UC entrepreneurs pitch at GCVI Summit

This year’s Global Corporate Venturing and Innovation Summit hosted a pitching contest that featured five startups founded by alumni of University of California – telemedicine and drug delivery company Pandia Health, peer-to-peer vehicle charging network EVMatch, medical device manufacturer Tergis Technologies, scientific research platform Hyperthesis and phone lens accessory producer Lume.

Introduced by Christine Gulbranson, senior vice-president for innovation and entrepreneurship at University of California, and sponsored by innovation platform Future Planet Capital, the pitch event gave each startup the opportunity to talk through their offering before a jury of industry experts and more than 650 delegates who attended this year’s summit.

First to take the stage was Jude Calvillo, co-founder of Hyperthesis and alumnus of UC Los Angeles. Calvillo noted that it currently takes researchers an average of 35 hours to compile a literature review and 20 hours to identify a research gap. To solve this major pain point for scientists, Hyperthesis has developed a platform that generates schematics of research papers based on metadata – extracted through natural language processing technology – enabling researchers to find relevant data through a visual interface and within a few clicks.

Calvillo said the platform was a significantly faster proposal than Google Scholar, a search engine that indexes scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed journals, conference papers and dissertations.

Above L-R: Christine Gulbranson, Heather Hochrein, Jude Calvillo

Hyperthesis, which is seeking between $380,000 and $1m in equity funding, hopes to target universities and marketing consultancies as clients. The startup also hopes to drive international synergy and discovery, allowing, for example, an English-speaking researcher to find papers in Chinese and significantly expanding the amount of literature to which scholars have access.

Heather Hochrein, co-founder of EVMatch and alumna of UC Berkeley, was similarly bullish about having a fundamental impact on her chosen market – electric car charging. Hochrein began by explaining “range anxiety” – drivers may not choose an electric vehicle because they might run out of energy without the ability to recharge.

The solution, according to Hochrein, is a peer-to-peer charging network that allows drivers to find the nearest charging point provided by a private user.

Alluding to Airbnb, the platform that allows home owners to rent out a room or an entire property, Hochrein noted that some providers on her platform had bought a charger specifically to generate passive income, even though they did not own an electric vehicle.

The company was launched in California in April last year and had since then grown to 100 hosts – with zero infrastructure cost to EVMatch, which provides only the app and handles payments. The startup’s initial target markets are urban and suburban neighbourhoods, though Hochrein was quick to point out that her company would not expand into areas where it would be in danger of falling under public utility regulations – a punishing set of rules for a young startup.

EVMatch is aiming to reach profitability by the end of 2019, growing from a current 350 customers to 50,000. The company is seeking $750,000 in seed funding and looking for a lead investor to help scale the business to 3,000 customers and $100,000 in revenue this year.

When one of the judges brought up the fact that millennials may never own an electric vehicle outright, Hochrein countered that ownership would not be a problem as the market was still shifting towards electric cars.

EVMatch has also discovered that Tesla drivers are not attracted to the platform yet, as they can rely on a dedicated network of superchargers. Users were commonly drivers of Nissan Leaf cars and part of single families in upper-middle-income neighbourhoods.

Next on stage was Brian Soo, founder of Lume. Soo, an alumnus of UC San Diego who is currently the only member of staff at Lume, launched the business after graduating last year and has turned to crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to bring his first product to market.

Lume has developed an optical zoom lens and a wide-angle lens that can be attached to a mobile phone.

Targeting content creators, such as video producers on streaming platform YouTube, Lume has also developed a phone case that adds the ability for external storage to the phone and brings back the ability to plug in jack microphones – a functionality removed by both Apple and Google in their phones.

Michael Urner, co-founder of Tergis Technologies and alumnus of UC Merced, is tackling an entirely different issue – ventilator-associated pneumonia in premature newborn babies.

Urner said this issue was made worse by hospitals “sweeping the problem under the rug”. Noting that many mothers affected by this issue were teenagers, their relatively young age meant they were often kept in the dark about how badly their baby is doing.

“It is really quite sad,” said Urner, who explained that 10% of babies in the US were premature, and that figure was rising. Newborns stayed in an intensive care unit for 13 days on average, during which time they were at risk of pneumonia.

The problem was humidification – dry air dehydrated a baby’s lungs, causing the tissue to crack, which led to infection. Urner’s technology made sure the air stayed humified.

Tergis is seeking $400,000 from strategic partners in return for an 8% stake, money it will need to secure regulatory approval in the US, start clinical trials at Children’s Hospital Central Valley and market the device to hospitals.

With regards to hospital administrations not being keen to acknowledge the issue for liability reasons, Urner said respiratory therapists and infection abatement specialists had proven keen on the device, which would initially cost $80 but which would have to be reduced to $55 eventually to compete with a single rival product.

In fact, Urner noted, Tergis’s technology was so ground-breaking that the only relevant patent they had to avoid infringing was from 1972 and related to heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems.

Above L-R: Brian Soo, Michael Urner

Finally, Sophia Yen, co-founder of Pandia Health and an alumna of both UC San Francisco Medical School and UC Berkeley, took the stage to talk about birth control.

A total of 10.7 million women in the US used birth control and another seven million were estimated to want it – a $4.6bn market. To receive the pill in the US was a convoluted process, with traditional pharmacies able to hold only a single address for clients, meaning a student moving away to university could not simply have her prescription sent to her term-time address.

What differentiated Pandia Health from other drug delivery companies was that it also offered a telemedicine service, where doctors could prescribe birth control pills directly and do away with the need for women first to visit a physician – though they retained that option, if they only wanted Pandia to handle fulfilment.

The cost to the customer was only $39 a year for the doctor to evaluate a questionnaire and verify identify. The pill was then billed to the relevant insurance provider.

In the longer term, Yen said the company hoped to add other items found in pharmacies, such as sexual health products, medicines and so on. Aiming to be the female version of Dollar Shave Club – a subscription service for male grooming products that was purchased by
consumer conglomerate Unilever for $1bn in 2016 – Yen also noted that birth control would be recession proof as it was not a luxury.

The company has already raised $650,000 from friends, family and angel investors, and is now seeking $1.5m to grow from 1,300 to 10,000 users – which would generate $300,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Yen said the business should be profitable by 2021.

Asked about the current White House administration’s fight to bring down the Affordable Care Act, Yen explained that the platform could easily be adapted to charge users directly for the pill instead of billing the insurance firm. The cost to the end-user would not exceed $20 a month, the retail cost of the pill.

It was left to Douglas Hansen-Luke, executive chairman of Future Planet Capital, to thank the five startups and announce the winning company, which will be invited to compete at the Future Planet Capital Awards at the GUV:Fusion conference in London this coming May.

The choice, while difficult, was an obvious one, noted Hansen-Luke, who congratulated Sophia Yen and Pandia Health for having the ambition to impact at least a billion people. Considering the fact that half the world’s population was female, Hansen-Luke said, he had no doubt that Yen would achieve exactly that.

Above L-R: Sophia Yen, Douglas Hansen-Luke