anytime you want a bigger display to interact with, for reading text or watching a video, say.
Enravel has five employees, and its technology was built over the past few years using $8 million in funding for a related endoscopic imaging project (led by Eric Seibel) and $100,000 in grants. The company expects to finish its portable prototype by next month, and to have a standalone product by the end of next year.
2. Calcionics (Seattle)
This company was spun out of the UW Bioengineering department in 2007 with a new method of preventing and treating cardiovascular disease—specifically, hardening of the arteries. It’s based on osteopontin, a natural protein which breaks down the calcified tissue that makes arteries harden; this protein is apparently the only a biomarker of heart disease that but is not yet treated, or in this case augmented, with a drug. My colleague Luke wrote about Calcionics when it presented at a Zino Society investment forum a little over a year ago.
CEO Chip Jacob has been working with UW professor Cecilia Giachelli, who did pioneering research on osteopontin. As a progress update, Jacob cited some new clinical data from Pfizer, some new grant funding, and new team members, as well as an ongoing study in mice. The plan is still to raise $35 million over the next five years, and then get acquired by a big drug company to commercialize the product.
3. RoadWyze (Walla Walla, WA)
CEO Dale Keep regaled the audience with stories from his 36 years of working with government agencies dealing with snow, ice, and other weather conditions on roads and highways. His company, founded in 2004, places wireless sensors in roads to communicate things like air temperature, surface temperature, humidity, and pavement conditions (ice or no ice) to computers in road-management vehicles. “The solution is data,” he said.
The idea is that all this data—the sensors could be placed every mile or so—will let authorities spend less money on salt and road chemicals by pinpointing where they’re really needed. It will also make roads safer for drivers. A case study in Maine suggests the technology could reduce the $32 million
