the potential to sort of direct some of the innovation talent towards these problem areas. The proposals for phase one will open in December. Please reach out to us, look at Connect with our website to find out more information and to synergize with that, we are continuing, we're running a new season of our tackling global challenges series. This will be a series of Zoom events where we engage outside experts to provide insight into a particular problem area and opportunities to develop new solutions. So last year we had plastics as the theme this year to synergize with Tomcat Solutions. We're focusing this series on tropical deforestation. We've already lined up some really phenomenal speakers to provide some insight into that problem. So with that, I'm going to begin the main event here. I'll just do really quick introductions to give our speakers for the maximum time to tell us about their companies. The first team we're gonna hear from is a company called Bundle. This is Edison Ding and Jana Calucci. Bundle, the sort of tagline is a one-stop shop for building materials procurement. So builders save time and money and access health and sustainability information. This is obviously a company that's addressing a big problem in the construction industry. The construction industry accounts for, accounted for about 38% of CO2 emissions globally in 2019. So it's a huge footprint. As you'll hear from Bundle, there's incredible opportunities to improve efficiency reduced waste and have a correspondingly big impact. So Jana and Edison, thank you for joining us. Great, thanks for having us, exciting to be here. All right, well, hello everyone and thank you so much for attending today. We're excited to tell you more about Bundle, our one-stop shop for building materials procurement. I'm Jana Calucci and I'm our CEO and co-founder. To give you a little bit more background about myself before we get started, I graduated from Stanford GSB in June, but before that worked in designing construction for five years in New York. And during that time, one of my projects was to build my company's headquarters, which was really supposed to be a showcase of healthy, sustainable, innovative building. And while the project was ultimately a success, it really opened my eyes to how fragmented and antiquated the construction industry is. Specifically, I saw that the way that we buy materials greatly limits innovation. And I decided to use business school as a time to step up the construction stack to try to address these systemic problems and ultimately unlock healthier, more sustainable and more innovative building. Hi everyone, my name is Edison and prior to pursuing my MBA at Stanford, I spent about four years in New York working in design and construction as an architect. I led designs for larger scale commercial projects, such as the New Uber headquarters in Mission Bay and an 800 foot tall tower as part of a mixed use project called Hudson site in Detroit. The process of translating architectural designs to real buildings showed me how much friction and how many inefficiencies there are in the construction process, starting from getting the right building materials on the job site. With Bundle, our goal is to transform healthy construction industry buys, sells and manages materials and improve the way that we build. We're excited to share our vision here with you today. Awesome, so what might surprise you is that 98% of construction projects finish over time and over budget. And the current system of building materials procurement is a major contributing factor, costing builders and owners up to $250 billion annually. To dig into this a little bit more deeply, on every single project builders spend much of their day researching products, placing orders and coordinating delivery, which can mean calling tens to hundreds of vendors to get current pricing, lead times and availability for any of the products that they wanna order. And as you may be privy to, COVID has only made lead times and pricing more unpredictable with all of these supply chains. So let's take one of our pilot builders as an example. Brian, who's one of our current customers should be building on the job site, but instead he needs to manage figuring out pricing and lead times for products. He has to manage payments for all of the products that he's ordering. And he also has to put out fires when products unexpectedly don't arrive on time. He may even lose business because projects become delayed or are so far over budget that people don't wanna work with him anymore. Should there be green or healthy building requirements? Brian dreads this even more because there's more research, more paperwork and probably more cost involved. However, with Bundle, Brian can really focus on building. Bundle is the first procurement platform that enables builders and suppliers to buy, sell and manage construction materials from quote to delivery powered by a two-sided marketplace and project management tools. With Bundle, builders like Brian get access to real-time pricing and lead times all in one place. And they get that information through a few clicks rather than hundreds of calls and emails. On the other side of the marketplace, suppliers benefit from a digitized sales process, custom e-commerce storefronts and access to data to better predict demand. On Bundle, Brian simply uploads a product order form and our system optimizes for price, lead time, sustainability metrics or other project goals. Brian can even see price trends for specific products over time, informing him if he should buy now or wait for a better price or lead time. Brian can then check out through Bundle, only paying one vendor rather than dealing with the payment terms of many different suppliers. And on Brian's first project with Bundle, he saved 8% on his project costs and access up-to-date lead time information for almost all of them. Brian's also able to view project information, orders and tracking status all on a personalized dashboard. Should there be any delays on the project, he has real-time updates rather than finding out about a problem when a product doesn't show up or the wrong product gets delivered to the project site. This also reduces the amount of construction waste and excess carbon footprint that results from misordered or reordered products. On the supplier side, so the other side of the marketplace, manufacturers and distributors are able to pre-populate product information even before an order comes in, allowing them to speed up and simplify the bidding process overall. Bundle's smart quoting tool enables easy communication between suppliers and builders, which really supports existing relationships but simplifies all of the communication that typically happens. With Bundle, we think of environmental impact through three different buckets. First and foremost, Bundle enables greater transparency throughout the product procurement process which helps builders avoid waste generation through product misorders, overorders and delivery delays. Leveraging industry research about carbon emissions on construction sites and specifically emissions resulting from on-site construction, we predict that Bundle can eliminate at least 25% of product order errors. This results in saving an estimated 9 million metric tons of CO2 each year worldwide and we expect that this could increase from there. Secondly, as an end-to-end procurement solution, integration with existing healthy and sustainable material databases is very top of mind. For suppliers, this gives environmentally friendly products a competitive advantage through increased exposure and marketability to a broad network of customers and maybe even more importantly. And the other side for builders, if all products are purchased through one consolidated platform, sustainability attributes and total project carbon become much easier to calculate. This is something I've experienced firsthand and really hoped that there was a solution for. And lastly, we have longer-term dreams of a building materials resale market. Even if products are ordered incorrectly even through Bundle, Bundle's marketplace infrastructure allows for easy resale of materials rather than scrapping them into a landfill or sending them all the way back to a supplier. So shifting gears a little bit, looking at traction, we're currently underway with four builder pilots in three geographic regions as well as pilots with three national manufacturers. For these pilots, we've evaluated more than $2 million worth of building products and expect our first transactions through the platform in the coming weeks. Through this process, we've also engaged with over 300 product distributors which has built up our network to quickly get the information we need even if it isn't pre-populated on Bundle. Probably Bundle taps into the $1.3 trillion U.S. construction market. Across the country, most construction is done by the 730,000 small and medium construction companies who don't have robust procurement teams or purchasing power. And as a result, our prime users for Bundle. With the 700K average annual product spent per builder, assuming a 5% market penetration and Bundle's 8-10% take rate, Bundle can make at least $2.6 billion in annual revenue. Within the small, medium business segment, we believe that the modular market provides Bundle key strategic entry point. Primarily compared to traditional subcontractors, modular builders need to manage even more product orders because they take on the roles of many subcontractors under one roof. Through creating buildings and factories, they're essentially a super subcontractor and experience procurement pain points at an even larger scale. Modular builders also tend to seek out technology, making them key early adopters in comparison to other more technology-averse players in the industry. Our product easily serves both modular builders and more traditional builders, allowing for a seamless transition to the broader market in the near future. Our go-to-market strategy continues to leverage strategic players, such as owner operators managing large real estate portfolios and top-down general contractor engagement. In the coming months, we expect customer acquisition to occur through partnerships, warm connections, and highly concentrated industry groups for both builders and suppliers. In terms of our business model, it's twofold. Builders pay a transaction fee when they order products, which is folded into the quoted prices they see on the platform. Suppliers pay SaaS fees for the core platform and additional subscription fees for access to business intelligence and data analytics features. A little bit about our competitors, Bundle's focus is not just on the builders, but we also focus on providing tools to suppliers. Some startups, like Reno Run or Curry, focus on last-minute, last-mile delivery, whereas Bundle is focusing on stepping up the construction stack to address the root cause of procurement problems before they happen. There are a few other product marketplaces like Agora or Join, but they focus primarily on builder-focused features and project management tools. Big box retailers, such as Home Depot, can be fast, but they can be limited in variety because they own their inventory and need to leverage economies of scale. And lastly, we've started to see supplier-focused e-commerce solutions in other industries, which we're bringing to construction as a way to get real-time supplier data we need in our marketplace. Currently, we're raising our precede round to grow our engineering team, develop the next version of our product and move forward with the next stages of our pilots. We're also taking part in both Stardex and Ondec, which provide us with additional mentors, educational content, and hiring and fundraising support. So in addition to our fundraise, we're working hard on building up our supplier pipeline, talking to leaders of relevant industry groups and also hiring a front-end engineer. We'd love to talk if you have any of these connections. So during a time when supply chains are more fragile than ever and we need solutions to minimize waste and reduce our carbon footprint, Ondol can provide an answer. Thank you and we look forward to your questions. Great, thank you, Jenna and Edison for a really interesting presentation. Congratulations on the early traction you're getting. I think I'm gonna start with a question from the audience. So given the long tail on building supplies, how will you populate your supplier list sufficiently to really be seen as the one-stop shop for procurement management? Yeah, really great question. Happy to take that one. So right now the way that we're essentially managing that process is twofold. So eventually we wanna get to the point where we have all of this data pre-populated on Bundle which really expedites any sort of speed or any sort of pricing information lead time, any of that straight into the order forms and into the platform on the builder side. But in addition to doing that with the manufacturer information that we have to date, we essentially have created a digitized bidding process of sorts that really mimics the more manual process that exists in the industry today. And so that allows us to basically still deliver really high quality value and output to those initial builders that we have without having all of that information already built up in our system. So we've actually slowed down the buildup of our builder pipeline right now really to make sure that we're giving them exactly what they need delivering high value services again and until we get to that point where we have critical mass on the supplier side. Great, thank you. And maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on the incentives from the supplier's point of view for working with you, particularly some of the early adopters here. Yeah, definitely happy to talk a little bit about that. So one initial kind of interesting strategic entry point we're taking, which Edison talked a little bit about is into this modular market or offsite construction. And what basically happens with that is it's people building buildings and factories as opposed to on a construction site. And what's nice about this, there's a variety of different reasons as we mentioned why we're partnering with them but what's great about them is that in terms of this supply chain you're really selling from manufacturer into a factory. And so you don't need as many of the middlemen typically wholesalers, distributors in between that process. So very interesting kind of initial go-to-market strategy. Beyond that, we do eventually see ourselves competing with distributors and wholesalers in the sense that we're really a tech-enabled distributor in a lot of ways. But what incentivizes suppliers to work with us is we can essentially simplify a lot of that process using tech, save some margin for them and really cut out all these different steps that really complicate the communication process through all those different pieces. And are you going after everything required for building a new unit or is there sort of a subset of the supplies that are particularly well-suited to this type of platform? Yeah, definitely. We're very focused at least initially on what we think of as mid-construction cycle products which are also of most interest to a lot of these modular builders. If you picture a typical building being built in a factory, they typically have some IP in the core and shell of the building, but one will provide a lot of variety with the interior finished products or exterior finished products. So flooring, windows, doors, countertops, those sorts of things. Well, that's still a very long list of SKUs. It's allowed us to really narrow in to some of those product categories, which also happened to be the product categories that have the most opacity in terms of pricing and lead time information. Essentially the typical process is that anytime you want information about any of those products at a commercial level, kind of above the do-it-yourself type market, you need to essentially put out a bid or go out to bid that then goes through a couple of people to eventually bring you back the price and lead time. And so we're really trying to simplify that process. And with respect to the sustainability, so how are you gonna vet certain suppliers claiming certain green credentials for their products versus another? How is the quality control for that implemented? Yeah, great question. So really leveraging the resources that exist in the market. So actually one of the tools that I built prior to coming to business school is a platform called Mindful Materials, which is a healthy and sustainable product database open to the public, really made to simplify the vetting process that goes into finding the healthiest, most sustainable products and being able to easily compare those. They've continued to advance even since my time there in terms of putting more numbers and embodied carbon and just factors even beyond health and sustainability standards and attributes. And that as well as some other platforms like EC3, which is very focused on carbon, have APIs that we easily tap into and so can show you the contrast between products that may not have any of that data with the products that are really leading in the industry. Okay, maybe I'll end with a somewhat personal question. So you both came from construction and building backgrounds. Did you find each other right away at GSB or how did you connect to Launch Bundle? So Jen and I actually serendipitously met through a class called Startup Garage over in the business school where we found out that we came from similar backgrounds and had a shared passion for improving the industry, both stemming from our firsthand frustrations and working on certain types of projects. So that was earlier this year. We really liked working with each other and we're both passionate about the idea. So we've been full steam ahead ever since. Fantastic, thank you. So there are a number of other questions in the Q&A. I'll let you take those up separately and offline. And thanks again for being here. Thank you. Thank you. All right, so now we're going to switch gears quite dramatically from construction to the barren landscapes. So our next speaker is Neal Spachman from Regenerative Resources. The tagline here is rejuvenating degraded landscapes and turning them into ecosystems that attract biodiversity and financial wealth for rural communities. Neal has a lot of direct experience working in these landscapes and some very unforgiving climates. A surprising fact to sort of set the stage for his presentation or this is a depressing fact. Nearly 30 billion tons of fertile soil is lost every year over the course of this one-hour talk that means 3 million tons of fertile soil will be lost. So Neal with that backdrop, we're excited to hear about Regenerative Resources. Hey, thanks very much. Hey folks, I'm Neal Spachman. I was an MSX student at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, graduated in 19 and where I essentially incubated what is now Regenerative Resources. And we do indeed seek after the most degraded landscapes on the planet, which we'll get into. But I wanna start with two really important quotes. Hey Neal, could you try to pop it to the full screen view? Thank you. How's that? Not quite. And now? That's better if you just get rid of this stuff on the right. I don't know if I can get rid of this stuff on the right at the moment. But here we go. There you go. Okay, thanks, sorry. No, thank you, Matt. First off, there's no path to delivering climate mitigation without investing in nature. We do consider ourselves an ecosystem services company or a nature-based solutions company. The second quote uses a term that most people have never heard, Halifites are crops that grow in seawater of which there are 800 that have commercial viability, almost none of which have been bred or commercialized in any sense of the word as we would think of with typical crops. And this is a landscape that we intend to purchase in the next 12 months. It's 8,000 hectares on the Pacific coast of Baja California, Seward. You can see that there is a cactus ecology that starts about a kilometer off of the ocean. And in this in-between space, you've got highly saline sandy soils on which nothing is living. There's literally no life on this site. We saw a coyote and an osprey in two weeks of staying here. And we are intending to transform it into this. This is a system of seawater-based mangrove agroforestries, constructed mangrove wetlands driven by effluent from aquacultures. It is a circular regenerative system that increases fresh water, increases biodiversity, sequesters, carbon creates jobs and produces a wide array of goods from textiles to food to mushrooms and other CPGs. Process flow I'll go through really quickly but we start off with aquacultures. We've got experts in shrimp, sea cucumbers, oysters, tilapia and a number of other finfish on our team. And typical aquaculture operations, they dump their effluent into the ocean which creates dead zones and their feed tends to be one-third soybeans, one-third wheat paste and one-third bycatch, all of which have their own kind of destructive issues. What we're doing is we're starting with aquacultures and we're pumping the effluent through these systems to do mangrove corpus, to do haliphitic alley cropping. This is where we're growing crops in seawater, alley cropped with mangrove trees as a version of integrated pest management. And the last place where that water flows is in constructed mangrove wetlands where we can produce a wide variety of goods using multi-trophic aquacultures. The best thing about this is we have a number of feeds in development where the aquacultures grow the forests and we can actually grow the feed for our aquacultures in these same forests. So it is a contained closed loop, circular regenerative system. Here are some of the products that we have grown in the past on different iterations of this. Finfish and shrimp as well as sea cucumbers and oysters. We were the first in the world to grow edible mushrooms on haliphitic crop residues, algaes, including both macro and micro algaes. And here's the estimated impact per 500 hectares of this system. And our first iteration, we start, which was done in Eritrea from 2000 to 2004 by my partners. We started with 20-something birds on site and within four years we had about 250 species of birds living on site. And significant impact across a wide variety of different metrics. The applications here are really pretty shocking. We are in the process of talking with EFAD, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, which is a UN body to send a task force to Madagascar. Madagascar is facing massive famine and drought right now because they aren't able to grow crops. We're talking with them to send a task force to start growing seawater crops, which we are never gonna run out of seawater. It is an infinite resource and we can grow food without any fresh water whatsoever. Fodder and feed is a really big deal in places like the Horn of Africa and places like in Madagascar, Senegal, Mauritania, Namibia, et cetera, where we can essentially increase the food security of countries that are prone to famine and drought. We can produce all sorts of stuff with seawater aside from the animal fodder and in places like these where food security is so critical, this is a massive solution. Biodiversity is a big one, but also this is a system that we think can actually adapt to sea level rise because mangroves are capable of growing between five and 15 millimeters of soil a year. And then there are also a massive protector against hurricanes, against storm surges. And at the same time, they're massive for fishery sustainability. It's estimated that one third of all species in the ocean rely on mangroves during some part of their life cycle. And we have lost over a third of mangroves on the planet since the 1970s, right? So the climate and environment's a huge piece of this and a huge motivator for us. We are integrating macro algae and micro algae into these systems which show major promise in the development of other industries such as bioplastics, biopolymers. And then cooling and greening. This is a helicopter photo of our first iteration in Eritrea. On this system, we did cool the local climate by two degrees Celsius as a function of this regenerative seawater system. So it's got wide applicability. We estimate there's about 15 million hectares globally where we could build these systems and are doing so in a number of places. Here's a project we're going after in Spain. This is not mangrove based. This is marsh restoration. This is the river in Cadiz. It is a very salty river because the tides here are about five and a half meters. And so about 100 kilometers upriver, you have very salty water. This used to be a marsh. They built dikes around it. You can see that it's a totally barren landscape, extremely salty, almost nothing grows on there. We intend to convert it into a multi-trophic aquaculture system that includes halophitic crops. This is, that's probably gonna be our first project in Spain. Spain is facing huge issues with desertification and there are thousands of hectares of degraded land where we could build these kinds of multi-trophic systems. This is the one in Mexico that I already showed you. The numbers on this is that if we integrate the carbon and the real estate gain, it's about an $80 million project with an IRR of 18 to 20% over the first 10 years. How do we make money? It's kind of four different ways of value creation. The sale of goods off of the sites. Carbon is a very big one for us, particularly in the projects we're doing in Africa. The real estate gain is extremely significant. It's kind of mind-blowing numbers when we're able to integrate real estate into the business model. And then fourth, this transformation of land allows for all sorts of ancillary activities to happen, whether it's ecotourism or medical tourism or similar kinds of things. When you transform a landscape from something like this to something like that, people wanna come see it. We've experienced it every place we've done this. And that's kind of what we're up to right now. We have projects underway in Spain, Ghana, Namibia and Mexico. We just secured permits in Mexico and I gotta be careful what I'm allowed to say here in public. We have permits to do our first site and encouragement from Mexico's EPA that they are going to study this with an eye towards expanding it across multiple states within the country. And that's where we are right now. Thanks very much. Great, thank you Neil. That was fascinating and almost too good to be true at times, all the benefits added together really seem remarkable. So a lot to ask about, I guess first just these designs for these whole systems, where did those come from and how have those been sort of validated and refined so that you have a pretty clear idea of exactly how much land you need for each part and how it's all gonna work together, how does that... So we are the pioneers of this system. My partner Ned Doherty built and directed and designed the first system like this which was done in Eritrea. He's been working on this for over 30 years. The concept was developed by a scientist named Carl Hodges who was, he passed away earlier this year. He was our senior science advisor and kind of passed the baton of these systems onto us. But there have been multiple failed efforts at establishing these around the globe, including in Mexico before with Carl Hodges in Saudi Arabia. So there have been a lot of lessons learned and a lot, the one successful attempt was Eritrea. They had 800 employees, they had tripled their income. They were exporting two tons of shrimp to the EU every month. They did initial measurements on carbon sequestration by diversity and it was too successful for their own good because in 2004, the Eritrean Navy showed up, seized the operations and gave my partners 48 hours to leave the country because they thought it was gonna be a cash cow for them. And so when you first, so you start with the aquaculture, is that right? And so that, and then that will support the mangrove trees and then those feedback into the aquaculture. So how long does it take to get to sort of a self-sustaining system? I mean, certainly you'd have to bring feed in for the first couple years. It's a four to five-year process. On that side I showed you we're gonna grow 45 million mangroves. Okay. And it takes some time to get that many trees in the ground. Okay, and then all of that, that can supply sufficient feed for the aquaculture. For the aquacultures, yes. Okay, and then basically they fertilize the mangroves and it's all a closed system. That's it. The limit to growth on that system in these landscapes, particularly the arid landscapes is the nitrogen and phosphorus. In a Delta like we have in Ghana, that's not so much of an issue so you get much faster growth rates. But on, in a place like Baja California, there's no nutrient in the land whatsoever. And so it is using the aquaculture effluent as the source of that fertility and the source of that nutrient instead of dumping it into the ocean, which is standard practice. Okay. And do you worry about sort of diseases in these closed systems or? Yes. White spot is a, is a really big issue with shrimp. The, I am not an expert in the aquacultures but we have really phenomenal people with decades of experience on our team doing this kind of thing. My role as a CEO or as a designer is more of a choreographer, right? Because each one of those systems has separate management and we can hire people who know how to manage each system. For us it's choreographing the connections between those making sure that the outputs of one function as the inputs of the next. Okay. And can you speak a little bit more about your team and how you see that sort of growing as the business grows? Yeah, we have, our plan is to keep our US team very small. We currently have a team of seven in the US which is kind of our core. We have a dozen people on our Mexico team and our CSO came from Mexico. She's a world expert in multi-trophic aquacultures who's coming out of Sibnort. We have a team of about a dozen in Europe from a company that we just acquired called Sea Water Solutions. We have a team of 20 in Ghana. And the idea is to everywhere we go we are cooperating and partnering with local communities. And our intention is to maximize local labor and local expertise as much as possible. And then it's our job to fill in the gaps, right? Of what knowledge isn't there? So in Eritrea, our country director has 15 years experience doing Tilapia aquacultures and Tilapia has a massive market in Ghana. They love that stuff over there. And so it's about finding the right expertise locally, putting together the right teams locally and then working with them to institute the primary system and then expansion happens from there. Okay. And if you sort of think forward 10 years what sort of scale are you targeting 10 years now in terms of hectares or whatever metric you wanna use? Well, I've committed to myself that we're gonna grow a billion mangroves before I retire. We will in 10 years we'll have expanded in Latin America we'll be in at least three states in Mexico we'll probably be in La Guajira in Columbia. I mean, we're already in talks with Senegal, Mauritania, Mozambique, Somali land, Egypt, Oman, the Emirates, Northwestern India. The last place we'll end up is Australia cause we're gonna have to automate our systems before we go there cause cost of labor is so high but we intend to be global within 10 years quite and quite quickly at that. Fantastic. Thanks so much for sharing this vision really, really exciting story. Please check the Q and A there's a number of additional questions for you. Thank you for being with us. Who's, all right, we've got Alisa asking do we plan to build a product brand across our projects? Yes, eventually. So I'll let you answer those offline. Great. So I'll read the question out loud for other folks it says, do we plan to build a product brand across our projects? How many projects do we envision in next years? So the, it's gonna take just as much time to go from zero to one project as it will to go from one to 10 and as it will to go from 10 to 100 because we're gonna get better and better at it and we're gonna be able to train people we'll be able to bring them to the nuclei sites. Each project is telling the same story of regeneration eventually we will have a food brand we're starting out just wholesaling because it's more work than we wanna handle to try to vertically integrate across the whole supply chain at the beginning but eventually the story is so powerful it gives hope and inspiration to everybody we talk to about it and eventually we are gonna want a brand that tells that story and represents that kind of transformation we want. Yeah, I think that the future you're gonna get tapped to do terraforming at some point after the Mars mission is the ultimate horizon. I don't know, we'll see, we'll see. Laura asked. Sorry Neil, thank you. Oh, we gotta stop. Yeah, we gotta move on to our last speaker but thanks so much, this is really amazing. Okay, our final team today is Velix Computing and we're joined by Jason Poon. This is a, we're back to the built world. This is a software accelerator platform for advanced analytics and computation that enables more intelligent resilient and secure industrial systems. It just is a fun fact to set the stage for Jason's presentation. If you look in the upper Midwest the average person loses power annually for about an hour and a half whereas in Japan the average person loses power about four minutes per year. So with that, I'll turn it over to Jason to tell us about Velix. Great, thank you Matt. Thank you Matt. So hi everyone, it's really great to be here. I'm Jason Poon, I'm a visiting scholar here in the EE department and also co-founder of our venture that we call Velix Computing. And yeah, I'm super excited to be here to give you an overview of what we've been up to. So as Matt mentioned, the really the central challenge that we're trying to address here is the fact that operating and maintaining electric grids today is more critical, more complicated and more important than ever before. And I don't have to go through all of the recent events in the news that have really highlighted this, whether they're the wildfires out here in California or events in Texas or in Florida that have shown that the reliability and resiliency of our electric grid is really critical and really impacts the lives of millions and millions of people around the world. So there are a lot of things that we wish our electric grid could do automatically to prevent these problems. And I've listed a laundry list of them here. So for example, wouldn't it be great if the grid could just automatically detect faults and anomalies and then automatically reconfigure to ensure that the power would never go out? Or wouldn't it be great if we could detect where and when wildfires are most likely to occur and then modify how the power flows to reduce the likelihood of starting one? And what really underpins this list of things is their reliance on computing. So not only having the algorithms to do these things but also having the necessary computing capabilities exactly where they're needed. And unfortunately, we think this poses a big challenge for the grid today because if you look at how the grid is set up it often looks something like this. So the infrastructure is extremely distributed and often in locations that are very remote. So if we think about our ability to do the really advanced computing that we need in these types of settings then there's a number of very obvious pitfalls. So the first is that, given that these locations are very remote connecting to the cloud could be really challenging. And this is a problem because a lot of services today that companies offer rely heavily on the cloud. So getting a bunch of data from these locations that are very remote to the cloud can be really difficult. And also there are a lot of security and privacy issues moving data off site that our customers are really concerned and cautious about as well. So that's the first problem. Second, if you want to keep everything local the computing resources that you have at these, for instance, at these transformer substations you may know that the equipment for the grid is often designed to last decades. So you're dealing with these legacy industrial PCs that absolutely weren't designed to run the latest and greatest machine learning or optimization based algorithms that we need them to. So our company is on a mission to address this problem. And towards that end, we have developed what we call the Velix Acceleration Platform. So our core technology is a computing accelerator for industrial systems that enables up to 100x acceleration in compute performance. And importantly, it's compatible with existing deployed infrastructure. And this means that our customers don't need to rip and replace anything and can instead retrofit their existing compute assets. And this really results in substantial CAPEX reductions. So our platform is designed to be installed in a variety of edge compute hardware and operating systems. So for instance, PLCs or data historians or industrial PCs. And we work with our customers to develop these apps that provide the functionality that they want. So these could be apps for predictive maintenance, for fault and anomaly detection, for wildfire detection, so on and so forth. And these apps will leverage our accelerator technology, the accelerator core, to run on these legacy hardware platforms. So our accelerator is based on technology that came out of Stanford. And we have this hardware prototype here on the left that has validated some of these acceleration capabilities for a specific class of non-linear optimization problems. We also have a white paper and a couple of patents that are making their way through the Office of Technology Licensing. And we're also negotiating an exclusive licensing agreement with OTL that should be in place very soon. Something that's interesting about our technology is that it can be realized as either a piece of software or as a piece of hardware. So we can package the accelerator as a SaaS solution that our customers can deploy on any bare metal hardware. And this will provide somewhere in the range of five to 10x performance acceleration. Or we can package this as a piece of hardware, something in the form of a PCIe card or a USB stick that our customers can plug into their existing computing hardware. And this will provide the most acceleration up to 100x. So really our technology is one aspect of how our product is really differentiated from existing solutions on the market. So we're able to bring that advanced computation that conventionally happens exclusively in the cloud and bring it to the edge where the data is most readily available. And we can offer a product that has much lower latency and lower operating costs for our customers. And beyond the utility space, we're also really excited about the broader edge compute market which today is nearly $700 billion and growing rapidly. And this growth is really driven by growth not only in the smart grid technology space but also in a variety of industries including industrial IoT, smart manufacturing, traffic management, EV charging, infrastructure and so on. And we believe that these verticals could potentially really expand our TAN and we're actively exploring pilots in a number of these areas. So speaking of pilots, we're excited to say that we're actually engaged with one pilot with a company called Dynamics. They're an edge operating system company located out here in Menlo Park. And with them, we're aiming to demonstrate a live prototype of our technology with a community-owned utility company in Florida. And in addition, we have five additional pilots in our pipeline that we're aiming to start in this next six months or so. So in order to capitalize on these markets, we envision having three revenue streams. So we want to monetize our accelerator platform with a usage-based pricing model. And we'll also provide turnkey solutions and also license our IP to end users and also supply chain customers. And our go-to-market plan consists first of deploying these paid pilots and field trials with our supply chain customers. And then we'll launch on a beachhead market and then subsequently scale once we've reached something like QRL-9 level validation. We've also shown here what our forecasted revenue looks like for the next five years. And this is the team that's making it happen. So I think we have a really unique blend of technical and business expertise that's needed to bring this technology to market. So we have over 20 combined years of work experience in the power and energy sector, including experience in the utility space. And we also have business expertise leading and operating B2B companies. So I think we have some sense of the challenges of selling into these enterprise and regulated industries. So with that, I think we're all really excited about the next steps and we'd love to connect with you if you're curious to learn more. So thank you. Great, thank you very much, Jason. Maybe I'll start just with some, a little bit more questions about the technology itself. So it seems that you're focused on the sort of power and energy industry early on at least as sort of the initial target market. Can you walk me through a edge computation that can't be done now, that isn't done now, of course at a transformer substation that this would really unlock, that would sort of impact the power and energy industry? Sure, sure. So the big one in the space, if you talk about a transformer substation, really a big application today is in predictive maintenance. And around that, it's basically looking at the hardware that you have and trying to anticipate failures, say in a transformer before it happens. And a lot or some of those methods today use machine learning. But the challenge is that in order to train and build these machine learning models, they need to send a bunch of operating data from the operation of this transformer, whether that's voltage, current, temperature, vibration data to the cloud. And this could be gigabytes and gigabytes of data over the course of months in order to really characterize the operation of the normal. This is what the transformer operation looks like under a normal situation versus this is an anomaly, this is something that's not expected. So today that process happens exclusively in the cloud. And as I mentioned in a lot of scenarios, that's simply something that's not feasible, right? You have locations that are extremely remote. You don't have a very secure or high bandwidth connection to the cloud. So a lot of times it's just infeasible to deploy these types of techniques. So you would provide the hardware at the substation that would do the computation right there? Exactly, exactly. So we would leverage existing computing at the location itself and we could do these things locally, exactly. Is that similar to what you're doing in this first pilot or is the first pilot sort of targeting a different application? No, that's exactly what we're doing. That in addition to other things, but I think that's one of the first key things that we aim to address. Okay, and just a couple of technical questions from the audience. So the first is what are the bandwidth requirements from edge to cloud at some of these remote locations? Again, that would really depend on the type of application that is being implemented for a lot of vision-based applications. So where there's actually, where you're processing pictures or video data, you could require pretty substantial connection to the cloud. Other times there are ways that you could potentially reduce the amount of data that you're sending and whether that's again, voltage or current or temperature information that perhaps doesn't update as frequently, but it really depends on the exact application that's being implemented. And how many of these systems have you produced so far? You showed, is that one hardware prototype is the first prototype or what are the issues that you're sort of manufacturing these on a large scale? That's a fantastic point. That's a fantastic point. So we have developed a hardware prototype to validate the core IP. As I mentioned, the technology is amenable to both a software implementation and a hardware implementation. So our initial go-to-market plan initially is to really focus on the software version of this technology because we think that would first allow us to validate what are our value proposition and also iron out any problems that we come across with the technology. In developing the hardware, that's obviously a much longer development cycle. We could potentially even envision something that would be implemented as an integrated circuit. And that would, you're talking about years of development there. So we do envision a staged cycle where we're focusing first on a software realization of this and then transitioning to something in hardware. So I hope that answers the question. And we have live prototypes of the software that's working and that we're actively developing. Yeah, it sort of relates to my next question. So in terms of growing your team, so then you're focused mostly on sort of the software engineering component on the technical side or is there, what are your needs for growing the team? Sure, so exactly. So software engineering is one component but also another big component that we're looking at or seeking to address is, and selling to a lot of these regulated or regulated industries or really any B2B industry is I think it's important to have or it is important to have somewhat of a reputation in the field. It's very difficult to sell into some of these industries sometimes. So we're trying to work with or find people who have experience in this space and are familiar with the sales cycles of some of these utility companies or other businesses that we want to work with because that's definitely something that we want to de-risk. And it's definitely a challenge as a young or as a small B2B business. And then sort of last question, beyond utilities and power and energy, what's sort of the next target industry for this type of technology? And that's a great question and that's something we're actively exploring. So again, if anyone in the audience has thoughts or is interested in talking more, we'd love to hear from you and I'd be happy to be connect with you. Terrific. Okay, thank you, Jason, for sharing Velix with us. I wanna thank all of our participants one more time. Really fascinating mix of exciting new technologies. Any of you who didn't have a chance to ask a question or didn't get your question answered, please don't hesitate to either try to connect directly with our participants. I'm sure they would love to talk with you offline or connect through the Tomcat LinkedIn group site or contact any of us on the Tomcat team. So thank you all for joining us this afternoon and we look forward to another innovation showcase in the next quarter. Thanks so much.