 Okay, hello everyone and welcome to the Tomcat Center innovation showcase. My name is Matt Cannon and let me say on behalf of the Tomcat Center team. Thank you for joining us this afternoon. I know there are a lot of familiar faces. Friends of the center people we've worked with before as well as many newcomers. We're really happy to have you here. We're really pleased to see the enthusiasm for this event. For those of you who haven't attended an innovation showcase before I'm just going to give you a one minute primer. Basically, this is your chance to learn about exciting new startups and ventures that were born at Stanford, and that are addressing markets that impact energy and sustainability. The teams that we feature were previous awardees of what's called the innovation transfer program at the Tomcat Center. Basically, this program is designed to provide resources and mentoring and networking to teams that are seeking to commercialize innovations or business model innovate inventions or business model innovations developed at Stanford, related to energy and sustainability. There's a competitive application and review process. It's always open. This for those of you who have ideas that you seek to commercialize related to our mission I strongly encourage you to reach out to myself or Brian Bartholomews or Donica Sarlia. We just recently launched a shiny new website and in doing so updated the statistics for the innovation transfer program I can't help but highlighting a couple of those. So the program was started in 2013. We've awarded a total of $5 million to 81 teams over the past eight years. Those teams have gone on to raise more than $720 million and follow on funding. The companies that have started from those teams now employ almost 1000 people with more than $100 million in annual revenues and there's been five acquisitions. This is sort of one perspective, I think on the impact of the program. Again, what really unifies all of the teams that we've supported is that they're tackling a hard problem related to energy and sustainability. So we started the innovation showcase just about one year ago when we switched to virtual events. And it's really been, I think, an upside of this new mode of interacting for the center. It's been well received in our first two events. And really the idea is basically today you're going to hear from three teams. They're going to present for about 10 minutes, tell you about their ventures, what they're doing. It's a five minute period for question and answer. There's a Q&A feature in the zoom. So as you're listening to a presentation if you have questions, please put them there I will do my best to capture as many questions as possible. In the Q&A session I undoubtedly will not be able to to ask everyone's question. And for the companies, the best outcome for them today is to connect to new people who can help them build their team or find new customers or partners or investors. So I really strongly encourage you to reach out to them either directly or through us here at the Tomcat Center. We also have a LinkedIn Tomcat networking group that we would love for you to for all of you to join. And that's a great way to connect with the presenters and the teams today. Okay, so without further ado, today we're hearing from three ventures that are really addressing markets that that actually span most of the landscape of the country from farms to highways to urban areas. So let's start with farms, and our first venture is called FarmRays. For those of you like myself who don't know a whole lot about farms, I think one surprising fact to set the stage. As of 2019, there were a little over 2 million farms in the United States together spanning nearly 900 million acres. This is from the US Department of Agriculture. In a single line FarmRays is the one stop shop for farm grants and loans informed by and built for farmers. We're joined today by the founder and CEO of FarmRays, Jace Hafner, Jace. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you so much and it is a pleasure to be here. I have to say that we were so fortunate to receive the Tomcat Innovation Transfer Grant when we did because that capital was really catalytic for us and getting FarmRays off the ground and testing its commercial economy. So it's just so grateful to be here today and delighted to share FarmRays with you all. Our mission is vital farming communities. So when we think about vitality and farming communities, whether urban or rural we think about equitable access to finance profitability and resilient ecological outcomes. So that's what we're shooting for at FarmRays. Before I dive into FarmRays, I really want to introduce you all to the person who got me into farming, which is my dad, Jay, and we operate a 160 acre Angus beef cattle farm in Virginia. As a kid, I just remember how hard he was working all the time. His days would begin and end in the darkness. He'd go out at 5am in the morning. If I was lucky, I would catch him and get to go with him as a kid to check the cows. And then he'd go work a second job doing construction, which paid our bills. Like so many farmers, he had a second side hustle to keep us profitable. And then he'd come home in the evening and finish up the farm chores and it would be dark. He was always exhausted and there was very little bandwidth in the day or really with energy levels to attend to the finance side of operation and business development, applying for certifications that could help us capture a better premium or direct marketing. There was just so much that we could have done that we just didn't have time to do in terms of the financial aspect of our operation. Now that changed as I became a teenager. This is me growing up on the farm was really involved in the farm. And when I was a teen, we started to learn more about resilient, I think many folks call this regenerative agriculture practices. And we started to learn about different funding opportunities that we could access to make these practices possible for us because a lot of times these practices require significant upfront capital to get the ball rolling. And my dad was now at more of a place at his other job where he had more time to attend to this and we went through the process of applying for a couple grants from the US Department of Agriculture in the state of Virginia, which paid for us to change how we grazed our cows. We previously grazed our cows and one paddock throughout the year down so that the land was going down to brittle stubs. And this grant that we got gave us seed capital so that we could install new water systems new electric fencing systems and begin to rotationally manage our cows so that we moved them around the paddock throughout the year and we started seeing benefits in year one, as the year two was much healthier our soil health was much higher. And what was cool is this had a huge impact on our profitability as well, because the grass was so healthy we could graze the cows outside for three additional months throughout the year before we had to buy hay inputs and truck those on to the farm. And so this was not only a huge environmental one for a farmer was also an economic one. So in that process, we learned a lot, and one of the biggest learnings that came out of this is it's really hard to access finance as as a farmer, and this is you know the lens that really spurred farm raise into being there are three different aspects that are broken and the farm finance system. The first one is, there's no one place that a farmer can go to understand what funding options are eligible for you know this information is scattered across the internet. So one USDA loan officer and they'll tell you one thing and then maybe you'll get someone else on the phone next day or they won't answer your call it's it's really really hard to get to the bottom of what grants and loan programs you can apply for the second pieces. Once you figure out what you're eligible for, then you have the process of going through if you're applying for government funding and eight to 30 page application with a lot of complicated paperwork. So this process again for my family for a couple years ago, and I couldn't understand it I had to call someone else to help me walk through it, which was, which was interesting. And the third part is the application process itself is really inefficient, it requires a lot of stops and starts, sometimes you have to call someone on the phone to help you through it or you have to wait to hear back from them. It's not a one stop smooth process and so this discourages a lot of farmers from completing their funding applications. This is a problem this is a huge problem because financial access is really important on farms. There's three main outcomes that it supports the first one is regenerative agriculture, you know these practices that farmers are learning about that improve their land and also increase their profitability you know there's a great study that came out a couple years ago that showed if you do these practices correctly they can increase your profitability by up to 80% depending on what biome you're these all these practices require upfront seed capital and so getting that in the door is key to scaling up conservation practices. The second piece here is profitability you know you definitely need to get some seed capital in the door to be able to invest in your operation and expand it and make it viable it's crazy that the median farm income in the United States it was about $300 and in 2020 it's projected to be a little over $700. So you can see why so many farmers have an off an off farm job that helped helps them to keep keep the ball rolling. And then finally farmland conservation is a big part of this picture because when a farm is an economic decline or trouble a lot of times will happen as a farmer will sell. They will often sell to a commercial developer, instead of passing the farm down to another farmer often the child of the farmer but it can be just another operator. Instead this farm will be converted to commercial development and that's sad from losing a farmland perspective but it's also really bad for carbon emissions you know those types of conversions can release a lot of carbon into the air. So for all these reasons it's really important that we support financial access and agriculture but there's not a lot of it today. And that's why we're here we aim to make it really easy for farmers to know their best funding options and then to access those funding options through a one stop shop. I am excited to show you how we work. So today, any farmer can come to our site, and they can check if they're eligible for the top three USDA funding programs. Two of these are conservation based funding programs one same same program my farm my farm access. And the third one is the farm service service agency loan these are great for beginning farmers farmers with trouble accessing credit farms who want to invest in conservation, and they have really low interest rates. The application is like 30 pages long so they can check their eligibility, and if they're eligible, they can then apply through farm raise, and we shepherd this process in a way that we keep them on task it's kind of like the gamification of having a to do list with reminders, as well as simplified language and eliminating duplication so that farmers don't have to fill out 30 different forms our goal is to have every farmer complete their app in less than 20 minutes if they do it all in one sitting. So what we also have noticed is that farmers this we're we're building and we have built a tech enabled product for a tech forward company. But farmers also want to know that there's a person behind the technology who's who's there for them and so we've put a lot of effort into creating personalization and making sure that farmers know there is someone you can call farmers can set up office hours with us they can text us on demand farmers love texting because they're often on the go. And we have you know we continue right now we have 1000 farmers who are free users on our platform about 100 who are subscribers paying us month over month. Our office hours are never fully booked, but farmers love texting us they really really love that so that personalization component is important. So introducing you to our founding team, we have a lot of really sort of the experience that spans lots of different sectors from Amazon and Microsoft and Apple to farmland investing to working at Land O'Lakes and the US Department of Agriculture. Sammy, one of my co founders we met at Stanford through the joint EIPR Stanford GSB program, and then we teamed up with Albert in the pair VC summer accelerator over over the summer highly recommend that as an accelerator program. It was fantastic for us to just getting to meet someone else to join our team through that and so many other benefits but we're actually no longer a team of three we're now a team of six full time and we're we're looking to hire actually a product designer right now so one quick plug to all of you connected folks on there we would love if you have any suggestions for product designers to send to farm race. We have a really ambitious vision for the year ahead of you know the farmers we we're working with we aim to get 500 of them through this common application for the top three funding programs we're actually right now the the MVP we have online is is it's functional but it's it's not you know where we want it to be yet so we're going to launch a farm race 2.0 platform in two weeks and so we're pumped to get that out. We're going to get 500 farmers through that, and then two things that we're working on that we'd love your help with. The first and foremost we're actually in conversations with the US Department of Agriculture right now to run pilot projects that would allow us to to to connect private capital investors who could invest alongside the USDA for monetizable conservation based projects. So that's one thing if you know impact investors who want to directly invest in farmers particularly through debt, we would love to speak with them. The second thing we'd love help with will really this is the third counting the product designer are one of our go to market strategies is agribusiness supply chains you know big companies like to known and cargo they've made these great commitments to wanting to improve soil health and sustainability and their supply chains and so the type of funding we unlock for farmers is really in line with that. We actually just launched a partnership with Corteva and granular last week and we are looking to launch more of these so if you know folks who are connected in big agribusiness supply chains that are hoping to make them more regenerative. We would love to speak with them and so I will I will again leave you with our vision of fight vital farming communities this is our farm in Virginia. Thank you again and welcome your questions and conversation. Thank you Jay says wonderful to see the personal connection to the company as well. Lots of different areas for questions I guess I'll start just around this idea of the, the practice the regenerative practices and sort of the know how around, you know how to improve sustainability of farming and also improve profitability. There's a lot of knowledge out there, and it's, and it's purely a sort of hurdle of getting the right capital to make the changes are all farmers aware of what can be done. Or is there some education involved that sort of saying hey here's an opportunity to change your practices and also improve your economics. I think education is always part of the puzzle and it will continue to be even as these practices become more and more mainstream. One of my favorite things to watch when I want to get a pulse on what the mainstream farmers thinking is farmer YouTube. It's really taken off and sometimes it's just hours of farmers like planting stuff in their fields and they're talking on their into their phones and it's almost like this real time on the tractor moment but what we're seeing and a lot of these like so across social media now is is an increased awakening and awareness among farmers about the opportunity that conservation practices present. And what's so interesting is this. This is the way that farmers talk about it they're not talking about in terms of climate change so much as profitability and soil health. So it's I think it's really important for those of us who are thinking about going into policy and wanting to mitigate carbon emissions through policy, when we talk to farmers the language we use is so important, because it's, it's wild but most farmers graphically in terms of like the latest I've seen is still the majority of farmers don't believe that climate change is human cost. So we have to, we have to be mindful with how we talk about it but there's definitely an increased awareness of these practices being beneficial, but absolutely education has a big role to play. So do you, how do you advertise you connect primarily through social media or how are you getting the word out about about farm raise or is it just sort of being passed along naturally from one farmer to another. It's a lot of word of mouth for sure. I'm in a lot of farm Facebook groups and I just post our landing page there and then farmers share it, they comment on it they give great real time feedback so we found that to be a great go to market but that's necessarily a sustainable go to market and so that's why we're really bullish on partnering up with agribusiness supply chains that have access to you know hundreds of thousands of farmers across the US. And the private investors do you think what's sort of the potential there relative to the government funding do you think that that could that that source of funding could rival what's available through the USDA or what's sort of the scale of the opportunity there. Yeah, I think it actually could be incredibly synergistic. What's really interesting with the two most popular conservation funding programs at the USDA. They're actually three times oversubscribed three to four times oversubscribed so only about 25 to 30% of farmers who apply for these programs in a given year actually get the funding because there's just not a lot of funding out there, and a lot of the projects they want to undertake like improving their water systems, energy efficiency regenerative grazing. These are actually these could produce financial returns and so my dream is to find a really streamlined way for investors to directly connect with farmers. There's a great soil wealth report that I read a couple from I think it's from 2019. And I think there's great information on there showing how, you know, today they're over I think it was between forgive me I can't remember the exact number I think it was over $30 billion and investable strategies that are here in the US for regenerative ag and if we could just deploy some of that directly to farmers. That would be great because the USDA's budget is only around $5 billion annually for those. Wow, okay. And so how does how does this work logistically someone signs up for your, you mentioned a subscription or or is it is there sort of an option where you pay for help with one application or what's can you give us a little bit more in the business model there. Yeah, so farmers sign up at 20 bucks a month to access the common application, but we're actually seeing that farmers are are just as if not more interested in signing up on a month by month basis because we are building out this comprehensive farm funding and we're tracking all these programs at the state local federal level and we send updates to farmers who meet the eligibility requirements or who we suspect meet the eligibility requirements for different options between all these different, you know, levels of funding and so we give them updates and they sign up because of FOMO they don't want to miss out on a single funding program. Our dream is really to eventually incorporate as many of those programs as possible into the common application so they can continue to apply but what we like about the updates is it makes the business less transactional and more of a community. Okay. And you have a small but growing team so can you give us perspective how long did it take to get to your minimum viable product in terms of you said yourself that you know, going through one of these applications is incredibly complicated how did you distill that down then into this virtual assistant that can walk somebody through that. Yeah, I mean the first MVP was a type form and then we got some some Tomcat funding and we're able to actually you know build an application over the summer and a couple months and now it's been I think three months. And since we launched development on farm raise 2.0 which will be that 20 minute experience and we're just we're just so excited to push that out there and start getting farmers through it. So that's that's what we're really gearing up toward now. Awesome. Jayce thanks again for sharing the story with us. It's tremendously exciting and best of luck and all of your endeavors for this next year. So thank you so much appreciate it. So now we're moving from farms on to two roads and factories. So our next venture is called Indrio technologies. One of the problems that they are addressing is emissions from diesel engines, and you may not know that on road diesel engines account for almost 9% of us CO2 emissions. So in one line, Indrio makes laser based sensors for rapid monitoring of chemical concentrations and harmful emissions. And we're joined by the founder and CEO, Rito sir, Rito, the floor is yours. Thanks for joining us. Thanks Matt. Hi, my name is Rito. I'm the CEO and founder of Indrio Technologies, and we are a proud Tomcat company. And Tomcat, I have to say has been very helpful over the years like we got the fund. Initially the direct funds helped us a lot and then also over the years the incredible interns we get every year. They've added a lot to our products over these years and we're very helpful where we got a lot of this help over these years. So the leadership team consists of myself and Terry, we both did our PhDs at Stanford mechanical engineering at the Hansen group. Our background is laser based diagnostics in combustion. So we bring a lot of expertise in how to make these laser based chemical sensors for measuring in very extreme environments and making them survive extreme conditions. So fundamentally what Indrio does is we close the control loop for chemical reactions. So this is the fundamental principle we act on. And the science we use for doing so is is a method of sensing using laser absorption. So, in our method, we have a laser beam that can go through a medium, and then when the laser beam goes through this medium. It can get absorbed and this absorption can be then interpreted to understand how much of that chemical is that in their volume. And the, there are many different unique value propositions that we bring to the table. Some of them are our sensors are calibration free so we can make them so that once it is out of the factory it's is there and will never need to be calibrated again. And it is portable, we can reach very low sensitivities of chemicals, and we are about 10,000 times faster than traditional techniques, which is great to have. And we sometimes we can even measure these chemicals without having to sample any of it. So this is a great advantage in many applications where we started from, and many more, which I cannot get get to right now. If you want to think about Indio's interaction with its clients. It's such as this so we have this client clients who have some sort of reactor, which produces some chemicals. And they have some way to control this reaction so they have this control variables that they can control. And what Indio does is it measures the the molecules that are produced from this reactor. And we can give this information to the, the clients where they can use these measured concentration to be able to control this reaction. You can imagine that this is a very broad platform type thing so it can be applied across many different applications including food and agriculture, process control, energy utilities and healthcare. But right now we're focusing on this piece of the pie transportation. So, just to give you some background about what we're thinking about so we're thinking about decarbonizing the entire energy and mobility sectors but when we look at heavy duty transportation this is a very focused view of like electrification specifically. You can see that even though there is a lot of growth in battery manufacturing, even in 2030 it will only be creating about 1.17 terawatt hour towards the commercial electric vehicles. And when we look at the total energy need from these heavy duty sectors, and we look at trucks, and this will require about 30 terawatt hours per day. So, if you take these numbers and take this into perspective, we can only meet about 0.5% of heavy duty demand by 2030 and 16% by 2050. So the takeaway message from this is that we still have to do a lot of things to try to reduce the emissions from heavy duty sector just from the way it is and maybe trying to use some other biofuels or electric fuels. So, ICA engines are here to stay in the heavy duty sector and we have to clean it up. So, in that regard, so there, if you think about that system perspective, our client, one of the clients that we have is the state of California. So we are, if you think of it as a very broad way, like government, the government has all this enforcement mechanism that like they can literally give people tickets and get their trucks fixed. And what they're trying to control is a pollution that's coming out of vehicles. So what we are doing for them is that we are measuring the pollution that comes out of these trucks. And then we inform that to the government which they can use to enforce these regulations. We created this sensor called Zephyr, which is the first of its kind sensor that can measure these chemicals at these levels and the speed that is required from these tests. And we are establishing an enforcement infrastructure that gives the state of California tools to enforce these regulations so that they can catch the biggest polluters on the road and help them fix it. So, even focusing down on individual trucks, they have the same structure. So you have engine controls that controls the engine, which is basically a reactor and converting the fuels into the different end products. So there, what we are doing is we can directly measure the emissions coming out of the truck, and then we can involve inform the engine controls to change its state to perform in a certain way. So given that, and there is this problem of trucks having this issue of trying to balance between something called NOx and carbon tradeoff. So NOx stands for nitrogen oxide. And this is the main reason we have smog across many different sectors. And this is the reason why we have about 9 million deaths from fossil fuel burning. So it's a major reason for public health distress because of fossil fuel combustion. And because of that, this is a very heavily regulated molecule. But what happens is the current emission control technologies reduces the efficiency by about 10% today. So this is what we're trying to change. So we're going to build this sensor that will go inside the truck exhaust, and we are naming this sensor called Ignis. And we are partnering with some of the biggest OEMs in the world. And we're also getting funded by National Science Foundation to build these sensors that will go inside trucks and these have very unique properties. So that lost 10% fuel efficiency that I talked about before, that was lost due to NOx emissions control. We can give them back that 10% loss efficiency. And that directly relates to about $6,000 in revenue for every truck driver in the US. And if you multiply the number of truck drivers in the US, this easily creates about $21 billion in at revenue every year for the truck drivers. And we can clean up the smog emissions by 90%, which is a great advantage of this technology. And of course, there are other things that are inside truck that reduce the engine life and we can, we can also reduce their use and increase the engine life that way. We don't need any change in fuel behavior or engine type to do this. So this is something that we can do with the existing system with no changes required. You just need to put our sensor in there and then if we'll talk to the other parts of the existing system and then we'll change its working pattern. And this is the lowest hanging fruit I can imagine to reduce a bunch of carbon emissions and also NOx emissions by a large degree, and also going forward, we hope to work with electrophills and biofuels. And of course that will have a much lower carbon impact going forward, but those will still have NOx emissions that we need to reduce. So what we're looking for is mentorship for high volume design for manufacturing. We are also looking for new product by introduction help. We're currently raising a seed round, which is about 50% full. So if you know anyone who is interested, please let me know. Yeah, thanks. If you want to reach out to me directly, you can email me at this email address here. Otherwise, I'll be happy to take any questions. Perfect. Thank you, Rita. You made engineering sound so easy. And I realize you've, you know, removed a lot of the sort of technical detail. Can you explain just a little bit more on this emissions reductions with the Ignis product at the end. So what is it about the current controls that lead to that last 10% inefficiency in the combustion engine? Yeah, so primarily there are two things, right. So actually, what happens is a lot of the bad actors, they know this and they make this engine tuning parameters change like the injection timing specifically and some of these other things you can do like the amount of EGR is exhaust gas recirculation. So if you do those changes, you can actually get more performance and more efficiency out of existing trucks, but you're not supposed to do that because it releases more knocks. But you have all these people in the black market doing this for them. That aside, but there are these engine performance domains where you're not supposed to operate because of knocks, which is currently not allowed because of this knocks issue. What we're doing is we're bumping up the knocks reduction to an extreme efficiency level where those regions will not be forbidden anymore. So you can access those regions where which are fundamentally better for engine performance. And that really is just an issue of sort of real time monitoring of the knocks. And then not just that, but some sort of control is not possible if you cannot differentiate multiple types of emissions. So, so knocks contains multiple individual components. And also it needs to distinguish between individual components of blocks. And this is something we can do and knocks is nitrogen oxides it contains like nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, all these other things. So you can, you have to be able to distinguish between these two things to be able to optimize these chemical reaction, which, which isn't impossible to get with current sensors today, because to them everything looks same, even the thing that it reacts with ammonia, which is a result of dissociation of area in the exhaust. It's the same to the sensor as well. So they can't even distinguish between what they're trying to reduce, and then what they're reacting it with. So, the sensor, the control system is super confused, and it cannot be optimized as it is. Okay. And then on this, this Zephyr product that you, I guess that's your first product right, the Zephyr monitoring system. When you identify a truck that is, you know, basically out of compliance with with what the regulations are. What's involved in sort of bringing that back into compliance is that is it a matter of sort of tuning the engine or, or what has to be done there's in some cases the vehicle need to be decommissioned. So it depends on the extent of what what really happened, because there are a lot of things that can trigger higher knocks. One of them is, of course, you know, tampering with the exhaust system, which is easily not easy for the people who did it, they might get into trouble like this illegal and they will be fine or doing so. But there is a correction method like you can literally get a new after treatment system installed in their truck. There's a single and after treatment delete which people do. And if they're hard, they have to do that. And they will also be fine for doing so. So this also creates this because this exists. This is almost like a deterrent for such behavior that they will be caught and if caught. This is very damaging financially to them. And then also, if it is not something like that, if it's just something like age related issue of the catalyst, they can just change the catalyst and individual components to get it fixed. There are generally well known solutions for these kinds of problems. I see. Okay. And speaking to some of the other markets or the potential markets, there's a question about leak detection at say a refinery or another chemical plant. Is that something you're pursuing and is that it within your capabilities? No, yeah, that's how we started actually initially we were doing just leak detection. We moved away from that a little bit because we found that market was a little bit, it has a high barrier to entry because of low willingness to pay for small leaks. So we're exceedingly good at finding small, very difficult to measure things versus the other existing types of sensors. So our value proposition made more sense in an application like this, but we definitely can do leak detection, except that people are not willing to find that many leaks, unfortunately, and willing to pay for that many leaks. So the business model didn't really work in that market that well. So we can still do it and we can go back to that market when the cost per unit of our sensors have come down a little bit. But at this point at this price level, it didn't make any sense for us to start there. Okay. And then another question related to Ignis from one of the audience members so do you anticipate that that would be that a truck manufacturer could incorporate that into the manufacturing stage of the truck or is this something that you would that you would sell as an add on. So we're, we're thinking of starting at the manufacturing stage. Some of the new regulations that are coming that are explicitly targeting lower emissions so the older existing trucks would not be subject to those upcoming regulations as soon as the new trucks would be. So we're targeting application in those newer trucks. And then, once we're out and about and scaled up and go back and do retrofitting for the older generation trucks on the road. And ultimately, you know, what's sort of the number of units you would be producing to sort of to address that that market what's what's this ultimate scale that you're targeting for for this I guess. I mean, that's dependent on what time, but ideally we can make like millions of these sensors. Okay, yeah. Yeah, and I guess the last question sort of related to you mentioned seeking mentorship on the design for manufacturing. What are some of the challenges that you've identified related to that just mass producing this this technology. Well, firstly, like there, this is a very new type of sensing technology, the core elements of the sensor. They're not scaled up. But they're all subject to initial scaling problems like something is not uniform like across a whole batch and stuff like that like how do we standardize the manufacturing process of all these components. How do we standardize the assembly process, how do we automate bunch of assembly parts. Like, how do we have a test for intermediate stages. All those things add up and, and there are all these unanswered type questions that we're starting to answer. And, and we can see like, there would be a lot of these questions to be answered. So we have some industry experience on trying to create a new product line that involves complex geometry and assembly process would be really helpful for us to get there. Great. Yeah, it looks like there are at least a few attendees who might be interested in helping you with that. So, so I hope that you can connect with them. Thanks. Thanks again for for sharing in Rio with us this afternoon. Appreciate it. Yeah, pleasure. Thanks. Okay, so, finally, we will finish with cities. The last venture today is called kids which they are addressing the problem of affordable housing and the environmental footprint of construction of housing. One surprising fact that impacts their business models that there are currently about 17 billion square feet of vacant non residential buildings, 6 billion of which are already zoned to allow for housing. So in one line kits, which enables adaptive reuse of underutilized commercial buildings into affordable housing. And we're joined by the founder of kits which are Mel Kuton, Mel. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here. And wonderful for it to hear from the other teams as well. All right. Can you see my screen. All right. Perfect. So hello all my name is our Mel. I'm here on behalf of my team at kids which where we designed tools to turn the buildings we already have into affordable housing. So, in the past year you may have had to work remotely shop online or cancel much awaited travel plans. And while I know that we all hope that these habits are temporary. They also reflect increased vacancies for office retail and hospitality that existed before and will exist after the pandemic. Finally, are these vacant buildings a deep pain point for property owners unable to get a return on their investment, but their upkeep and lost value is also a costly burden to communities surrounding them. The pandemic has also emphasized the country's urgent need for housing. For every 100 low income households there are only 29 adequate housing options. The construction industry, which suffers from labor shortages and lengthy timelines has simply not been able to keep up with demand, as it costs 500 to $700,000 just to produce one unit of housing in key urban areas. But what if we converted vacant buildings into housing. The 17 billion square feet of currently vacant non residential buildings in the US six billion square feet are already zoned for housing. And so what that means is that developers don't even need to apply for rezoning in order to start building housing units. If we were able to convert the six billion square feet of vacant buildings into housing, we could produce over eight million units, or enough to completely address our housing deficit. And developers are well aware of this opportunity, yet the process of adding interiors into existing buildings can still be confusing and lengthy. And that's where we come in. We're a team of architects designers and engineers with a strong commitment to building better. It's been such a pleasure to work with this team of talented women. Alex studied construction in search of better ways to build housing in Sub-Saharan Africa. And she's also an awesome baker. Anusha's been working as a lead AP architect for over six years focusing on sustainability human wellness. And she's also a Zumba instructor and yoga enthusiast. Sam studied civil engineering. She's really passionate about public transit and has coded some incredible data dashboards to help with food distribution and covert response. Candice is an engineer with a love for travel and she's been dedicated to putting her skills towards providing more just and more affordable housing. Together we designed a panelized interior kit of parts. Its components are easy to manufacture flat pack and fit through an existing structure in order to set up a code compliant and energy efficient housing unit in under a day. And since our components are modularized, they're easy to reconfigure to suit changing needs and disassemble for end of life recyclability. And effectively we design walls as a product where the system layouts for plumbing and electricity are already pre engineered. These panels can then easily clip together on site, and they serve as the building blocks to set up everything a housing unit might need. The kit also simplifies the design process, and it enables us to set up clear metrics to optimize for plumbing efficiency in an adaptive reuse scenario, as well as comfortable day lighting ventilation and reduced plug loads for our living spaces. While our kit is perfect for conversions, it can also be used for new construction projects as a flexible non structural interior solution that can be rearranged to grow with tenants, as well as same use retrofit projects as a more targeted tool for specific upgrades. Construction involves multiple stakeholders on a typical project a developer will interface with an architect general contractor and maintenance team. And we integrate with this ecosystem by working as a component designer outsourcing production to a manufacturer and selling the kit to developers, in addition to providing unit design assistance to the architect. We also provide regulation training to the general contractor and user manuals to the maintenance team. So while we don't take on real estate purchasing, permitting onsite work and maintenance, we understand those areas well in order to best interface with our partners. The advantage of a pre designed kit is that instead of confusing timelines and creeping budgets customers can view a single clear and upfront price per panel. In this way they're also able to generate instant quotes based on kit bundles for their projects, and they can order additional parts if they wish to reconfigure their units. I want to take you through a recent case study that we conducted in order to best understand our product at work and all of the multiple benefits. So meet Jordan and affordable housing developer. They recently purchased and secured a change of use permits for a distressed retail building. They could request an initial assessment from kids which schedule a lighter scan for precise interior dimensions and have the kids which team work with a project architect to populate a 3D model with our components. So once the developer gives us the green light for our layouts, the general contractor can perform any necessary renovation system upgrades while the kit is being manufactured offsite. Finally, it can be brought on site and 20 units could be installed in under two weeks. And so what does this mean for our developers triple bottom line. So first taking a look at the economic implications. You know, typically a project like this would take a year. Acquisition costs included it would it would cost about $250 a thousand dollars per unit. There would also be some environmental implications. So there would be some waste generated from demolition and few sustainability metrics and accountability there. There could be a lot of noise and dust impact to the surrounding community and little design transparency on how people really want there to shape the units where they live. And so we can really change that by cutting nine months off of the timeline and enabling the developer to start generating rental income, effectively saving them $70,000 per unit. Our kit could also use could also enable waste reduction for the project as well as already incorporated lead and well standards for sustainability on top of making our existing building stock more energy efficient and sustainable without having to demolish and rebuild those buildings. Finally, with minimal installation impact. Our tool can also be used for participatory design enabling people to play with the different components and craft their ideal housing units and foster a sense of place making where we're not constantly demolishing and rebuilding buildings, but where we're really enabling local communities to make use of the buildings they have. So a little bit about our journey and next steps. We joined the Tomcat innovation transfer program shortly after starting our initiative at the end of 2020. And we set three types of goals for ourselves. Coalition building customer discovery and product development. Since then the Tomcat program has enabled us to form a network of support, engaging stakeholders at international conferences and being selected as one of the top 10 queen tech teams nationwide for the venture well program. Going forward, we welcome any legal support around incorporation which is one of our next steps, as well as founder visa status, and we seek to build a sponsor network across supportive architects engineers and organizations. We've also been able through the Tomcat Center to generate a comprehensive data study of vacant buildings across the US to inform our commercialization and have collected intent for multiple pilot projects, including the initial conversion of one office into a standard studio, three motel conversions attend story office conversion and the installation of 400 residential units across the second floor of a shopping mall. We've learned most from workshopping these projects as case studies, and we welcome any additional projects that you think we would be a good fit for. So, finally, we've also been able to research different potential applications uses and designs for our kits through an in depth building typology study, 3D printed mockups and performing a life cycle analysis of our sustainability impacts. Going forward, we recommend we definitely welcome any recommendations for maker spaces and manufacturers, as well as an eventual product showcase location. I'm really proud of how far my team has come in the past few months, and want to reiterate how incredibly helpful the Tomcat innovation transfer program was to work hits which is today. Thank you so much for your time and attention today and I'd welcome any questions that you might have. Wonderful. Thank you, RML for really inspiring presentation. You mentioned a couple of commitments for pilots at the last slide there. So, is there a, where are you targeting some of your first projects is it local. Or elsewhere in the US. That's a really awesome question and I think it highlights also one of the key challenges that we're mitigating for which is being able to make these units code compliant and understanding local building code does take a fair amount of effort and so to answer your question, we're focusing on California as of right now, but across different city typologies so San Francisco, but also places like Fresno, in order to develop these pilot projects. So starting with the state of California. Okay. And a couple of questions from the audience kind of around how you connect with developers and how receptive developers are to this concept so first of all, are there a lot of developers who are really keen on developing affordable housing from these vacant buildings, or does it take some convincing to get a developer to warm up to this idea. Yeah, absolutely. When it comes to the pilot projects we've really been focusing on a couple important points, the first one being affordable housing developers. There are people who do have capital to develop housing but are also mission oriented and share goals and values. And then secondly we've been focusing on affordable housing developers that already owned buildings that are vacant so they've either recently purchased distressed motels because of the impact that the pandemic has had on those types of buildings, or some property owners have owned an office building for up to 10 years and have been really looking to lease those units and are deciding to switch to residential. So thus far we've received quite a bit of traction just based on people who are already have already made that decision and are looking for a tool to make it happen. So we think that, you know, by pursuing these successful pilot projects we can show other more reluctant developers which is important to note the construction industry is, you know, does move slowly when it comes to change and probably for good reason because we're building spaces that need to be safe for people. But yeah. So it would be a single manufacturer of the panel or is there a number of different parties that you have to interact with to produce that. Yeah. So we're looking at a manufacturer network. Effectively, our value add as a component designer is that we're bringing together a lot of trades that have usually been fragmented. And so there is no manufacturing facility today that can make every single component that we need in our panels. But we're strategically, you know, targeting metal frame manufacturers because that's kind of the box within everything fits. So targeting them and then partnering with any kind of mechanical electrical plumbing subcontractors and suppliers and having those parts shipped to the manufacturing facility is how we're planning to operate. So not a single manufacturer relying on a network and kind of building those connections across industry as a systems integrator. One question around the cost. So the costs that you showed are those are national averages. That's that's one question. And then what is the cost of constructing a new housing unit that would that would enable you to address this housing unit in shortage for the 7.5 million people seeking affordable housing. So how do you have the cost to to to be able to address that. I'd be happy to walk through very briefly I have a couple more visuals that detail the costs. So just pulling those up really quickly. So this comes to looking at how we stack up against traditional methods, you know property owners will still have to purchase the building and these were not based on averages they were based on a case study of what we believe to be the most representative building typology so working with developers who have a really strong understanding of costs having done a lot of different projects. So we know a developer would have to take on permitting as well, get a custom design and use traditional construction methods. Overall the process for this five story retail building to 20 studio units would take about a year and the developer would have a 1% IRR leasing their units affordably. So what we really change is that when it comes to those costs, you know, a developer still has to take on property acquisition permitting and system upgrades. And while our actual materials aren't that different in cost from traditional construction methods. We enable them to cut design time by half and also reduce on site mistakes. The key here is the time component is because we can enable them to start leasing their units after three months and generating rental income. They're able to get an 8% IRR leasing their units affordably. So, hopefully that answers the question of how does the cost that our solution changes a change impacts the ability to produce affordable housing and that's really in the IRR and for property developers to be able to get a return. So this is also independent of government grants which do help for affordable housing a fair amount. And did I answer every. Yeah, no thank you that was that was wonderful. And then a question about so can, can a municipality contact you can you work directly with them or do you do you have to go through a developer. The city of Florida market has really heavily emphasized forming partnerships with cities, just recognizing the importance of aligned goals there. And when it comes to our actual customers. If anyone owns a building and wants to convert it so that could also be a city through some of their reclaimed properties for their city own deliver on that so we've been working most closely with the cities. And Fresno. Well, I want to take this last minute here to thank our mail again for a wonderful presentation thank all of our teams today. And we certainly hope to see you at another Tom cat event in the future. Thanks so much everyone. Thank you. Thanks for that. Thank you.