Industry: CleanTech

Upgrade Energy

Origin: MO | Grant Awarded: 2022 | Status: Active

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What is Upgrade Energy?

Upgrade Energy began its journey in 2020 from shifting from a drone company to a battery company after realizing the biggest limiting factor in drone technology is flight time. The founder, Matthew Barnard, developed a new LiIon battery technology and along with his team, scaled the company to manufacture drone batteries at scale in St Louis Missouri. After early traction, the company further expanded their product line to carrying 14 distinct products to date. After working through customer feedback, Ariel Cerfoglia and Matthew Barnard have worked to bring Smart Battery technology to their battery technology, enabling battery analytics to further improve the safety and widespread use of the batteries. Since launching, Upgrade Energy has sold over 1000 batteries, selling through 3 online retailers, direct to consumer, and specific batteries developed for commercial clients. Upgrade Energy has attracted numerous high profile customers such as Drone Express who handles drone delivery for Kroger’s Grocers, Papa John’s Pizza, Win Supply Construction company, Whirrx who performs ground surveys nationwide, the US Air Force Academy, and several other companies who are currently testing our batteries for deployment for their drone services. Upgrade Energy has a team of 5 and is continuing to scale their business through increasing manufacturing output. So far, Upgrade Energy has made a difference through enabling delivery of goods, enabling further reach of search and rescue operations, and enabling the advancement of clean tech to provide a greener future for all.

Upgrade Energy has brought to market a silicone anode Lilon based battery system which achieves a 30% increase in pack energy density to standard NMC Lilon based battery chemistries.

Company Leadership

Matthew Barnard

ceo

Matthew Barnard has been involved in robotics from a young age. After finishing his degree in computer science, he worked as a software developer, then an electrical engineer for a consumer product company. While launching a drone startup, he realized that the need for a better battery technology is what was limiting the drone industry, and Upgrade Energy was born.
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HabiTerre

Origin: IL | Grant Awarded: 2022 | Status: Active

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What is HabiTerre?

HabiTerre is an ag and geospatial technology company specializing in environmental and productivity modeling for food and agriculture.

Through a suite of advanced, patented technologies, we generate insights such as farm management practice history, farmland productivity, in-season crop yield forecasting, and water and nutrient use efficiency, all of which ladder up to a holistic understanding of farm production systems and their environmental impacts. These capabilities form the foundation of our ability to quantify things like GHG emissions and carbon sequestration accurately, scalably, and efficiently.

Our truly unique System-of-Systems approach leverages Model Data Fusion to seamlessly integrate numerous data streams at high geospatial and temporal resolution to calibrate and constrain our models. Backed by industry-leading research and development and published literature from founder Dr. Kaiyu Guan’s lab at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, the underlying technology powering HabiTerre’s quantification capabilities is second to none in terms of ability to scale while providing highly accurate and verifiable data that starts at the field level.

Company Leadership

Dr. Kaiyu Guan

founder & science lead

Dr. Kaiyu Guan is HabiTerre’s lead scientist and a Blue Waters Professor in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kaiyu’s lab produces research and technology at the forefront of the ecohydrology and remote sensing fields in agriculture, using satellite data, computational models, field work, and machine learning approaches. He founded Habiterre to solve the real-life problems of large-scale crop monitoring and forecasting, water management and sustainability, and global food security.

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Nick Reinke

CeO

Nick brings a lifetime of experience in agriculture, from his family farm in North Dakota to working with farmers and agribusinesses for over a decade in crop insurance and ag finance. From there, he went to work on ag sustainability, earning his MBA from Johns Hopkins University and joining Truterra, where he acted as Soil Health Services Lead and helped the team launch one of the first and largest ag carbon initiatives in the US, working with partners across the entire ag value chain. This work prepared him to lead HabiTerre with a deep understanding of ag and related sustainability metrics.

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Intramotev Autonomous Rail

Origin: MO | Grant Awarded: 2021 | Status: Active

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What is intramotev Autonomous Rail?

Each year in the US alone, over $690B in goods are moved via a fleet of 1.6 million railcars. On any given day, though, 900,000 of these railcars won’t move. A loaded railcar sits idle for 24.6 hours on each leg of its journey, just waiting to be picked up by a diesel locomotive. For locomotives to move these railcars, it requires 3.5 billion gallons of diesel annually – that’s over 37 million metric tons of greenhouse gases emitted into our atmosphere. Intramotev is building a future where no railcars sit idle, and not a gallon of diesel is consumed to move them. By putting motive power directly into the railcar instead of relying on locomotives, we enable freight to move itself from point-to-point independently and without fossil fuels.

Company Leadership

Timothy Luchini, Ph.D

CEO

PhD Mechanical Engineer with experience leading teams of up to 40 engineers to scale early-stage technologies in the aerospace industry.

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Alex Peiffer

COO

Business development and strategy expert with an MBA from University of Southern California, USAF logistics veteran.

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Corey Vasel

CTO

Expert in battery and motor technologies with experience developing early stage technologies in the aerospace industry.

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ThermoAI

Origin: NY | Grant Awarded: 2018 | Status: Active

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What is ThermoAI?

ThermoAI is using AI and IoT to optimize combustion, saving millions in fuel and reducing emissions. Our team includes a machine-learning Ph.D. from Oxford, a chemical engineer, and a published applied AI expert. We are currently seeing increasing of combustion efficiency of 3%-5% with our existing proof-of-concepts.

Company Leadership

Aiden Livingston

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Applied AI expert, contributor to VentureBeat’s AI section, and author of the upcoming book “The AI Entrepreneur – how to bring AI to legacy industries”. Marketing consultant from Manhattan having worked with Fortune 50 companies.

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Carolina Chaves

Co-Founder & COO

Chemical engineer from Nacional Universidad of Colombia. Member of TAYEA (Termodinámica aplicada y energías alternativas) or Applied Thermodynamics and Alternative Energies.

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David Watson

Co-Founder & CTO

Doctoral candidate at Oxford University. Expert on machine learning and causal modelling for complex, high-dimensional systems.

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Accelerate Wind

Origin: The Netherlands | Grant Awarded: 2016 | Status: Active

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What is Accelerate Wind?

Accelerate Wind creates a novel rooftop wind energy solution- one that operates quieter, cheaper, and more aesthetically pleasing than current solutions.

Company Leadership

Erika Boeing

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Erika has worked previously as a Systems Engineer at DRS Technologies, studied the interrelations between technology, society, and sustainability as a Fulbright Scholar in the Netherlands, and worked as a Research Fellow at Project Drawdown. She holds an M.A in European Studies on Society, Science, and Technology, and a B.S. In Mechanical Engineering.

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Kathy Mulders-Vredeveldt

Co-Founder and Head of Business Operations

Kathy has been a co-founder of two successful companies in the gaming and health technology industries, as well as director of the Launch Incubator in Maastricht, Netherlands. She is particularly passionate about starting companies which have both aspects of profit and social good. She holds an M.S. in Health Food Innovation and Management, and is currently completing her Executive MBA.

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MeterGenius

Origin: IL | Grant Awarded: 2014 | Status: Acquired

What is MeterGenius?

MeterGenius was a creative plug-and-play customer engagement platform that connects competitive energy providers with their customers.

MeterGenius was acquired by Hero Power in 2020

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Rocket Rack

Origin: MO | Grant Awarded: 2012 | Status: Acquired

What is Rocket Rack?

The patented Rocket Rack®, a Sanitary Support System for Conduit & Process Piping currently being used in food and beverage processing plants throughout the United States.

Rocket Rack was acquired by Robroy Industries Raceway Division

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