Boston’s university-to-startup pipeline defies downturn to grow and diversify

City Spotlight: Boston


The startup economy has grown and shifted since the turn of the century, and universities — stocked with a never-ending supply smart, ambitious young people — have increasingly taken part. Boston has always had a robust university-to-startup pipeline, but the last decade has supercharged it, as well as student aspirations to found the next unicorn, change the world, or do both at the same time.

Institutions are increasingly embracing this tendency as both inevitable and prestigious. Harvard and MIT loom large over the rest, and their immense resources tend to allow them to experiment with new methods and approaches, such as MIT’s The Engine and Harvard Innovation Labs. Other schools and organizations are not far behind, and the revamped Boston environment is decidedly collaborative.


Attend the TechCrunch City Spotlight: Boston event on February 27, 2023.

Register for the free virtual event here.


But the last few years have been tumultuous and transformative in both education and business. And in the more immediate past, layoffs and a capital crunch suggest, if not a bubble about to burst, at least one with an alarming wobble. How have the changes wrought by the pandemic and stuttering economy affected Boston’s unique ecosystem? Here’s what leaders of some major Boston outfits had to say about it.

Embracing entrepreneurship

“We’ve seen an extraordinary rise of entrepreneurship focused programs,” said Cait Brumme, CEO of nonprofit startup community MassChallenge. “Tufts, Brandeis, Boston [University], UMass, all these universities now have entrepreneurship programs, incubators, on campus accelerators that are often included in the curriculum.”

Some of that has been just in the last few years. In 2019, Harvard Innovation Labs was tracking 93 concurrent ventures at the school.

“We’re at 673 now,” said executive director Matt Segneri. “There’s been a significant increase in students interested in this work; business, law, design, we’ve seen a representative pie of all of those. Edtech, climate, digital health and biotech, and enterprise have also seen a big uptick.”

Segneri also described crossover work between domains, with consumer-facing rather than therapeutic applications.

Cait Brumme of MassChallenge, left, and Harvard Innovation Labs’ Matt Segneri.

Pillar VC principal and co-founder of Petri Tony Kulesa echoed that, saying “we’ve seen significant exploration of fields outside of therapeutics, bioengineering broadly applied. We are seeing an explosion of entrepreneurs applying bioengineering technology to public health, climate biotech, food, agriculture, and sustainability.”

The shift to remote work and learning has had unpredictable aspects across nearly every industry and segment of society. In the case of student entrepreneurship it seems to have supercharged the community, says Subaita Rahman, a student and entrepreneur herself who has participated in startup scenes in Boston, Toronto, and beyond.

“I really think the pandemic increased and accelerated young people getting in earlier, because everything went remote,” explained Rahman, who is currently spending her gap year working at Boston’s Pillar VC. “That really changed things because you can find that environment anywhere you go. There’s also hacker houses popping up everywhere you go, and founders wanting to give back to their communities. Knowledge is being democratized, it’s all out there after years of people trying and failing, in tech and bio and crypto. It’s all just unfolding on the internet.”

Segneri said that this trend is noticeable at Harvard, where entrepreneurship is becoming a more common skill for students to want to cultivate.

“There are more folks coming into these programs who already have entrepreneurial experience — there are college freshmen who already have startup experience,” he said. “There are more people who are orienting to their degree program with entrepreneur experience, and we’re trying to meet people where they are.”

Subaita Rahman and Tony Kulesa of Pillar Venture Capital.

But the trend reaches beyond the student body: Kulesa described increased interest across the board — a migration, even, especially compared to the relatively insular academic community of just a decade ago.

“The most prominent change is the level of interest among academics — both grad students and faculty — in startups, with many even leaving academia to start and run companies. For example, consider these faculty that left academia to start companies: Daphne Koller of insitro, Andy Beck of PathAI, Sri Kosuri of Octant,” he wrote in an email. “This year for the first time, ~50% of graduating PhDs want to enter industry rather than remaining in academia.”

Learning and doing

In the undergrad world, it’s not just about learning Business Management 101, though. As Brumme points out, entrepreneurship involves more than that.

“It’s building in the notion of entrepreneurship as a professional skill: not just the founder as entrepreneur, but all of us as entrepreneurs in our own organizations,” she said.

“The education mission is essential,” Segneri said, and commercial success isn’t always the outcome or even goal. “For people just dabbling in this work, what they’re learning is not just how to build a company — they’re learning hypothesis testing, learning by doing. Applying what they’re learning in coursework to entrepreneurial work is a way to take that project-based learning into an impact space.”

A side effect of integrating startup lessons into classes is that these skills don’t need to be addressed remedially at the moment someone decides they’d like to start a company.

“And as more institutions engage in that early stage, it has allowed us to reduce our emphasis on classic curriculum and increase our emphasis on having a strong network,” said Brumme.

Segneri described the network side of things as “turning entrepreneurship from a solo sport into a rich community of founders.” Rahman seemed to concur, while also noting that the community reaches between institutions as well as within them.

“All these great universities are so close to each other and they collaborate so much — that’s the key to why Boston is in such a good place,” she said. “There are great people everywhere, not just your alma mater. I found value speaking with people my age, who were more like me, even if they were in different places. It’s always nice to speak with people with wildly different perspectives.”

She also found it a bit funny that, as universities have been working to recreate the tech startup world, “tech has been trying to recreate university, in a way, with hacker houses and stuff — they’re basically dorms, but more curated.” Clearly the collaborative atmosphere of idealistic, early-stage founders is a valuable resource.

Finding the right partner

In fact, it can be valuable enough that one perceives a risk of exploitation. Students are, of course, coming to university to learn, and that needs to be balanced with the siren song of startup millions.

“It reminds me a bit of paid sponsorship for athletes,” mused Brumme. “On one hand, you could say that allowing students access to resources to grow their businesses before graduating provides them value and runway, but does it detract from the core purposes of going to school?”

Photos from MassChallenge’s various events.

As young and inexperienced founders, they are also vulnerable to mistakes like trading away too much equity or succumbing to investor pressure. That’s the exception rather than the rule, but one it pays to be aware of.

“No one is insulated from this current environment, but we think the Boston seed and pre-seed system has held up pretty well. We’ve seen experiments from venture firms doing scout programs. Flybridge launched a student first fund this year focused on Harvard. We saw that with Dorm Room Fund and First Round Capital,” Brumme continued. “Startups would say it’s really hard to raise funding still, and we work on getting them access to non-dilutive options. VC is a very powerful partner for the right moment in time, but it is not the right mechanism or option for all founders, especially early ones. 25-30 percent of the companies we back intend to bootstrap as long as they can.”

“There are a bunch of new funding mechanisms coming online,” said Kulesa, naming Convergent Research, Arc Institute, Fast Grants, and Homeworld as organizations changing research funding models. VC is adapting too; Pillar is working directly with the student-led non-profit incubator Nucleate to find and fund university spinoffs.

Rahman warned, however, of biting off more than you can chew as a student founder.

“You have to know your own limits. Some people can full-on drop out and make this company, they’re the only one who can do it. But you have to realize that you’re young and you have to make a lot of mistakes,” said Rahman. “And I mean, if you’re under 25, your brain isn’t even fully developed yet! It’s not just about age either, it’s any first time founder.”

Kulesa recommended that any first-time founders do some real research before accepting investment.

“The best I can recommend is to be educated,” he said. “We put tons of resources online that include how to negotiate a term sheet and a term sheet grader, and there is a plethora of stuff out there from others as well. That being said, I think trust and shared vision/values is the most important thing. We always offer to buy common stock in rounds that we lead for this reason — we believe if we have the same economics as founders it leads to trust and alignment.”

Segneri was careful to clarify that although HIL does promote the companies going through it, they are in service to the students, not investors or any other interested parties.

“We will do demo days, so we are in that sense an intermediary, escalating certain student pitches to venture firms,” he said. “But what we center in all of it is the best interests of these students. We don’t typically have corporate partners. We’re largely supporting students launching or building their own thing.”

While everyone agreed that more resources and support are a good thing for student founders, Rahman had the most practical idea for improving the ecosystem.

“I think microgrants would be super helpful,” she said. “Getting money to travel to places for conferences, to take the chance to do an internship. Not everyone is able to afford San Francisco rents. Even a thousand or two thousand can change someone’s life”

“It’s hard, to balance your ambitions with being young, and just being a college kid. but I think you can do both,” she concluded. “It can be quite difficult to find people who are as ambitious and curious, who are dropping out and exploring things — it can be isolating and lonely. You might fail, you might fail badly — and that’s OK. That’s the best expectation to have. We can get caught up in the glamour, so just learn from the experience.”

Boston’s university-to-startup pipeline defies downturn to grow and diversify by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

Boston’s university-to-startup pipeline defies downturn to grow and diversify

City Spotlight: Boston


The startup economy has grown and shifted since the turn of the century, and universities — stocked with a never-ending supply smart, ambitious young people — have increasingly taken part. Boston has always had a robust university-to-startup pipeline, but the last decade has supercharged it, as well as student aspirations to found the next unicorn, change the world, or do both at the same time.

Institutions are increasingly embracing this tendency as both inevitable and prestigious. Harvard and MIT loom large over the rest, and their immense resources tend to allow them to experiment with new methods and approaches, such as MIT’s The Engine and Harvard Innovation Labs. Other schools and organizations are not far behind, and the revamped Boston environment is decidedly collaborative.


Attend the TechCrunch City Spotlight: Boston event on February 27, 2023.

Register for the free virtual event here.


But the last few years have been tumultuous and transformative in both education and business. And in the more immediate past, layoffs and a capital crunch suggest, if not a bubble about to burst, at least one with an alarming wobble. How have the changes wrought by the pandemic and stuttering economy affected Boston’s unique ecosystem? Here’s what leaders of some major Boston outfits had to say about it.

Embracing entrepreneurship

“We’ve seen an extraordinary rise of entrepreneurship focused programs,” said Cait Brumme, CEO of nonprofit startup community MassChallenge. “Tufts, Brandeis, Boston [University], UMass, all these universities now have entrepreneurship programs, incubators, on campus accelerators that are often included in the curriculum.”

Some of that has been just in the last few years. In 2019, Harvard Innovation Labs was tracking 93 concurrent ventures at the school.

“We’re at 673 now,” said executive director Matt Segneri. “There’s been a significant increase in students interested in this work; business, law, design, we’ve seen a representative pie of all of those. Edtech, climate, digital health and biotech, and enterprise have also seen a big uptick.”

Segneri also described crossover work between domains, with consumer-facing rather than therapeutic applications.

Cait Brumme of MassChallenge, left, and Harvard Innovation Labs’ Matt Segneri.

Pillar VC principal and co-founder of Petri Tony Kulesa echoed that, saying “we’ve seen significant exploration of fields outside of therapeutics, bioengineering broadly applied. We are seeing an explosion of entrepreneurs applying bioengineering technology to public health, climate biotech, food, agriculture, and sustainability.”

The shift to remote work and learning has had unpredictable aspects across nearly every industry and segment of society. In the case of student entrepreneurship it seems to have supercharged the community, says Subaita Rahman, a student and entrepreneur herself who has participated in startup scenes in Boston, Toronto, and beyond.

“I really think the pandemic increased and accelerated young people getting in earlier, because everything went remote,” explained Rahman, who is currently spending her gap year working at Boston’s Pillar VC. “That really changed things because you can find that environment anywhere you go. There’s also hacker houses popping up everywhere you go, and founders wanting to give back to their communities. Knowledge is being democratized, it’s all out there after years of people trying and failing, in tech and bio and crypto. It’s all just unfolding on the internet.”

Segneri said that this trend is noticeable at Harvard, where entrepreneurship is becoming a more common skill for students to want to cultivate.

“There are more folks coming into these programs who already have entrepreneurial experience — there are college freshmen who already have startup experience,” he said. “There are more people who are orienting to their degree program with entrepreneur experience, and we’re trying to meet people where they are.”

Subaita Rahman and Tony Kulesa of Pillar Venture Capital.

But the trend reaches beyond the student body: Kulesa described increased interest across the board — a migration, even, especially compared to the relatively insular academic community of just a decade ago.

“The most prominent change is the level of interest among academics — both grad students and faculty — in startups, with many even leaving academia to start and run companies. For example, consider these faculty that left academia to start companies: Daphne Koller of insitro, Andy Beck of PathAI, Sri Kosuri of Octant,” he wrote in an email. “This year for the first time, ~50% of graduating PhDs want to enter industry rather than remaining in academia.”

Learning and doing

In the undergrad world, it’s not just about learning Business Management 101, though. As Brumme points out, entrepreneurship involves more than that.

“It’s building in the notion of entrepreneurship as a professional skill: not just the founder as entrepreneur, but all of us as entrepreneurs in our own organizations,” she said.

“The education mission is essential,” Segneri said, and commercial success isn’t always the outcome or even goal. “For people just dabbling in this work, what they’re learning is not just how to build a company — they’re learning hypothesis testing, learning by doing. Applying what they’re learning in coursework to entrepreneurial work is a way to take that project-based learning into an impact space.”

A side effect of integrating startup lessons into classes is that these skills don’t need to be addressed remedially at the moment someone decides they’d like to start a company.

“And as more institutions engage in that early stage, it has allowed us to reduce our emphasis on classic curriculum and increase our emphasis on having a strong network,” said Brumme.

Segneri described the network side of things as “turning entrepreneurship from a solo sport into a rich community of founders.” Rahman seemed to concur, while also noting that the community reaches between institutions as well as within them.

“All these great universities are so close to each other and they collaborate so much — that’s the key to why Boston is in such a good place,” she said. “There are great people everywhere, not just your alma mater. I found value speaking with people my age, who were more like me, even if they were in different places. It’s always nice to speak with people with wildly different perspectives.”

She also found it a bit funny that, as universities have been working to recreate the tech startup world, “tech has been trying to recreate university, in a way, with hacker houses and stuff — they’re basically dorms, but more curated.” Clearly the collaborative atmosphere of idealistic, early-stage founders is a valuable resource.

Finding the right partner

In fact, it can be valuable enough that one perceives a risk of exploitation. Students are, of course, coming to university to learn, and that needs to be balanced with the siren song of startup millions.

“It reminds me a bit of paid sponsorship for athletes,” mused Brumme. “On one hand, you could say that allowing students access to resources to grow their businesses before graduating provides them value and runway, but does it detract from the core purposes of going to school?”

Photos from MassChallenge’s various events.

As young and inexperienced founders, they are also vulnerable to mistakes like trading away too much equity or succumbing to investor pressure. That’s the exception rather than the rule, but one it pays to be aware of.

“No one is insulated from this current environment, but we think the Boston seed and pre-seed system has held up pretty well. We’ve seen experiments from venture firms doing scout programs. Flybridge launched a student first fund this year focused on Harvard. We saw that with Dorm Room Fund and First Round Capital,” Brumme continued. “Startups would say it’s really hard to raise funding still, and we work on getting them access to non-dilutive options. VC is a very powerful partner for the right moment in time, but it is not the right mechanism or option for all founders, especially early ones. 25-30 percent of the companies we back intend to bootstrap as long as they can.”

“There are a bunch of new funding mechanisms coming online,” said Kulesa, naming Convergent Research, Arc Institute, Fast Grants, and Homeworld as organizations changing research funding models. VC is adapting too; Pillar is working directly with the student-led non-profit incubator Nucleate to find and fund university spinoffs.

Rahman warned, however, of biting off more than you can chew as a student founder.

“You have to know your own limits. Some people can full-on drop out and make this company, they’re the only one who can do it. But you have to realize that you’re young and you have to make a lot of mistakes,” said Rahman. “And I mean, if you’re under 25, your brain isn’t even fully developed yet! It’s not just about age either, it’s any first time founder.”

Kulesa recommended that any first-time founders do some real research before accepting investment.

“The best I can recommend is to be educated,” he said. “We put tons of resources online that include how to negotiate a term sheet and a term sheet grader, and there is a plethora of stuff out there from others as well. That being said, I think trust and shared vision/values is the most important thing. We always offer to buy common stock in rounds that we lead for this reason — we believe if we have the same economics as founders it leads to trust and alignment.”

Segneri was careful to clarify that although HIL does promote the companies going through it, they are in service to the students, not investors or any other interested parties.

“We will do demo days, so we are in that sense an intermediary, escalating certain student pitches to venture firms,” he said. “But what we center in all of it is the best interests of these students. We don’t typically have corporate partners. We’re largely supporting students launching or building their own thing.”

While everyone agreed that more resources and support are a good thing for student founders, Rahman had the most practical idea for improving the ecosystem.

“I think microgrants would be super helpful,” she said. “Getting money to travel to places for conferences, to take the chance to do an internship. Not everyone is able to afford San Francisco rents. Even a thousand or two thousand can change someone’s life”

“It’s hard, to balance your ambitions with being young, and just being a college kid. but I think you can do both,” she concluded. “It can be quite difficult to find people who are as ambitious and curious, who are dropping out and exploring things — it can be isolating and lonely. You might fail, you might fail badly — and that’s OK. That’s the best expectation to have. We can get caught up in the glamour, so just learn from the experience.”

Boston’s university-to-startup pipeline defies downturn to grow and diversify by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

Sync Computing rakes in $15.5M to automatically optimize cloud resources

After a pandemic-driven cloud adoption boom in the enterprise, costs are finally coming under a microscope. More than a third of businesses report having cloud budget overruns of up to 40%, according to a recent poll by observability software vendor Pepperdata. A separate survey from Flexera found that optimizing the existing use of cloud services is a top initiative at 59% of companies — cost being the main motivation. 

An entire cottage industry of startups has sprung up around optimizing cloud compute. But one in the race, Sync Computing, claims to uniquely tie business objectives like cost and runtime reduction directly to low-level infrastructure configurations. Founded as a spinout from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, Sync today landed $12 million in a venture funding round (plus $3.5 million in debt) led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from The Engine, Moore Strategic Ventures and National Grid Partners.

Sync co-founders Jeff Chou and Suraj Bramhavar both worked as members of the technical staff at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory prior to launching the startup. Bramhavar came to MIT by way of a photonics research position at Intel, while Chou co-founded another startup — Anoka Microsystems — designing a low-cost optical switch.

Sync was born out of innovations developed at the Lincoln Lab, including a method to accelerate a mathematical optimization problem commonly found in logistics applications. While many cloud cost solutions either provide recommendations for high-level optimization or support workflows that tune workloads, Sync goes deeper, Chou and Bramhavar say, with app-specific details and suggestions based on algorithms designed to “order” the appropriate resources.

“[We realized that our methods] can dramatically improve resource utilization of all large-scale computing systems,” Chou told TechCrunch in an email interview. “As Moore’s Law slows down, this will become a key technological choke point.”

Chou claims that Sync doesn’t require much in the way of historical data to begin optimizing data pipelines and provisioning low-level cloud resources. For example, he says, with just the data from a single previous run, some customers have accelerated their Apache Spark jobs by up to 80% — Apache Spark being the popular analytics source engine for data processing.

Sync recently released an API and “autotuner” for Spark on AWS EMR, Amazon’s cloud big data platform, and Databricks on AWS. Self-service support for Databricks on Azure is in the works.

“The launch of our public API will allow users to programmatically apply the Sync autotuner to a large number of jobs and enable continuous monitoring of [cloud environments] with custom integration,” Chou said. “The C-suite cares about managing cloud computing costs, and our Sync autotuner does this while also accelerating the output of data science and data analytics teams … The product also allows data engineers to quickly change infrastructure settings to achieve business goals. For example, one day, teams may need to minimize costs and de-prioritize runtime, but the next day, they may have a hard deadline, therefore needing to accelerate runtime. With Sync, this can be done with a single click.”

Sync first applied its technology inside MIT’s Supercomputing Center before working with larger government high-performance compute centers, including the Department of Defense — with which it has a $1 million contract. Now, Sync says it has roughly 300 registered users on its self-service app and “several dozen” design partners testing and providing feedback, including Duolingo and engineers at Disney’s Streaming Services group. 

“The pandemic and recent economic climate have been a boon for Sync, as controlling cloud costs through improved efficiency is now top of mind for many cloud software-as-a-service-native companies. Many companies are on hiring freezes and need an ‘easy button’ to drop cloud costs without adding burden or overhead to teams already at over capacity,” Chou said. “With the recent economic downturn, the demand for Sync’s unique approach has accelerated dramatically, already getting adopted by major enterprise customers. Our main challenge is for developers and CTOs to see how what we’ve built is different and also realize both can dramatically benefit by using it.”

Chou says the funding from the latest round, which bring’s Boston-based Sync’s total capital raised to $21.6 million, will be put toward customer acquisition, marketing and sales, product development, and R&D, including adding integrations with existing engineering workflows. Sync currently has 14 employees, a number that Chou expects will grow to 25 by the end of the year.

Robotics and AI are going from cage to stage

A lot of promising companies come out of work by researchers at universities, or even grad students who have struck on some new innovation. But the transition from tech-focused research group to product-focused startup isn’t easy to make; fortunately three experts in the matter joined us at TC Sessions: Robotics to discuss a few ways to get through it successfully.

Milo Werner is a new general partner at MIT’s The Engine, an accelerator and fund focused on “tough tech.” Joyce Sidopoulos is a co-founder of MassRobotics, a community and advocacy group for the sector’s startup ecosystem. And Pieter Abbeel is a professor at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Covariant, which is designing a new generation of warehouse robots (he also just won the ACM Prize — belated congratulations, Pieter).

Our panel started out with some of the most obvious technical considerations founders need to keep in mind when shifting from a research to a mass production process. (Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and continuity.)

“When the technologists are designing the product itself, they just want it to work, right? But when you actually go to manufacturing, the manufacturer will say, we can’t put that board on top of that, we can’t assemble it that way. So you really, from the beginning, should be thinking about manufacturing, and design for manufacturing,” said Sidopoulos.

Werner pointed out that the tolerances, precision and monitoring will never be as good as your own lab, so be ready to accept that — as well as compromises for cost. “The reality is you go through a series of iterations once you enter manufacturing, for cost down, and managing the ramp up,” she said.

“In a research lab, you’re just trying to get a prototype working. And often you can write a paper that gets a lot of visibility and excitement for showing something for the first time — it can work!” said Abbeel. “Then you go to something in production… and all of a sudden, it’s not the fact that you can make it work once that matters — it’s the consistency, having it essentially always work. So, chasing the kind of high nines of performance and reliability, I think is probably the biggest difference.”

As demands on the company change, the company itself must change to accommodate them. Werner pointed out that many founders, having come off four to eight years of work in the area, have a passion and familiarity with the material that’s difficult to match — but that can be a barrier to building a team.

“The part that they often face is that they need to build a big team, and that team needs to be just as strong or stronger than them,” she said. “Coming from the academic, institutional space, it can be a very individual contributor ideology. And moving to the business space, it’s completely team oriented. And you are only as strong as your team.”

“I would totally agree with that,” Sidopoulos said. “We find that a lot of time, the co-founders are passionate about what they’re doing. But then they have to bring in, you really have to bring in a strong business-focused person, because how do you sell this thing? How do you put it into a pitch deck? That’s not what you’re taught when you’re in engineering school. Finding the right people and the right combination. It’s like getting married, right? You’re marrying someone who you’re going to be spending a lot of time with. And so you have to make sure that you have the same goals, you have the same mission, you have the same work ethic.”

Werner pointed out it’s always wise to hire ahead of the need — and joining a community of like-minded people can help a founder build their network and get a sense of where others are in the process.

Abbeel told a story about a serendipitous relationship that Covariant built:

Our first lead investor, Amplify, had a partner who they made available five hours a week, who had a ton of operational experience in sales, on the business development side, many previous startups, where he had worked full time, and now he was a venture capitalist,” he said. “And he brought all that operational experience into what we were doing. And we quickly found that five hours wasn’t [enough]… we wanted more! Over time, we got him so excited to join us as our COO! It’s a great example of somebody who most likely would not have been in our natural network, but came our way in a way that actually it was possible to get to know each other very well, for several months before we really started working full time together. With a completely different set of experiences and skill set — so valuable.”

If only all founders were so lucky! It’s not exactly advice, but it does show that it pays to strike while the iron is hot.

Finding a product market fit was another topic we touched on, and each panelist had variations on the idea of focusing fast.

“We get a lot of startups that have an awesome technology that can really solve a lot of problems… if you’re not focused on one solution, for one industry, you’re spreading yourself too thin,” Sidopoulos said. “You have to really know your customer, what their challenge is, what they want solved, and what they’re willing to pay for. Get that focus on one, get it accomplished — then you have a story, then you have someone who’s using your technology. Then pivot to another case. It really, really helps with investment as well.”

Abbeel pointed out that this can be extended to the timeline as well. Sure, you might be able to solve problem Y in six months and problem Z in 18 months — but what’s problem X you can solve tomorrow? Someone out there wants to pay you for that, even if you plan on having something way better later.

“To us, that was very eye opening,” he said. “Because many others were also very excited about robots, but it was excitement for, in some sense, of the future of the company. It wasn’t excitement for the today of the company. To us, that was really the big factor in our decision making, who’s excited for robots today?”

Werner actually recommended partnering with a large strategic in the sector, as their deep knowledge (and pockets) can help you build that first use case. Even companies like Tesla (where she worked before The Engine) started out partnering with bigger ones to test and prove out their product.

“You’re kind of using your partner to de-risk your technology,” she said. “Once you’ve de-risked that technology, build on that and go farther.”

But, she warned, be careful not to fall into the trap of over-specialization or over-reliance on the partner’s resources, or you’ll find yourself dependent and tied to their roadmap instead of your own.

That’s just a handful of the topics we covered today — you can watch the rest of the panel for free right here.

Covariant, MassRobotics and The Engine discuss the road from lab to market at TC Sessions: Robotics

It’s a long road taking an idea from the R&D stage in a lab to successful commercialization, especially when you’re talking about technologies as complex and costly as robotics and artificial intelligence.

Robotics startups require expensive equipment — like industrial-grade sensors, 3D printers and controlled environments — for building and testing prototypes. And even though robotics is weathering the current slowdown in venture funding better than other tech sectors, it’s still too easy for innovative inventions to remain stuck in the lab.

That’s why we’re thrilled to welcome three experts in the process to TC Sessions: Robotics on July 21: Pieter Abbeel, co-founder and chief scientist at Covariant; Joyce Sidopoulos, co-founder and VP of programs and community at MassRobotics; and Milo Werner, general partner at The Engine.

In a session entitled “From Cage to Stage: Commercializing AI and Robotics,” the panel will share their considerable experience in what it takes to move a robot or AI process from the lab to market.

Here’s what our panelists bring to the table, and why we can’t wait to get their take on the topic.

In addition to founding Covariant, which develops AI for robotic automation of warehouses and factories, Pieter Abbeel is the director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence (BAIR) Lab.

A founding partner at AIX Ventures, a VC firm focused on AI startups, Abbeel also hosts The Robot Brains podcast, which explores what AI and robotics can do today and where they are headed.

Abbeel’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, Rolling Stone, Wired, Tech Review and (of course) TechCrunch.

As the co-founder and vice president for programs and community at MassRobotics — whose mission is to enable and grow the next generation of robotics companies — Joyce Sidopoulos develops high-impact programs for the robotics ecosystem. She matches startups with potential funders and customers, connects students and talent to potential employers and works with academia to commercialize research.

Previously, Sidopoulos served as the innovation and robotics community manager for the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council to expand the robotics ecosystem in Massachusetts and the New England region, which helped lead to the founding of MassRobotics.

Sidopoulos spent 14 years with the USN’s Naval Undersea Warfare Center, where she served in various roles, including chief scientist, systems and test engineer and sonar systems analyst/engineer. She has held senior roles at General Dynamics and other defense contractors.

Milo Werner is a general partner at The Engine, a VC firm that helps deep tech companies bridge the gap between discovery and commercialization. Previously, she was a partner at Ajax Strategies where she led midstage investments across energy, transportation, agriculture and industrial applications.

At Tesla, Werner led the new product introduction team and helped launch the Model S powertrain and Model X. She also ran the new product introduction team at Fitbit, and she led engineering and product development at Zola, a microgrid startup providing distributed energy to families in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Werner earned a BS in Geology and Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Vermont, an MS in Civil Engineering and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Deep tech VC fund The Engine raises $230M for its second fund from MIT and new backer Harvard

Deep tech. Hard tech. Or, as The Engine dubs it, Tough Tech.

Venture investing today is essentially identical to what happens on Wall Street, focused on data rooms, spreadsheets, SaaS churn models and cohort analysis. Yet, the history of venture capital firms is heavily interwoven with universities and their research. Some of the most famous VC funds like Kleiner Perkins got their start funding compelling research projects out of laboratories and financing their commercialization toward scale.

Technical risk is something many VCs like to avoid, but The Engine has built an entire brand and thesis around it. Centered around Kendall Square and the broader MIT ecosystem, The Engine debuted a couple of years ago with a focus on “tough tech” problems that are perhaps a touch too early for other VCs. That’s led to investments in companies like Boston Metal, which builds environmentally-friendly steel alloys, WoHo, which is rethinking modular building construction that we profiled last week, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is developing fusion power.

Indeed, the firm’s portfolio page has to be one of the most interesting in the industry today.

The good news is that the firm’s ambitious funding strategy looks set to continue. It announced this morning that it has raised $230 million toward the firm’s second fund, which on top of the firm’s first fund brings it to a total of $435 million under management. In a press statement, the firm said that it has funded 27 portfolio companies out of its first fund. While MIT continues to be the anchor LP, Harvard joined for Fund 2, creating a cross-Cambridge, MA venture platform.

Katie Rae remains CEO and managing partner of the fund, and her team has expanded over the past few years as the firm has scaled up.

The Engine’s Reed Sturtevant, Katie Rae, and Ann DeWitt prepare for the Tough Tech Summit today. Photo via The Engine.

One interesting point that we haven’t noted previously is that MIT is building The Engine a 200,000 square foot building near its campus that will offer massive space for startups and portfolio companies to start and grow over time. That building is expected to open in 2022, hopefully when this whole pandemic situation allows for in-office collaboration again.

Boston has become something of a hub for deeper technical projects. Local startup Desktop Metal, which builds 3D printers that can print metal, is going through a SPAC process that values the company at roughly $2.5 billion. With this latest news from The Engine, it seems clear that Boston’s tough tech ecosystem will continue to have a pipeline of interesting and compelling companies.

WoHo wants to make constructing buildings fast, flexible and green with reusable “components”

Buildings are the bedrocks of civilization — places to live, places to work (well, normally, in a non-COVID-19 world) and places to play. Yet how we conceive buildings, architect them for their uses, and ultimately construct them on a site has changed remarkably little over the past few decades. Housing and building costs continue to rise, and there remains a slow linear process from conception to construction for most projects. Why can’t the whole process be more flexible and faster?

Well, a trio of engineers and architects out of MIT and Georgia Tech are exploring that exact question.

MIT’s former treasurer Israel Ruiz along with architects Anton Garcia-Abril of MIT and Debora Mesa of Georgia Tech have joined together on a startup called WoHo (short for “World Home”) that’s trying to rethink how to construct a modern building by creating more flexible “components” that can be connected together to create a structure.

WoHo’s Israel Ruiz, Debora Mesa, and Anton Garcia-Abril. Photo via WoHo.

By creating components that are usable in a wide variety of types of buildings and making them easy to construct in a factory, the goal of WoHo is to lower construction costs, maximize flexibility for architects, and deliver compelling spaces for end users, all while making projects greener in a climate unfriendly world.

The team’s ideas caught the attention of Katie Rae, CEO and managing director of The Engine, a special fund that spun out of MIT that is notable for its lengthy time horizons for VC investments. The fund is backing WoHo with $4.5 million in seed capital.

Ruiz spent the last decade overseeing MIT’s capital construction program, including the further buildout of Kendall Square, a neighborhood next to MIT that has become a major hub for biotech innovation. Through that process, he saw the challenges of construction, particularly for the kinds of unique spaces required for innovative companies. Over the years, he also built friendships with Garcia-Abril and Mesa, the duo behind Ensamble Studio, an architecture firm.

With WoHo, “it is the integration of the process from the design and concept in architecture all the way through the assembly and construction of that project,” Ruiz explained. “Our technology is suitable for low-to-high rise, but in particularly it provides the best outcomes for mid-to-high rise.”

So what exactly are these WoHo components? Think of them as well-designed and reusable blocks that can be plugged together in order to create a structure. These blocks are consistent and are designed to be easily manufactured and transported. One key innovation is around an improved reinforced cement that allows for better building quality at lower environmental cost.

Conception of a WoHo component under construction. Photo via WoHo

We have seen modular buildings before, typically apartment buildings where each apartment is a single block that can be plugged into a constructed structure (take for example this project in Sacramento). WoHo, though, wants to go further in having components that offer more flexibility and arrangements, and also act as the structure themselves. That gives architects far more flexibility.

It’s still early days, but the group has already gotten some traction in the market, inking a partnership with Swiss concrete and building materials company LafargeHolcim to bring their ideas to market. The company is building a demonstration project in Madrid, and targeting a second project in Boston for next year.