Allison Duettmann

If you are a founder building in climate and/or deep tech - check out this webinar tomorrow hosted by Newlab. A killer panel diving into Techno-Economic Analyses (TEA) and Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) Mastering TEA and LCA for Deep Tech Success - August 20 at 2:30pm ET - Understand how these tools drive the economic viability and environmental sustainability of your venture Link to register below!

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ICYMI: Verne co-founder and CTO David Jaramillo wrote about the importance of helping entrepreneurial scientists cross the first "Valley of Death". In his mind, this first valley is the lab bench where many scientists and academics develop breakthrough technologies and products. Unfortunately, many of these science breakthroughs don’t see the light of day. It can be difficult for PhD students to independently determine whether the new material they have discovered or idea they have been developing has merit in the real world. Fortunately, there are many fantastic institutions working on solving this challenge. Activate, Breakthrough Energy Fellows, The Engine’s The Blueprint, and many others are leading examples of fellowships that aim to instruct scientists and create entrepreneurial communities. We agree with David. Investing in more programs to develop scientist-to-founder ecosystems is the best way to address some of the world’s toughest problems and to mitigate climate change. This is why Collaborative Fund created The Shared Future Fund back in 2022. We know that by backing climate startups that have earned a place among some of the world’s leading accelerators and fellowships, we can help provide rapid, catalytic capital to this emerging class of founders. https://lnkd.in/g_wXMHbX

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On the surface, tech transfer operations (e.g. the process of transferring research and IP into commercialized opportunities) and early-stage startups may seem quite different. But when we at 9point8 Collective dug a little deeper, there was tons of overlap which speaks to the essence of zero-to-one development: 1️⃣ Innovation Focus: both tech transfer and early-stage startups aim to commercialize new technologies or solutions that can address real-world problems or create new opportunities. There is no blueprint to follow. 2️⃣ Intellectual Property: tech transfer ventures usually come with robust IP portfolios, including patents and trade secrets, and early-stage startups often focus on developing and protecting their IP to create a competitive advantage. Leverage IP as an asset is a key part of the strategy. 3️⃣ Market Potential: both tech transfer and early-stage startups target markets with high growth potential. They often aim to disrupt existing industries or create entirely new market segments, so targeting the right markets is essential. 4️⃣ Risk Profile: both types of ventures carry extreme risk and ambiguity due to the uncertainties associated with bringing new technologies or business models to market. With all this overlap, we innovated different versions of our diligence and assessment tool #VentureIQ to focus on tech transfer. Instead of a pitch deck as the raw inputs, we used patent filings instead. We wanted to see if our tech could generate credible insight on how raw technologies can be commercialized. The results have been pretty solid so far. From a single patent filing, we can extract technology readiness levels, target markets, competitors and benchmarks with similar technology, and even sources of public and private funding. From what our design partners have validated for us, these are monumental leaps in the development process -- saving thousands of dollars and weeks of time -- all done with #AI. Know of an interesting #techtransfer use case? Send me a DM so we can chat about it!

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