Throughout their time at MIT, students are encouraged to team up and pursue innovative ideas. Jessica Shi ’17 (left) and Charlene Xia ’17 work during their senior year on a prototype for Tactile, a portable realtime text-to-Braille converter. With four fellow cofounders from the Class of 2017, they are now beta testing their device in Boston. Photo: Lillie Paquette/School of Engineering
By focusing on innovations, not simply ideas, and by emphasizing the importance of impact and the challenge of delivering at scale, we will expose our students to demanding, inspiring activities all along the innovation chain, in contexts from the developing world to industry.”
Five years later, a headquarters for that initiative is under construction in Kendall Square. The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Hub will occupy the top five floors of the new E38 with multiuse spaces for student makers and entrepreneurs, researchers, and staff. Several of MIT’s flagship entrepreneurship programs will move into the building, including the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, the Translational Fellows Program, Project Manus, the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and MIT Sandbox. Centralizing such programs will accelerate the journey of aspiring MIT entrepreneurs.
Of course, students aren’t waiting for the grand opening of this new facility to take advantage of the Institute’s array of innovation resources—those listed above, along with many others both formal and informal across campus. Here are examples of how some of MIT’s many student founder teams have charted their own paths from concept to startup.
Yellowstone Energy
MIT founders
Matthew Ellis PhD ’17 (Nuclear Science and Engineering)
Samuel Shaner SM ’14, PhD ’18 (Nuclear Science and Engineering)
Mission
Yellowstone Energy is developing an advanced nuclear reactor designed to exploit the existing nuclear supply chain for quick and cost-effective deployment.
Status
The startup filed for patent protection in January for its key technical innovation: a novel reactor control technology that enhances passive safety and reduces costs for their molten salt reactor. In June, Yellowstone received almost $2.6 million from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program. Its next steps will be creating a detailed computational model for the plant and beginning experiments on key components.
MIT pathway
Yellowstone Energy is an outgrowth of Shaner’s time as a 2015 MIT Energy Fellow. Through the MIT Energy Initiative, he received a year of funding from Exxon-Mobil to examine challenges in the nuclear supply chain—and found a need to fill.
“I looked at the landscape of new reactors and saw that everyone wants to use the new fuel form,” he says. Most advanced reactor designs rely on new material compositions and/or fuel that is between 5% and 20% Uranium-235—a more highly enriched fuel than is typically used today.
“While the new material compositions and higher enrichments enable compelling reactor designs, the commercial supply chains required to produce these new fuel forms are incomplete and would require significant time and investment to construct,” Shaner says.
To shorten development time and cut costs, Shaner joined with Ellis to develop a molten nitrate salt reactor that takes advantage of the existing supply chain by using uranium oxide fuel that is less than 5% enriched. Yellowstone Energy was born.
In December 2016, MIT Sandbox awarded the company $25,000, which enabled it to file its first provisional patent. Shaner says the team received valuable feedback from Sandbox mentors, as well as the MIT Venture Mentoring Service.
Even before Yellowstone Energy, “MIT provided me with a great breadth and depth of opportunities to prepare me for starting a new clean energy venture,” Shaner says. For example, in fall 2012, he took 15.366 MIT Energy Ventures, a class focused on creating energy companies, and he served as co-managing director of the 2013 MIT Clean Energy Prize.
Advice for fellow student entrepreneurs
“The entrepreneurial support system of MIT goes beyond your diploma date,” says Ellis.
Shaner agrees: “Don’t be afraid to reach out to other founders and other members of the community. We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the generosity and support we’ve received—not only from our professors, but from the broader MIT engineering and entrepreneurship community, as well as from MIT alumni.”
—Kathryn M. O’Neill
Biobot Analytics
MIT founders
Newsha Ghaeli, former MIT research fellow
Mariana G. Matus PhD ’18 (Computational and Systems Biology)
Mission
A stream of data flows beneath our feet. In city pipes, raw sewage carries microscopic information on residents’ health, in the form of gut microbes and chemical compounds—traces of food and drugs—we as a society are constantly excreting. Biobot Analytics seeks to harness this data stream by deploying robots into the depths of the sewer, constantly sampling the city like a doctor closely monitoring the health of a patient. “We see wastewater as being such a rich resource—and it’s currently untapped,” says Matus. “Our vision and our mission is to promote a more data-driven response to public health and government policy making.”
Status
Biobot is focused on growth. The company has five full-time employees, including an expert in spatial epidemiology, Noriko Endo SM ’14, PhD ’17. The Somerville-based company is working with its first city partner: Cary, North Carolina. There, the team is deploying robots in 10 locations to measure opioid drug metabolites as part of the city’s efforts to monitor and address its opioid crisis. The city will leverage the data to evaluate the success of intervention programs.
The project in Cary is just the beginning of what the company hopes to accomplish. “We see this technology being implemented in every city around the world,” says Ghaeli.
MIT pathway
The startup began in 2014 as the Underworlds research project, the brainchild of MIT faculty members Eric Alm of the Department of Biological Engineering and Carlo Ratti of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Matus, then a graduate student in Alm’s lab, and Ghaeli, a research fellow in Ratti’s group, led the interdisciplinary project, which garnered a $4 million grant from the Kuwait-MIT Center for Natural Resources and the Environment and grew to include 20 researchers from six different labs across MIT.
On its way to launching, Biobot participated in numerous MIT programs, including the MIT $100K Competition, MIT FUSE, designX, the Sandbox Innovation Fund Program, MIT IDEAS Global Challenge, MIT Water Innovation Prize, and the delta v accelerator at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.
Through all these experiences, the resource that has made the biggest difference to Biobot, says Ghaeli, is the MIT network. Sandbox director Jinane Abounadi SM ’90, PhD ’98 encouraged Ghaeli and Matus and put them in touch with other MIT staff, including School of Engineering Dean Anantha Chandrakasan. That led to broader opportunities, such as an invitation for Matus to present Biobot to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during his visit to the Institute in May of this year.
“That’s the main reason for us to move back to Boston—to stay within this ecosystem,” Ghaeli says. “It’s been such a huge benefit to us.”
Advice for fellow student entrepreneurs
“Take advantage of all the resources on campus,” Matus says. “They help you think and refine your ideas, and along the way, you’ll meet people you’ll stay connected with through your entire entrepreneurial journey.” In 2015, when the team pitched Biobot’s business concept at the $100K competition, they didn’t know that, listening in the audience, was someone who would become a mentor and supporter—and, 10 months later, their first investor.
—Alison F. Takemura PhD ’15
dot Learn
MIT founders
Tunde Alawode SM ’15, PhD ’17 (Mechanical Engineering)
Sam Bhattacharyya MBA ’16
Mission
Dot Learn’s consistent goal has been to make online video learning accessible in the developing world, but its approach has shifted. Originally, the founders started an online learning platform that was geared toward students in Sub-Saharan Africa, but they’ve evolved their focus to provide software that compresses educational videos. They can package an hour of video in as little as 1MB, about 100 times smaller than the average YouTube video, and deliver content to areas where data accessibility is an issue.
Status
Educational providers like Coursera and Khan Academy as well as companies in the developing world have already approached dot Learn about working together. The video compression technology is being developed now, and the founders hope to begin rolling it out to companies in late 2018. In the next year, Bhattacharyya and Alawode hope to address issues of scaling the business, with the aim that dot Learn will help to provide data-light online learning to 50 million students by 2022.
MIT pathway
Alawode and Bhattacharyya met in 2015 in MIT D-Lab’s Development Ventures class. Bhattacharyya felt driven to address global education inequality after working in the Peace Corps, and Alawode shared that passion.
After that class, the founders entered the $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. The Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, D-Lab, and MIT-Africa Initiative all provided financial support, and through the MIT-Africa Program at MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) they were able to perform market research directly in Ghana. Bhattacharyya and Alawode received an award from the MIT IDEAS Global Challenge and the MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge, and further developed their ideas through MIT Sandbox and the Trust Center‘s delta v accelerator.
Bhattacharyya credits the combination of all of these resources for dot Learn’s progress. Early on, the D-Lab class in which he met Alawode “helped me learn that I wasn’t crazy—this was a path others were following, and this is something I could do, too,” he recounts. Further along their road, the delta v accelerator helped to focus their energy in a new way. “For the first time, I had the full day to work on the project. I thought, ‘This is my job now.’ It was amazing,” he recounts. Even now, after graduation, MIT mentors have continued to help him and Alawode as they build, shift, and scale.
Advice for fellow student entrepreneurs
“Entrepreneurship is like running a marathon through a maze,” says Bhattacharyya. “To get this far and keep going requires persistence, extreme optimism, and a nearly compulsive paranoia.” But he insists that the perseverance and grit pay off: “If you’re truly passionate to spend the next 5 to 10 years working on your idea, keep going. You’ll make it happen.”
—Katherine J. Igoe
Bloomer Tech
MIT founders
Alicia Chong Rodriguez SM ’18 (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Integrated Design and Management)
Aceil Halaby SM ’17 (Integrated Design and Management)
Mission
“Our mission is to transform everyday clothing to manage chronic disease. Heart disease is the number-one killer for women. Women wear bras. We thought the idea was very obvious,” says Halaby. Washable sensors, comfortably embedded in undergarments, continuously track cardiac behavior and connect to an app via Bluetooth, so users can monitor their health in real time and share it with their physician.
Bloomer aims to take the guesswork out of cardiovascular health, especially for women feeling symptomatic or recover ing from cardiac events. Sensors analyze important metrics such as heart rate variability, respiratory rates, and heart rhythms. They can detect irregularities, such as an arrhythmia, and alert doctors to take preemptive action. An app provides interactive tools to help women modify behavior based on this personalized data, and they can opt for emailed personal reports.
Status
Today, along with third cofounder Monica Abarca, Chong Rodriguez and Halaby are collaborating with cardiologists to provide relevant information, and running clinical trials to ensure medical-grade quality, comfort, accuracy, and washability of the device. They aim to bring it to market in 2019.
MIT pathway
MIT played an instrumental role in Bloomer’s launch, says Halaby. “We got access to a lot of resources with MIT programs,” she notes.
MISTI enabled them to conduct primary market research in Peru and India. The Sandbox Innovation Fund provided the team with $25,000, which they put toward building prototypes and initial product and market testing. The Legatum Center also fueled the launch. “Legatum provided us funds for travel and prototyping. It also provided mentorship, entrepreneurship workshops, and a strong network of impact-driven founders,” Halaby says.
Additional product development was done on campus at the MIT Media Lab, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and International Design Center. The team also completed MIT Kickstart (now the MIT Entrepreneurship and Maker Skills Integrator), an immersive hardware boot camp at the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node.
Participation in the delta v accelerator at the Trust Center later allowed them to refine their business model, build a staff, and take risks in a supportive space. “We basically lived there,” Halaby says. “We had a strong network of mentors, and we were able to dedicate ourselves full-time to exploring what our business could be. We could be fearless.”
They also learned real-world business lessons. “We got our first slap in the face when we realized it was probably too early for interns,” Halaby says with a laugh.
Professors also provided practical advice—particularly Matt Kressy, director of the Integrated Design and Management program, and Collin Stultz, a principal investigator and cardiologist in the Research Laboratory of Electronics, under whom Chong Rodriguez wrote her thesis about female-specific computationally generated cardiac biomarkers.
“We were working with professors who are very experienced in this field and industry, so we were able to get a successful framework to implement prototypes and analyze software and business strategy,” Halaby says.
Advice for fellow student entrepreneurs
“Don’t be afraid of failure, and don’t try to do anything alone,” Halaby says. Thanks to MIT’s resources, she adds, Bloomer didn’t have to.