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XMeet the 10 Startups in Techstars' 2021 Space Accelerator Class
Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
Techstars' Space Accelerator took off this week with its third class of space-related companies that make everything from AI-powered smart cameras to technology that can anticipate celestial collisions.
The 10 startups selected for the competitive four-month program are based across the U.S. and Australia and will work with Techstars on a mostly remote basis.
All are developing technology with multiple uses in space and will receive a $120,000 investment in addition to access to Techstars' expanding network of mentors.
That network includes aerospace experts at the Pasadena-based NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Participating companies include Lockheed Martin, Arrow Electronics, SAIC and Israel Aerospace Industries.
"Alumni from our previous cohorts are launching space systems and infrastructure, raising tens of millions of dollars in venture capital as well as receiving lucrative contracts from both government and commercial customers," said Jonathan Fentzke, the program's managing director.
The program will culminate in a demo day on Sept. 2 where the startups will show off their work in hopes of winning potential investors or clients.
Fentzke noted that while no companies in this year's cohort are based in LA, Techstars still has partners mentors and investors based here.
"As it turns out the four companies in California out of 10 are not based in L.A. today, but will likely have a presence over time," Fentzke told dot.LA.
Here's a look at the 10 companies selected for this year's Techstars Space Accelerator.
Hyperkelp
LOCATION: San Clemente, Ca.
CEO: Graeme Rae
Founded by maritime engineer Dr. Graeme Rae, Hyperkelp is building buoys that aren't your average fishing bobber. Its tech can collect and transmit data about the surrounding ocean and incoming payloads from space. The company says its goal is to create a network of the buoys around the ocean to help aerospace launch companies stream data from anywhere around the world.
Hyperspec.ai
LOCATION: San Francisco, CA. and Tel Aviv, Israel
CEO: Ohad Levi
Hyperspec.ai makes smart cameras that run on artificial intelligence. The company's CEO Sravan Puttagunta previously worked in HP's engineering department. In a nutshell, Hyperspec's cameras are made to create accurate mapping and object tracking in real time, with the goal of being used on self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles.
Nicslab
LOCATION: Sydney, Australia
CEO: Dr. Andri Mahendra
Nicslab develops technology called the "source measurement system" that uses quantum computing to help organizations optimize their internet speeds and make them faster. Its current clients include the University of Oxford, HP Labs and Mitsubishi Electric.
Pierce Aerospace
LOCATION: Indianapolis, In.
CEO: Aaron Pierce
Pierce Aerospace makes software that helps autonomous drones identify objects and payloads. It argues that this software is critical to the development of the drone industry -- after all, it can be pretty scary if a drone goes rogue because it can't see where it's going. In 2019 the company received a roughly $50,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to continue work on its flagship product, the Flight Portal ID system, which the DoD wants to use on its Unmanned Aircraft Systems.
Pixspan
LOCATION: Rockville, MD.
CEO: Michael Rowny
Pixspan develops a system that lets large files be transferred from different storage locations (like hardware or the cloud) at rapid speeds -- sometimes up to 5 times faster than average, it reports. It's compatible with several app programming interfaces, the main one being Amazon Web Services.
QuSecure
LOCATION: San Mateo, Ca.
CEO: Dave Krauthamer
QuSecure is a security company that focuses on protecting government and corporate systems from hacks. Specifically, its software works to keep encrypted data from being stolen and decrypted by quantum computers, which can steal and read valuable information at rapid speed. Its customers include Google and Amazon.
SCOUT
LOCATION: Alexandria, Va.
CEO: Eric Ingram
Scout -- also known as Scout Space -- develops software that helps spacefaring companies visualize what's going on in the great beyond and avoid casualties, like crashes with other spacecraft, satellites or debris. The company was founded in 2019 and says its name is an acronym for helping Spacecraft Observe and Understand Things around them.
SeaSatellites
LOCATION: San Diego, CA.
CEO: Mike Flanigan
As the name suggests, SeaSatellites is building unmanned vessels that work as satellites for the ocean and have a wide array of potential uses, from environmental data collection to communications. Similar to their skyward counterparts, SeaSatellites' tech can be controlled from anywhere and are designed to carry payloads on long missions.
Xairos
LOCATION: Denver, CO.
CEO: David Mitlyng
This company's name is Greek to us -- literally. A nod to the Greek god of opportune time, Kairos, is an appropriate name for this startup using quantum mechanics to bring GPS-type technology to areas of the globe without internet access.
Thermexit
LOCATION: Boston, MA.
CEO: Katie Willgoos
Thermexit is the only company in this year's Space Accelerator cohort that's led by a woman. CEO Katie Willgoos joined the company in March and helps the company create and sell its main product, Theremexit Pads, which are tiny thermal sensing sticky pads that can be placed on circuit boards and inside computers.
Correction: An earlier version of this post stated this is Techstars' second space accelerator cohort. It's the accelerator's third such class. It also, misnamed the CEO of Hyperspec.ai.
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Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
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Salt AI’s $3M Bet, Snapchat’s Creator Cash, Rivian’s EV Tech, and ŌURA’s $200M Win
11:01 AM | December 20, 2024
🔦 Spotlight
Happy Friday, LA - let’s dive right in to this week’s highlights:
Salt AI, a forward-thinking AI startup based in Los Angeles, has secured a $3 million seed funding round led by Morpheus Ventures with participation from Struck Capital, among others, to tackle the complexity of managing workflows.Salt AI's blog details how its platform centralizes tools like CRM systems, project management software, and data trackers into one interface, eliminating inefficiencies and freeing up teams to focus on meaningful work. With new funding in hand, Salt plans to scale its platform and expand its reach, a move that underscores how AI can solve everyday business challenges.
Image Source: Salt AI - Aber Whitcomb
While Salt AI focuses on the workplace, Snapchat is doubling down on creators, with its latest updates introducing revenue-sharing opportunities and direct monetization features. The company’snewsroom update outlines how enhanced analytics will help creators better understand their audiences and sustain their work. The platform's latest updates introduce revenue-sharing opportunities and direct monetization features, along with analytics that give creators deeper insights into their audience. By making it easier for creators to grow and sustain their work, Snapchat positions itself as a key player in the creator economy, offering features that rival platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
Image Source: Snap
On the roads, Rivian is redefining what it means to drive an electric vehicle. The company’s latest software update includes advanced route planning, energy management tools, and customization options that make every trip more intuitive and efficient. Additionally, Rivian has introduced new entertainment features, including Google Cast, YouTube, and SiriusXM, as featured in Rivian’ssoftware spotlight, enhancing the in-cabin experience for drivers and passengers alike. This isn’t just about convenience; Rivian is showing how thoughtful software design can elevate the entire EV experience, blending practicality with sophistication.
Image Source: Rivian
ŌURA is making headlines with a fresh $200 million Series D funding round, with participation from Fidelity Management & Research Company and Dexcom, which now values the company at $2.55 billion. This investment, as reported byBusiness Wire, highlights the growing demand for wearable health technology and positions ŌURA as a leader in the space. With its sleek design and emphasis on actionable health insights, the funding will enable ŌURA to expand its reach and further integrate wearables into daily health management, strengthening its position in the competitive health tech market. With this funding, ŌURA aims to reach more users and expand its capabilities, further embedding wearables into daily health management.
Image Source: ŌURA
Stay tuned as Salt AI, Snapchat, Rivian, and ŌURA continue to evolve, offering us new ways to work, connect, and live better.
🤝 Venture Deals
LA Venture Funds
- Undeterred Capital participated in a $7M Seed funding round for Portal, a Watertown, Mass.-based biotech company specializing in advanced intracellular delivery technology to drive innovations in biological research and cellular therapeutics. - learn more
- Vamos Ventures participated in a $7.9M Series A funding round for Culina Health, a Hoboken, NJ-based company that provides personalized, science-based virtual nutrition care by connecting patients with registered dietitians, with plans to use the funds to expand its offerings for dietitians and patients, implement AI-driven tools to enhance care efficiency, and strengthen its leadership team through key hires. - learn more
- Humans Ventures participated in a $3.8M Seed funding round for Hamming.ai, a San Francisco-based company specializing in automated tools for testing and optimizing voice agents, with plans to expand its platform, enhance reliability and perform, and accelerate product development. - learn more
- Fifth Wall led, with participation from Starshot Capital and others, in a $9.5M Series A funding round for Mojave, a Sunnyvale, CA-based company developing energy-efficient commercial air conditioning technology. The funds will be used to accelerate the adoption of its innovative systems and reduce energy consumption in the cooling industry. - learn more
- ReMY Investors participated in a $17M Series B funding round for Scripta Insights, a company that leverages data analytics to help employers and healthy plans reduce prescription drug costs, with the funds aimed at expanding its platform and scaling operations. - learn more
- Mantis VC participated in a $16.5M funding round for Nuon, a company specializing in Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) solutions that streamline AI, data, and infrastructure software deployment. The funds will support product development, readiness for general availability in 2025, and efforts to expand customer acquisition. - learn more
- B Capital participated in a $102M Series C funding round for Precision, a company developing minimally invasive brain-computer interfaces to treat neurological disorders, with plans to use the funds to expand its team, advance clinical research, and refine its AI-powered brain implant for helping users with severe paralysis operate digital devices using their thoughts. - learn more
- The Games Fund led a $3M Seed funding round for Dark Passenger, a Poland-based game studio founded by veterans of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, to create an unannounced, innovative, first-person multiplayer PvPvE stealth-action game set in a distinctive universe inspired by feudal Japan and martial arts cinema. - learn more
LA Exits
- Calliope Networks, a generative AI company providing licensed media content like movies, TV shows, and news, has been acquired by Protege to strengthen its platform’s capabilities in advancing AI development. - learn more
Read moreShow less
How Will LA Look in 2028? A Look at the City's Plan To Embrace Transformational Tech
07:00 AM | January 02, 2023
Midjourney/Dall-E
It’s 8 a.m. on a Monday morning. I wave at the contact-free traffic sensor and the cars stop so I can cross. A delivery robot zooms past bringing cold brew and breakfast burritos to neighbors, while someone activates a micromobility electric scooter and glides off down a side street. An autonomous vehicle on a trial run pauses at the stop sign, guided by Global Positioning System satellites more than 12,000 miles overhead. A smart pole tracks air quality at the intersection and reports back to the data science team at City Hall.
At the “smart” bus stop I press a button and an AI swiftly triangulates incoming Metro Los Angeles GIS (Geographic Information System) data before a synthesized voice reads out wait times. I jump on the bus when it arrives, using my Tap card to pay the fare and grab a seat, plugging my charger into the (under seat) USB port. Thanks to the bus’s persistent WiFi signal en route, I pull up the latest technology report from the Harvard Business Review, courtesy of the L.A. Public Library, and start making notes.
Twenty minutes later and I'm the first one walking into my co-working space. As soon as I swipe my entry card the centralized system detects a change in the motion sensor network. It then turns on the lights, ambient music, and HVAC (heating, ventilation and AC) , ensuring the building remains energy efficient and to code when unoccupied.
Midjourney/Dall-E
The 2028 Plan
In December 2020, when the SmartLA 2028 city plan was released by (the now former) Mayor Garcetti’s office, this sort of scenario felt far-off.
But it’s all there in the document: a plan to turn L.A. from reliance on fossil fuels and cars and into a data-driven connected city, which addresses the digital divide and brings fresh ideas, including telehealth, clean tech and a switch to mass transit.
What no one knew, when they started working on this plan back in 2019, was a global pandemic was on its way. It took that pandemic to throw everyone into a digital-ready future earlier than (everyone) expected. But here we are.
“Throughout the crisis, digital tools have emerged as a critical lifeline for our society,” notes the SmartLA 2028 city plan. “Enabling contact-free essential services, accelerated medical solutions, artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted policy making, protest coordination through social media, real-time community engagement and a scale and pace of innovation previously unthinkable.”
LA and the Future of Everything
Let’s back up a moment, to the 1950s when L.A. first looked like The Future to the rest of the world.
Post-war industries flourished here. The Federal-Aid Highway Act (1956) ushered in the freeway system and cars poured off the manufacturing lots. Cold War NASA missions heralded an aerospace boom. The Case Study House Program showcased prefabricated components and modern appliances. Bold sci-fi style buildings such as The Chemosphere House (1960) and LAX’s Theme Building (1961) materialized on the landscape. L.A. County’s population tripled between 1940 (2.7 million) to over 6 million by 1960.
In 2023, our population is now north of 10 million and, as a result, this new L.A. Future plan is less about appearances, and more about a skillful cloud-based hyper-connectivity providing a vast mesh of advanced technologies which aim to make this city sustainable, livable and equitable for all.
Sure, we’ve got Big Tech from Up North on our doorstep. The FAANG companies (Facebook, Apple etc.) have carved out nearly 6 million square footage of L.A. westside alone, and obviously they contribute massively to our economy. But a fairer L.A. will depend less on unicorns (startups with a $1 billion valuation before public listing) and more on a needs-based cohesive approach to innovation, drawing on the best resources from academic institutions, updating local government departments across the board, and bringing both the venture capital community and its well-funded startups into alliance with real-world requirements.
Along these lines, Miki Reynolds, CEO and co-founder of Grid110, the L.A. tech hub, wants to ensure a spirit of egalitarianism is carried through into L.A.’s startups.
"The L.A. startup scene is more than just Venice and Santa Monica," says Reynolds, who prefers a cityscape and initially headquartered Grid110 in DTLA as a result. "Since our inception, we've supported 250 companies who have raised over $90M in investment capital. But I'm even more proud to say 70 % of our portfolio companies have founders who are women and 75% are founders of color. L.A. is an incredibly rich and diverse city - we need to reflect that in our emerging technology."
A welcome sign is that many L.A. technology companies have joined PledgeLA, an industry-wide initiative to make the tech sector accountable to its communities, establishing goals around diversity and social impact, and recording their progress.
Midjourney/Dall-E
Technology For Good
So how will L.A. ensure its tech-enabled future is providing value for all? The SmartLA 2028 city plan laid out some bold objectives, with measurable outcomes including a 10% reduction in travel time by utilizing data from 40,000 loop detectors across 4,500 connected intersections and annual savings of $3 million through converting over 165,000 street lamps to LED and connecting them to a dashboard to streamline maintenance and track outages.
The MyLA311 site and mobile app allow Angelenos a simple-to-use interface to city services. It's relatively unsophisticated in terms of UX (user experience) and design, but it works because it was created with equity in mind so everyone can use it. If you need to report a pothole, civic safety issue, schedule pick-up of bulky items or find the nearest municipal building or park, it’s all there - and available in English, Spanish, Korean, Armenian and Chinese (simplified and traditional) to reflect our diverse communities.
MyLA311 would not have been possible, however, without the Los Angeles Open Data project. This is the result of over 7 years of capturing, standardizing, centralizing and then analyzing vast amounts of city data - from almost every department - transportation, sanitation, public safety (crime stats), housing, infrastructure and health (most notably COVID-19 transmission data).
The Los Angeles Open Data’s main function is to provide data and analysis support to city programs which aim to realize high-value community outcomes by providing policy recommendations. Simply put - if you don’t know where you’re starting from (base line), how will you know if a program is a success?
But it’s also entirely open and accountable to the public too. As a result, Angelenos can now drill down to find out more on hyperlocal data sets which provide meaning to them. For example, a team scraped data on Black-owned businesses in L.A. and compiled a “story map” here, so people can choose to spend money within their communities and support causes most meaningful to them.
This data also powers ideas which have emerged from the Innovation and Performance Commission (IPC), an open forum for city employees to propose pilot projects which can receive allocations from a $1 million fund. According to the SmartLA 2028 report, “Since its inception in 2016, over 40 projects have been funded, including a mobile nurse practitioner unit that reduces emergency room visits, employee payroll app that reduces paper and staff resources, and 3D printers for rapid prototyping of public works projects.”
Connectivity Access
All these initiatives are vital to the running of a “smart city” - but what’s the use if a significant proportion of the population doesn’t have access to digital connectivity?
This situation was exacerbated by the pandemic and many agencies stepped up to close up the digital divide, including Get Connected Los Angeles, where the city partnered with the California Emerging Technology Fund and EveryoneOn to help Angelenos get access to computers, digital literary services and low-cost internet connectivity.
The Los Angeles County Library extended their Wi-Fi service to over 60 of its local branch parking structures so locals could “park and connect” (or “sit and connect” at nearby outdoor seating) to pick up email, do homework, or carry out job searches. While the Los Angeles Public Library rolled out its Tech2go Hotspot Loan to library card holders in good standing and re-trained staff to act as “cybernauts” and offer technology assistance.
Imagining the Future
With all these tech-future equitable concepts in place, what will L.A. look like in 2028 when the world arrives on our doorstep for the Olympics?
At first glance - and this is no bad thing - it might not look that different at all, because no new construction/venues will be built, according to the official Games Plan. We have enough facilities to host the Games. In a bid for sustainability and imaginative adaptive reuse, the plan is clear on that score.
But what will be entirely revolutionary is the technologically-based infrastructure enabling everyone to get around, connect, find out what’s going on, and enjoy the sporting and cultural events. As 15,000 athletes arrive at LAX they’ll take the automated people mover to the Metro and end up at the Olympic Village (UCLA) in no time. With the smart city layer in place, anything is possible - augmented reality glasses overlaying real-time sports scores, holograms of athletes participating in community-led training sessions, multi-lingual robots acting as guides and scanning tickets at turnstiles.
It all starts with the data - and L.A. is already way ahead of the game on that score.
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S.C. Stuart
S.C. Stuart is a foreign correspondent (ELLE China, Esquire Latin America), Contributing Writer at Ziff Davis PCMag, and consults as a futurist for Hollywood Studios. Previously, S.C. was the head of digital at Hearst Magazines International while serving as a Non-Executive Director, UK Trade & Investment (US) and Digital Advisor at The Smithsonian.
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