Allison Hinckley, PhD

Senior Associate

About

Allison Hinckley is a Senior Associate at Fine Structure Ventures where she brings more than a decade of experience leading research and commercial development of new technologies spanning wearable devices, IoT, and climate tech. Allison manages FSV’s investment pipeline in climate tech as well as in advanced materials and manufacturing. She received a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Stanford, where her research focused on next-generation electronic materials and electrochemical and thermoelectric devices. Prior to joining FSV, Allison founded and ran a deep tech consultancy, helping early-stage startups with thermal, mechanical, and electrical systems design and materials selection to accelerate their time to market.

Allison also holds an M.Phil. in Micro- and Nanotechnology Enterprise from the University of Cambridge where she was a Gates-Cambridge Scholar and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from MIT.

  • Many consider fusion to be the ‘Holy Grail’ of clean energy because it has the potential to power the grid with minimal greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Supported by the world’s leading investors in breakthrough energy technologies, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has assembled a world-class team of experts in magnets, manufacturing, and plasma physics dedicated to the mission of delivering clean, limitless fusion power to the world.

    Learn more at cfs.energy

  • 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.

  • mmWave is critical to the future of all wireless technology, but the realization of its potential faces severe roadblocks. Weak uplink, high deployment costs, low 5G radio efficiency and soaring operating costs are all combining to thwart the promise of mmWave. Currently, 5G networks are being held back from realizing their true potential due to a critical missing component: high-performance mmWave power amplifier technology. High-performance GaN-on-Silicon (GaN-on-Si) brings a new option to the table that could make 5G millimeter wave more practical. Finwave’s award-winning 3DGaN technology improves linearity, output power and efficiency in 5G mmWave systems – while reducing costs for carriers.

    Learn more at finwavesemi.com.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • VEIR’s innovations enable reliable, cost–effective high-temperature superconductor (HTS) transmission over very long distances through narrow rights–of–way, connecting lowest cost renewable resources to where they’re needed, when they’re needed. VEIR’s passive evaporative cryogenic cooling delivers significantly more cooling power per kilogram of nitrogen flow compared to mechanical subcooling.

    Learn more at veir.com.