MIT Clean Energy Prize Grants Go to Startups From Boston to San Francisco

OptiBit, a company with hardware intended to improve the bandwidth and energy efficiency of data centers, won top billing at the MIT Clean Energy Prize in May. The company, which developed its technology over 10 years at MIT, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Colorado, went home with the $275,000 grand prize.

The Clean Energy Prize, which started in 2008, awarded more than $400,000 in total. NexTint, a San Francisco company that can adjust the tint of a window to control the amount of light and heat transferred through it, won $35,000. So did CoolFlux, a company that tries to improve a building’s cooling performance, and Navi-Chem, a company that produces high-value chemicals such as lactic acid from organic municipal solid waste.

Safire, a business founded by MIT students, won $15,000 for its process of pretreating and increasing the density of biomass. It also won one of two $2,500 audience awards. Emreso, which developed an electromagnetic, geophysical method of monitoring fluid and gas movement, took the other.

Author: David Holley

David is the national correspondent at Xconomy. He has spent most of his career covering business of every kind, from breweries in Oregon to investment banks in New York. A native of the Pacific Northwest, David started his career reporting at weekly and daily newspapers, covering murder trials, city council meetings, the expanding startup tech industry in the region, and everything between. He left the West Coast to pursue business journalism in New York, first writing about biotech and then private equity at The Deal. After a stint at Bloomberg News writing about high-yield bonds and leveraged loans, David relocated from New York to Austin, TX. He graduated from Portland State University.