University of Pennsylvania
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R&D Roundup: ‘Twisted light’ lasers, prosthetic vision advances and robot-trained dogs
I see far more research articles than I could possibly write up. This column collects the most interesting of those papers and advances, along with notes on why they may prove important in the world of tech and startups.
In this edition: a new type of laser emitter that uses metamaterials, robot-trained dogs, a breakthrough in neurological research that may advance prosthetic vision and other cutting-edge technology.
Twisted laser-starters
We think of lasers as going “straight” because that’s simpler than understanding their nature as groups of like-minded photons. But there are more exotic qualities for lasers beyond wavelengths and intensity, ones scientists have been trying to exploit for years. One such quality is… well, there are a couple names for it: Chirality, vorticality, spirality and so on — the quality of a beam having a corkscrew motion to it. Applying this quality effectively could improve optical data throughput speeds by an order of magnitude.
The trouble with such “twisted light” is that it’s very difficult to control and detect. Researchers have been making progress on this for a couple of years, but the last couple weeks brought some new advances.
First, from the University of the Witwatersrand, is a laser emitter that can produce twisted light of record purity and angular momentum — a measure of just how twisted it is. It’s also compact and uses metamaterials — always a plus.
The second is a pair of matched (and very multi-institutional) experiments that yielded both a transmitter that can send vortex lasers and, crucially, a receiver that can detect and classify them. It’s remarkably hard to determine the orbital angular momentum of an incoming photon, and hardware to do so is clumsy. The new detector is chip-scale and together they can use five pre-set vortex modes, potentially increasing the width of a laser-based data channel by a corresponding factor. Vorticality is definitely on the roadmap for next-generation network infrastructure, so you can expect startups in this space soon as universities spin out these projects.
Tracing letters on the brain-palm
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Acting as the data integrator between hospitals and digital health apps brings Redox $33 million
Investors have forked over $33 million in a new round of funding for Redox, hoping that the company can execute on its bid to serve as the link between healthcare providers and the technology companies bringing new digital services to market.
The financing comes just two months after Redox sealed a deal with Microsoft to act as the integration partner connecting Microsoft’s Teams product to electronic health records through the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard.
Redox sits at a critically important crossroads in the modern healthcare industry. Its founder, a former employee at the electronic health record software provider Epic, knows more than most about the central position that data occupies in U.S. healthcare at the moment.
“What we’re doing, we’re building the platform and connector to help health systems integrate with technologies in the cloud,” says chief executive, Luke Bonney.
Bonney served as a team lead in various divisions at Epic before launching Redox, and the Madison, Wis.-based company was crafted with the challenges other vendors faced when trying to integrate with legacy systems like the health record provider.
“The fundamental problem is helping a large health system use a third-party tool that they want to use,” says Bonney. And the biggest obstacle, he said, is finding a way to organize into a format that application developers can work with the data coming from healthcare providers.
Investors including RRE Ventures, Intermountain Ventures and .406 Ventures joined new investor Battery Ventures in financing the $33 million round. As part of the deal, Battery Ventures general partner Chelsea Stoner will take a seat on the company’s board.
Application developers pay for the number of integrations they have with a health system, and Redox enables them to connect through a standard application programming interface, according to the company.
Its approach allows secure messaging across any format associated with an organization’s electronic health record (EHR), the company said.
Redox works with more than 450 healthcare providers and hundreds of application developers, the company said.
High-profile healthcare networks that work with the company include AdventHealth, Atrium Health, Brigham & Women’s, Clarify Health, Cleveland Clinic, Geisinger, HCA, Healthgrades, Intermountain Healthcare, Invitae, Fitbit, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Microsoft, Ochsner, OSF HealthCare, PointClickCare, R1, ResMed, Stryker, UCSF, University of Pennsylvania and WellStar.
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Medivis has launched its augmented reality platform for surgical planning
After two years of development, Medivis, a New York-based company developing augmented reality data integration and visualization tools for surgeons, is bringing its first product to market.
The company was founded by Osamah Choudhry and Christopher Morley who met as senior residents at NYU Medical Center.
Initially a side-project, the two residents roped in some engineers to help develop their first prototypes and after a stint in NYU’s Summer Launchpad program the two decided to launch the company.
Now, with $2.3 million in financing led by Initialized Capital and partnerships with Dell and Microsoft to supply hardware, the company is launching its first product, called SurgicalAR.
In fact, it was the launch of the HoloLens that really gave Medivis its boost, according to Morley. That technology pointed a way toward what Morley said was one of the dreams for technology in the medical industry.
“The Holy Grail is to be able to holographically render a patient,” he said.
For now, Medivis is able to access patient data and represent it visually in a three-dimensional model for doctors to refer to as they plan surgeries. That model is mapped back to the patient to give surgeons a plan for how best to approach an operation.
“The interface between medical imaging and surgical utility from it is really where we see a lot of innovation being possible,” says Morley.
So far, Medivis has worked with the University of Pennsylvania and New York University to bring their prototypes into a surgical setting.
The company is integrating some machine learning capabilities to be able to identify the most relevant information from patients’ medical records and diagnostics as they begin to plan the surgical process.
“What we’ve been working on over this time is developing this really disruptive 3D pipeline,” says Morley. “What we have seen is that there is a distinct lack of 3D pipelines to allow people to directly interface… very quickly try to automate the entire rendering process.”
For now, Medivis is selling a touchscreen monitor, display and a headset. The device plugs into a hospital network and extracts medical imaging to display from their servers in about 30 seconds, according to Choudhry.
“That’s where we see this immediately being useful in that pre-surgical planning stage,” Choudhry says. “The use in surgical planning and being able to extend this through surgical navigation… Streamline the process that requires a large amount of pieces and components and setups so you only need an AR headset to localize pathology and make decisions off of that.”
Already the company has performed 15 surgeries in consultation with the company’s technology.
“When we first met Osamah and Chris, we immediately understood the magnitude of the problem they were out to solve. Medical imaging as it relates to surgical procedures has largely been neglected, leaving patients open to all sorts of complications and general safety issues,” said Eric Woersching, general partner, Initialized Capital, in a statement. “We took one look at the Medivis platform and knew they were poised to transform the operating room. Not only was their hands-free approach to visualization meeting a real need for greater surgical accuracy, but the team has the passion and expertise in the medical field to bring it all to fruition. We couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome Medivis to the Initialized family.”
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Taali takes its popped water lily snacks from Y Combinator to the world
Aditya and Aarti Kochhar Kaji didn’t set out to start the snack food business Taali Foods when they were studying for their business degrees at Harvard.
The couple both hail from Mumbai and met at the University of Pennsylvania . They were married before starting at Harvard’s Business School and initially were interested in other areas — Aarti was exploring a career in venture capital and Aditya was looking at the food and beverage industry broadly in his classes at Harvard.
Addicted to snack foods like chips and popcorn to fuel her Harvard study sessions, Aarti started making popped water lily seeds as a snack — a food both she and her husband had grown up eating in India, she said.
The seeds, which are high in anti-oxidants and low in fat, have been a staple of Ayurvedic medicine — thanks to their purported anti-inflammatory properties, and are a staple of Indian snacking traditions. Now, with American consumers on the hunt for healthier snacks, they’re becoming a big business in the U.S. as well.
Y Combinator is very on-trend, with its decision to invest and accelerate Taali as part of its most recent cohort of startups. But in this instance you may call the accelerator a fast follower rather than a progenitor of this trend.
No less auspicious a food tastemaker than Whole Foods named water lily seeds as one of the top 10 new food trends of 2019. With that attention, competitors to Taali abound.
Bohana and AshaPops are just two new snack food companies floating on the popped water lily seed movement. Bohana even managed to nab the attention of PepsiCo’s Nutrition Greenhouse competitive accelerator.
It’s no secret that technology investors are investing more heavily in consumer businesses — everything from snack foods to period products and baby formula — and startups need only point to the success of Amazon as the everything store to show that there’s always money to be made in the category.
Indeed, at $1.47 trillion, the consumer packaged goods industry dwarfs technology as a share of the nation’s economy.
As Ryan Caldbeck, the head of the consumer-focused investment firm CircleUp noted last year:
The uptick in tech VC dollars going to the CPG market is partly because tech investing is brutally competitive and saturated, and largely because these VCs are awakening to the strong historical returns in CPG, especially with the trend leaning towards small brands stealing market share.
Consumer is a massive market – about 3x the size of tech, as seen below.
Despite the size of the market, the early-stage has historically been underserved by investors due to market inefficiencies like the geographic dispersion of brands and a lack of structured information sources (i.e. there is no Silicon Valley for consumer, and certainly no Crunchbase equivalents – yet).
Strong exits are already possible for consumer brands — and not necessarily from the big-ticket, headline grabbing acquisitions like Dollar Shave Club. Last week This is L. — the condom and period product retailer — sold for roughly $100 million after raising seed funding from investors, including 500 Startups and Y Combinator.
Taali was similarly bootstrapped before it was accepted into Y Combinator. The company is already selling its snacks through Amazon and in retail locations like Fairway in New York and Central Market in Texas. The founders expect to be in stores in California in the next few months.
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