Lots of Energy, Around Clean Energy: March Networking Night

Rev: Ithaca Startup Works hosted its most recent Networking Night on March 8, focused on the theme of CleanEnergy. Innovators from all aspects of the clean energy industry and at various stages of business growth presented their pitches in front of a packed house of fellow businesspeople, potential investors, and community members.

Pitches

Lynden Archer, Cornell’s Director of Energy Systems Institute, served as emcee and welcomed the crowd and fellow guest speakers.

Speaking guests included:

• Herb Dwyer: CEO of EMPEQ, and currently in the Executive MBA program at Cornell University. EMPEQ provides solutions to make energy efficiency projects affordable for small and medium sized companies.
• Gabriel Rodríguez Calero: Founder of Ecolectro,  a company focused on facilitating the manufacturing
  of fuel cellsand electrolyzers with half the cost and double the durability of current solutions.
• Romy Fain: Cornell PhD in ECE and Founder/CEO of Heat Inverse. Fain is working with a photonics-based cooling technology, initially demonstrated at Stanford, that helps manufacturers increase efficiency with a microfabricated thin-film material that gets cold with zero-energy input.  Heat^-1 is one of the newest member of Rev and recently completed an NSF I-Corps Short Course.
• Dave Bradley: Founder of FYTFuels, a company that develops innovative approaches to improve bio-fuel production.
• Hugh Bullen, PhD candidate in Chemical Engineering at Cornell University and 2017 Cornell University Commercialization Fellow, spoke about his company, BeyondVolta. The company is focused on building batteries geared towards increasing the flight time of commercial drones. The technology originated in Dr. Lynden Archer’s Lab.
• Juan Guzman: CEO and founder of Capro-X spoke his company which invented a method for converting greek yogurt waste into bio oil. Juan is a Commercialization Fellow and went through the NDF ICorps National Teams program after awarded $50,000 from NSF for customer discovery. Technology is out of Lars Angenent’s Lab.

 

76West Winners

After the pitches from the clean energy entrepreneurs, several winners from 76West, a clean energy competition focused on growing business in the Southern Tier of NY, discussed their startup journeys. Panel participants included:

• Micatu – Develops optical sensor technologies with next-generation measurement capabilities for smart grid, wind, power, transmission, and condition monitoring applications.
• Biological Energy– Invented an electroactive attached growth (EAG) module that increases wastewater treatment capacity and eliminates more than 95 percent of nutrients that are harmful to the environment, while reducing energy use.

Throughout the night, guests were able to enjoy delicious complimentary food and beverages from local grocer, Green Star.