UC brings startups to GCVI Summit 2020

Now in its third year, the University of California Entrepreneur (UC) Startup Showcase has become an integral part of the Global Corporate Venturing & Innovation (GCVI) Summit, held in Monterey, California by GUV owner Mawsonia.

After Christine Gulbranson decided to step down from her position as chief innovation officer at UC last year, this year the competition was introduced by her successor, Victoria Slivkoff, global head, UC Systemwide Innovation and Entrepreneurship. 
Gulbranson, true to her continued enthusiasm for the ecosystem, was still in attendance however to cheer on the startups from the audience, which included more than 800 delegates from the corporate venture capital world.

There was another change this year, as UC partnered Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC), a non-profit startup competition dedicated to promoting education and science and inspired by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. That meant that, in addition to a winner selected by the regular judges, one startup was also in line to become a finalist in the XTC regional contest and be in with a chance to secure up to $10m in funding. 

The regular judges included Shankar Chandran, managing director of consumer electronics group Samsung’s Catalyst Fund; Alessandro Zaga, managing director of carmaker Hyundai’s corporate venturing division Hyundai Ventures; and Eric Butois, general partner of early-stage venture capital firm Benhamou Global Venture.

Slivkoff welcomed judges, startups and delegates and revealed that “this year, we asked campuses from across the ecosystem to submit startups and we selected the top five finalists.”

The finalists included UC Berkeley’s BioTrillion and TomoCredit, UC Santa Barbara’s Cayuga Biotech, UC San Diego’s Educational Vision Technologies and UC Riverside’s FarmSense.

First to pitch was Savan Devani, chief executive and founder of BioTrillion, a mobile digital biomarker platform for detecting developing diseases. Devani noted that healthcare represented approximately a fifth of the US economy and countless aspects of it were broken.

BioTrillion’s platform relies on machine learning to identify biomarkers for neurological and cardiological diseases by measuring pupillary reflexes. These reflexes are currently assessed manually and on a qualitative basis, making them expensive and inefficient. 

The company is initially focusing on the compliance vertical and hopes to deliver a subscription model to ride-sharing platforms such as Lyft and Uber to make sure drivers are not intoxicated before picking up passengers. BioTrillion would subsequently expand into the pharmaceutical sector, where it expects its technology could help test responses to treatments in trials and recruit suitable patients, before moving into the insurance vertical.

Damien Kudela, co-founder and CEO of haemostatic drug developer Cayuga Biotech then took the stage to discuss the challenge of stopping bleeding in time. Cayuga’s treatment accelerated the body’s natural coagulation process, with Kudela stating that bleeding caused one in 10 deaths in the US, making it the leading cause of death for people under the age of 46. 

The challenge, he explained, was that every three minutes of bleeding increased the odds of dying by 1%, but current approaches focused on treating the first stage of clotting, called initiation. Cayuga, instead, focused on the second stage, acceleration, and was able to halt bleeding within five minutes – compared to an hour taken by patients in a control group.

Cayuga’s intravenous drug, administered intravenously, would have a wide array of applications, Kudela said, such as haemophilia or on the battlefield. The company was raising a $10m series A round to conduct its phase 1 trial following a meeting with US regulator the Food and Drug Administration this month. It was currently half-way through the preclinical phase, Kudela revealed.

Monal Parmar, founder, chief executive and chief technology officer of Educational Vision Technologies (EVT), subsequently sang the praises of his company, which has created an artificial intelligence-based system that generated notes from university lectures.

The notes, Parmar explained, were generated from a professor’s notes on the blackboard and were timestamped to the video, meaning students could click on a note to be taken to the relevant time in the video recording. 

The platform operated on a software-as-a-business model, Parmar said, and charged universities $12,000 per room. While this might sound like a steep sum, he reassured judges that currently, universities were investing far more than this in dedicated video suites to record online classes, which, in addition to hardware, also required video editors and additional time from faculty to record their lecture. EVT’s system recorded the lecture in a regular classroom as it happened, Parmar revealed.

Eamonn Keogh, co-founder of FarmSense, had an entirely different proposition for the judges: insect monitoring. FarmSense had developed an agricultural smart trap using optical sensor technology to monitor insects to detect potential pests early.

FarmSense, which was looking to raise a $1.5m seed round, used a mobile phone signal-based sensor equipped with a solar panel, with a machine learning platform combining insect models and predictive analytics to alert farmers to an increase in insects.

Today’s solutions were inaccurate, costly, labour-intensive and, worst of all, incurred a long time lag, Keogh claimed. This meant that farmers were unnecessarily deploying pesticides, which increased the risk of resistance, damaged the environment and increased a farm’s carbon footprint. 

The market was huge, Keogh said, citing the example of the navel orange worm, a pest affecting almond crops and causing $1,700 worth of damage per acre of crops. More than $12bn was being spent on pesticides in the US alone each year, he added, and more than $27bn of crops and forests were lost to invasive species in the US each year.

Finally, Kristy Kim, co-founder and chief executive of TomoCredit, tackled the issue of millennials in the US with a low credit score who were unable to get a credit card – which in turn prevented them from building up a credit score and led to a vicious circle.

Kim estimated there were 30 million adults in the US suffering from the way credit scores were currently calculated – a system first devised in 1900 and thus outdated and inaccurate, Kim added. 

TomoCredit analysed income, spending and asset monitoring, Kim explained, and once users have had a card for three months, the company sent repayment data to credit bureaus to allow a credit score to be built up. This, in turn, gave users access to other debt products, such as car financing and mortgages, Kim said.

The company carried 100% of the credit risk itself, she explained, and currently had a monthly credit limit of $5,000 – though this was set to increase to $10,000 from this March. It did not charge interest or late payment charges, instead opting to give people 30 days to repay before freezing the card and giving them a two-month grace period. 

TomoCredit was planning to issue 100,000 cards this year after experiencing double-digit growth every month since launching last year, Kim revealed, adding that TomoCredit did not merely see itself as a credit card provider, but as a stepping stone for young adults.

Following the pitches, it was time for Barrett Parkman, director of startup and VC ecosystem at Samsung Catalyst Fund and managing director of XTC, to introduce XTC in more detail, noting that it was supported by nearly 25 corporates and more than 1,000 startups had applied to take part in the competition so far.

Stunned by the breadth and potential of the startups he had just seen pitch, Parkman revealed that XTC had selected not just one startup as a regional finalist, but three: Cayuga Biotech, EVT and FarmSense.
Cayuga Biotech’s day became even better only a few minutes later when the panel of regular judges announced they had also selected the company as a winner.

GUV congratulates all the winners and, with the GCVI Summit returning to the same location in 2021, is already looking forward to next year’s session. Before then, however, we will welcome startups from SetSquared and University of Oxford to pitch at our GUV: Fusion conference in June 2020 – significantly discounted tickets are available for another three days.