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1849 bio
Engineering microbes for miners to unlock billions in trapped metal
1849 bio designs microbes enabling cheap metal extraction allowing miners to unlock value from low quality copper and gold ores. Surprisingly, the mining industry is one of the largest scale users of biotech in the world with biomining processes accounting for ~1% of global copper production. Biomining is ultra-low cost, running around ~$1/ton of ore vs ~$7/ton for conventional processes. Unfortunately, while biomining is cheap, it can’t be applied to over 80% of copper ores, leaving vast resources without profitable extraction methods. An estimated ~$800B of copper sit today in waste materials and stockpiles with negative unit economics. While a great deal of effort has been spent on optimizing microbial metal extraction processes, very little effort has been spent on optimizing the microbes themselves. To change that, we’re creating new biotech tools and platforms applied directly to the types of biology most relevant to miners. This enables us to develop new microbes and tackle some of the most difficult problems in biomining, unlocking billions in value from unprofitable resources while being more environmentally friendly than conventional processes. We’re world class microbial engineers. We met while doing our PhDs in synthetic biology, where we spent our time applying and developing the most advanced bioengineering technologies to engineer living cells.
Abatable
Carbon markets platform and solutions
Abatable is a carbon offsetting procurement platform which connects companies with carbon project developers of high quality carbon offsets. Abatable facilitates procurement decisions by offering third party quality assessments of projects and by standardizing multi-year purchase agreements and an automated RFP platform. The team has extensive experience advising institutional investors on nature-based carbon removal and impact investment portfolios and is backed by leading investors like YCombinator, BlueBear Capital and Global Founders Capital.
Advano
Advano is a battery technology company that improve the longevity of…
Combining nanotechnology with fundamental chemical engineering principles to accelerate the renewable energy revolution.
Aerogen Systems
Modernizing Chip Manufacturing Infrastructure
We are building the future of chip manufacturing. Chips are more advanced than ever, and the features inside them keep getting smaller. But the cleanroom infrastructure supporting their manufacture has not scaled at the same pace. Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and others spend billions building and operating massive cleanrooms, only to isolate their most advanced wafers from the surrounding facility as much as possible. We think that architecture is backwards. Instead of making the entire building cleaner, why not make the machinery itself as clean as possible? Talos is our proprietary tool-integrated purification system. It sits directly inside semiconductor equipment and continuously destroys airborne molecular contaminants before they reach the wafer. Instead of fighting contamination by constantly flooding tools with ultra-high-purity nitrogen, Talos keeps the environment inside the machine 10–100x cleaner, without the massive purge-gas bill. Talos is powerful on its own, but it is also the foundation for a much bigger vision: the Cleanpipe. The Aerogen Systems Cleanpipe is an ultra-clean interconnect infrastructure that protects wafers as they move from machine to machine across the fab. Rather than relying on a billion-dollar cleanroom to protect every cubic foot of factory space, Cleanpipe creates a controlled environment only where cleanliness actually matters: around the wafer. Talos cleans the tools. Cleanpipe connects them. Eventually, we delete the cleanroom and build more advanced chips, at greater scale, with radically less infrastructure. With cleanpipes connecting tools, chip fabs can exist anywhere.
Agency Tool Company
Reliable infrastructure to build, deploy and manage real-world robots.
Agency Tool Company ships software to robots in the field 20x faster than a Docker pull with ATC Deploy, sending only the bytes that changed and resuming when the network drops. Deployment tooling is the connection between the lab & the field that continually bottlenecks robotics scaling and lacks a strong robotics-native solution. Deploy is live today with 3 launch partners across ag, construction, and logistics robotics. Our second product, ATC Build, offers embedded-compute as a CI service so devs can run tests and validate their software on the actual target hardware. Build supports the Nvidia Jetson lineup, Raspberry Pi, and a number of other embedded platform targets. Jack Morrison and Davis Foster founded and sold Scythe Robotics after deploying hundreds of autonomous mowers across the country; Agency Tool Company is building the robotics deployment platform across hardware and software they wish they had. Learn more at https://agencytool.com
Airhart Aeronautics
Airplanes anyone can fly
Airhart is making airplanes anyone can fly. Our semi-autonomous tech will enable 10x more people to fly their own planes and make flying to Tahoe as easy as driving to the grocery store
Airthium
Decarbonized heat and power cheaper than fossil fuels
We build engines that have the potential to slash 33% or worldwide CO2 emissions - cost-effectively. First, we help food and mining companies cut both their heat costs *and* CO2 emissions by replacing gas-fired steam boilers with our proprietary high temperature heat pumps. Our heat pumps make up to 3x more heat with the same amount of electricity, even at up to 1000°F. Once the heat pump market is mature, we will address the seasonal energy storage market. Our storage units are based on the exact same proprietary engine we use for our heat pumps. They work with solar and wind, and replace lithium-ion batteries, fossil-fired power plants, CO2 capture and storage, and fuel procurement, with a cheaper, sustainable and more reliable alternative, which can be sited anywhere. The first opportunity is a high-margin market worth 3% of worldwide CO2. The second is a much bigger market worth 30% of worldwide CO2. By the time all cars become electric, it will be even more. Our key is we are building the first Stirling engine to reach 86% of the Carnot efficiency, compared to 64% for the state of the art. We do all that while significantly decreasing costs, and increasing reliability. Please see Airthium's website for more information.
Albacore Inc.
Drone submarines
Albacore Inc. builds mass-producible long-range drone submarines. In the era of autonomous warfare, we support military operators with underwater systems that can traverse oceans and be deployed at scale.