Startup founded by ‘Survivor’ champ debuts airless bike tires based on NASA rover tech

Published March 16, 2021

As NASA is quick to remind people, the investments it funnels toward space exploration often wind up improving life on Earth — and it’s now in the business of speeding up some of that work through startups. SMART, a startup founded in 2020, has a partnership with NASA through the Space Act Agreement and is part of the agency’s formal Startup Program that aims to commercialize some of its innovations. The young company today revealed its first product: An airless bicycle tire based on technology NASA engineers created to make future lunar and Martian rovers even more resilient.

SMART’s METL tire is the first fruit of the startup’s work with NASA’s Glenn Research Center, where NASA engineers Dr. Santo Padula and Colin Creager first developed their so-called “shape memory alloy” (SMA) technology. SMA allows for a tire constructed entirely of interconnected springs, which requires no inflation and is therefore immune to punctures, but which can still provide equivalent or better traction when compared to inflatable rubber tires, and even some built-in shock-absorbing capabilities.

Engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center assemble the new shape memory alloy rover tire prior to testing in the Simulated Lunar Operations Laboratory. Image Credits: NASA

Dr. Padula and Creager’s key development was creating an alloy that can return to their shape at the molecular level, meaning they can deform to adapt to uneven terrain, including obstacles like gravel and potholes, and return to their shape without losing structural integrity over time.

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SMART, which is co-founded by “Survivor: Fiji” champion Earl Cole and engineer Brian Yennie, worked with Padula and Creager, along with former NASA intern Calvin Young, to apply the benefits of SMA to the consumer market. They’re targeting the cycling market first with their METL tire, which is set to become available to the general public by early next year. Following that, SMART intends to also pursue bringing SMA tires to the automotive and commercial vehicle industries, too.

Image Credits: SMART Tire Company

Already, SMART has a partnership in place with Ford-owned Spin, the bike and scooter-sharing company focused on novel micromobility models. SMART’s technology has the potential not only to make flat tires or under inflation a thing of the past, but could reduce cost and waste long-term by supplementing the need for rubber tires, which need frequent replacement and can be a danger to riders or drivers when used without proper pressure.

SMART is also using WeFunder to seek crowdsourced equity investment, with SAFEs currently available at an $8 million valuation cap.

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Will new SEC equity crowdfunding rules encourage more founders to pass the hat?

Published November 4, 2020

The flow of venture capital in 2020 has been surprisingly strong given the year’s general uncertainty, but while investors have showered plenty of dough on growth-stage companies, seed-stage startups are down 32% last quarter compared to the year before.

There have been plenty of recent conversations about alternative funding routes for founders, and one of those oft-overlooked paths has been equity crowdfunding. While crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter push consumers to back unrealized projects in exchange for products or other services, equity crowdfunding allows consumers to actually invest cash and receive a piece of the company. It’s not a conventional path, but it can be a viable option for companies that have a close relationship with an engaged customer base.

The Security and Exchange Commission’s Regulation Crowdfunding guidelines were adopted under Title III of the JOBS Act back in 2016, but because many entrepreneurs were unfamiliar with how to participate, many of the startups that have taken advantage of it haven’t been the highest quality. The tide could be turning: This week, the SEC updated some of its guidance on crowdfunding, eliminating some ambiguities and increasing the amount of capital companies can raise from both accredited and nonaccredited investors. Additionally, companies can now raise $5 million per year using equity crowdfunding, compared to the previous limit of $1.07 million.

But life has gotten easier in other ways as well for founders pursuing this fundraising type and the platforms that seek to simplify it.

Wefunder is one of a handful of equity crowdfunding platforms that have popped up in the last few years. Before a company can raise on its platform, Wefunder vets them before allowing them to tap into their network of amateur investors who can invest as little as $100 with the median investment sitting at $250. Last month, 40 companies launched on Wefunder and collectively raised $12 million, according to Wefunder CEO Nicholas Tommarello.

DLab is a new East Coast accelerator for crypto

Published October 23, 2018

SOSV, a 20-year-old fund with $500 million in assets under management, has been running accelerators for years. Their oldest one, HAX, is the premier hardware accelerator in San Francisco and Shenzhen, and they’ve recently launched a food accelerator in New York and a pair of biology accelerators. Now, however, they’ve just announced DLab, a crypto accelerator that is paired with Cardano to build out distributed apps and solutions.

It is led by Nick Plante, a programmer integral in drafting the JOBS Act and who co-founded Wefunder, a successful crowdfunding platform.

“We can only make this sort of commitment to ecosystems we feel are incredibly compelling; it takes a substantial amount of dedication, education, staffing, and of course the long-term financial commitment to support the space and the companies,” said Plante. “We invest in ecosystems that we identify as ‘macro trends’ like disruptive food, life sciences and synthetic biology, Chinese market entry, IoT and robotics… things that will fundamentally alter the way that we live in the next 100 years.”

“Decentralization is clearly a macro trend, in the macro sense. What’s happening with blockchain and digital ledger technologies has the potential to upend some of the most basic economic incentives that lie beneath the things we do every day; to affect the ways that humans collaborate, identify, trust, govern, and bring new ideas to life… it underlies all of it,” he said.

DLab supplies up to $200,000 in pre-seed funding as well as perks from the SOSV global network of accelerators. They are also offering fellowships in partnership with Cardano to work with projects that would further blockchain research.

“Through last year and the start of this year we kept watching the blockchain ecosystem do some amazing things — along with some criminal things. The surveys and reports about the fraud rates of ICOs and other unpleasantness kept underlining our concerns report after report. The potential for the big economic shifts I mentioned earlier were clearly here but there were so, so many problems; there was a real need for education, for curation, and for proper governance and incentive structures to be put in place,” said Plante.

The group is accepting applications now for a January cohort. The group invests in 150 startups per year, a heady number in these cash-poor times.