MIT 100k Entrepreneurship Competition C-Crete Technologies: “a high-impact, carbon dioxide-reducing and enormously promising business proposition.”
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s entrepreneurship competition, the MIT 100k, gave a new venture, C-Crete Technologies, top honors and a $100,000 cash prize on Wednesday night. One of 204 initial competitors, the company advanced to the finals through a year long series of pitching and plan-writing contests.
C-Crete has invented and patented a new type of cement, which it says is harder and more durable than any other on the market. The company’s co-founders, Rouzbeh Shahsavari, who is chief executive, and Natanel Barookhian, who is chief of finance, say their innovative building material will help meet a rising global demand for cement and concrete, while allowing the industry to reduce its negative impact on the environment.
According to reports from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a major industrial trade association, cement production is currently responsible for at least 5 percent of the world’s anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions each year.
The founders say that longer lasting cement like C-Crete’s can be used to make concrete that weighs less and is less bulky (but stronger) than standard varieties and requires less energy for manufacturing and transport. “It gives architects the option to build walls half as thick as normal walls,” said Mr. Shahsavari, “to build taller, more impressive and more elegant structures.”
One of the judges at the finals, Dr. Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and a general partner at Polaris Ventures in Waltham, Mass., said several factors made C-Crete the consensus winner:
“The pedigree of the C-Crete team, quality of their intellectual property and fact that they had secured protection there were definitely impressive. So were the facts.Concrete is the highest volume artificial material on earth. This group had made a significant discovery as to the actual, nano-scale structure of concrete. And they had a method of making concrete that uses less energy, delivers a cost reduction and ends up being stronger [than the current standard]. The killer part is that they showed you could introduce this new cement without introducing new cement plants. Ultimately we saw a high-impact, carbon dioxide-reducing and enormously promising business proposition.”
C-Crete says it has early customers but declined to name them. Mr. Barookhian said C-Crete is still figuring out its business model: it could make and sell cement, for example, or it could license its intellectual property. The global demand for cement, according to a research firm, the Freedonia Group, is expected to rise by 4.1 percent annually through 2013 to more than three billion tons, representing a market in the range of $245 billion dollars.
MIT also announced the winners of its Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Competition, a k a the Clean Energy Prize. A $200,000 cash grant went to C3 Nano, a team lead by Stanford University students Ajay Virkar and Melbs LeMieux.
C3 Nano is commercializing technology developed by the chemical engineering lab of Zhenan Bao, company co-founder and Stanford professor, to make a new, transparent and flexible electrode material for use in photovoltaic solar panels, or in the consumer electronics, especially touch-screen mobile devices.
What’s special about the C3 Nano electrode material is that it conducts a charge, but is flexible and transparent, compared to electrode materials that are standard today.
The start-up’s chief executive, former U.S. Navy Seal Jeff Sabados, explained: C3 Nano’s technology will let in about 12 percent more light than existing electrode materials, the result of which, in a photovoltaic solar panel is a 1 percent efficiency gain. (In other words, C3 Nano’s technology could turn a 100-megawatt solar farm into a 108-megawatt solar farm.)
Mr. Sabados, said this electrode material — still in a lab prototype state — would be manufactured without indium tin oxide, or other metals that are mined outside of the U.S., and growing rarer by the year.
The chief executive quit his day job (in non-profit, high tech research) six months ago, he said, when he learned of Mr. Bao’s technology. He is on a mission to “move the American economy away from mining metals, which lead to skyrocketing prices, pollution and people going out to invest in mines.”
C3 Nano previously won $51,000 in prizes at Rice University’s Business Plan Competition. The company is using its winnings from the competition circuit now to seek $2.5 million in venture funding.
After that, it intends to hire a chief of technology and a processing engineer to create a market-ready prototype that it can present to manufacturers of solar panels and solar film, and consumer electronics (especially mobile phones and flexible “e-paper”).
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