Shyam Kamadolli

Steel has been made essentially the same way for thousands of years, by using carbon as a chemical reductant. Today, that process is responsible for about 8% of global CO2 emissions. Boston Metal has developed a game-changing electrolysis process for making steel. In their Molten Oxide Electrolysis (MOE) cell, an inert metallic anode is immersed in an electrolyte containing iron ore. The result is a clean, high purity liquid metal that can be sent directly to ladle metallurgy — no reheating required.

Learn more at bostonmetal.com.

Perovskites are a relatively new class of semiconductors that have emerged over the past two decades as a means to generate more electrons from incident sunlight at a lower cost compared to traditional PV modules.  Caelux has developed a proprietary formulation of the material and a manufacturing process that allows deployment in tandem with any other solar panel made of silicon.

Debut uses a proprietary platform technology called cell-free biomanufacturing to unlock and overcome the limitations of cell-based techniques. This process retains the useful parts of the cell, such as enzymes, and discards the limiting parts of the cell to overcome the barriers of traditional biomanufacturing. Debut provides access to complex and high-value ingredients for a vast number of markets.

Learn more at debutbiotech.com.

The current generation of AI hardware (TPU, GPU, CPU) is not optimized for edge AI especially as the complexity of tasks and memory requirements increases. Femtosense has developed a 2D array of tightly coupled digital compute and memory blocks that exploit
network sparsity coupled with an algorithm that trains networks to expose their underlying sparsity while maintaining performance. This coupled hardware and algorithm approach allows Femtosense to deliver the AI performance of large models in constrained edge platforms.

Mainspring’s research into high-efficiency methods of converting fuel to electricity led to the development of their Linear Generator – distinct from an engine, microturbine, or fuel cell – that directly converts motion along a straight line into electricity using chemical energy. Mainspring is now commercializing the industry’s first linear generator to maximize efficiency, resilience, and flexibility in electricity production while significantly lowering both emissions and cost.  Their linear generators are fully dispatchable, able to track both electricity demands and renewables production and can also seamlessly switch between renewable fuels such as biogas and hydrogen and conventional fuels such as natural gas and propane.

Learn more at mainspringenergy.com.

Mantle helps manufacturers bring new products to life faster, cheaper, and more easily with its patented TrueShape metal 3D printing technology. TrueShape delivers precision parts that dramatically cut the time and cost of making production-grade tools, molds, and dies. Mantle tools have been used to produce over one million end-use parts for customers – a number that grows each day.

Learn more at mantle3d.com.

Nitricity produces ready-to-use nitrogen with only air, water, and renewable electricity deployed as fertilizer directly at the point of use. Their technology has the potential to produce cost-effective fertilizer for environmentally conscious farms, as well as for developing markets outside of traditional supply chain infrastructure. Removing the long supply chain allows farmers to apply fertilizers when their fields are ready, reducing wasteful runoff and maximizing nitrogen delivery anywhere in the world.

Learn more at nitricity.co.

Today, businesses use an energy-intensive technique called separation to filter out the valuable methane from other gases. That often requires using fossil fuels to boil off the unwanted chemicals.  Osmoses, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, has created a membrane material thinner than human hair to reduce carbon emissions from industrial processes such as natural gas production.

Learn more at osmoses.com.

Modern agriculture faces increasing challenges due to climate change and population growth. Humanity needs to produce more food to sustain a growing population while significantly reducing emissions. Current methods to improve crops are severely limited by development time and cost. Phytoform’s technology significantly speeds up trait development and implementation, producing new plant traits in months rather than years, and at a fraction of the cost of conventional breeding and GMO technologies.

Learn more at phytoformlabs.com.

Quaise is commercializing technology developed at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center to economically enable access to baseload geothermal power anywhere in the world. The company plans to leverage their unique drilling platform to decarbonize existing fossil fuel-fired power plants with high power density geothermal energy.

Learn more at quaise.energy.

Sepion combines the latest in nanoscience, polymer chemistry, and cell engineering to deliver lithium-metal batteries with disruptive performance and economic benefits relative to incumbent lithium-ion technology.

Learn more at sepiontechnologies.com.