Keep up with news from Wisconsin’s innovation community with these recent headlines:
—A team of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has constructed a third prototype for a vehicle designed to zoom through an above-ground vacuum tube at speeds that can exceed 300 miles per hour, the school said. The “Badgerloop” team is one of 20 from around the world competing in the 2018 Hyperloop Pod Competition.
The competition, which will take place on July 22 in Hawthorne, CA, is organized by the Elon Musk-run company SpaceX. (Musk introduced the Hyperloop concept in a white paper published in 2013.) The winning team will be the one that can reach the highest rate of speed without crashing, according to SpaceX’s list of rules and requirements. The Badgerloop team competed in two Hyperloop competitions last year, but neither time was it one of the teams selected to test their pods inside SpaceX’s vacuum tube.
—C-Motive Technologies, a Madison-based startup developing a new type of electric motor that it claims will produce less heat and can be built with lighter materials than the motors currently on the market, raised $750,000 from a group of angel investors. The motors C-Motive plans to begin selling in late 2018 or early 2019 could potentially be used to propel vehicles in water and on land, or to power assembly equipment in factories, said Justin Reed, C-Motive’s president and CEO.
—Madison-based Cellectar Biosciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CLRB]]) announced a 1-for-10 reverse stock split, meaning stockholders were given one share for every 10 shares in the company they owned. Cellectar, which is developing drugs with the potential to treat several forms of cancer, said in an SEC filing that the stock split would take place after markets close on Monday. The split is expected to reduce the number of outstanding Cellectar shares to about 1.8 million, from 18 million. The company has a current market value of about $13.2 million.
—Telkonet faces a somewhat uncertain future following the Waukesha-based company’s decision to hire the investment bank Roth Capital Partners to “explore strategic alternatives.” Telkonet develops Internet-connected thermostats, sensors, and other building products that can collect and share information in order to conserve energy. Jason Tienor, president and CEO of Telkonet, said his company will consider a variety of transactions alongside Roth, including mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures.
—Maurice Cheeks, vice president of business development at the Madison-based software company MIOsoft, announced he will run for mayor of the city next year. Cheeks currently serves on the Madison City Council. Before joining MIOsoft in 2015, he was director of the Wisconsin Innovation Network.
—Gregor Diagnostics, a Madison-based startup seeking to commercialize a new, at-home test to screen for prostate cancer, raised a $900,000 seed funding round. San Francisco-based First Round Capital and Dallas-based Green Park & Golf Ventures led the round. Gregor Diagnostics plans to use some of the new money to fund a study evaluating a panel of biomarkers that the company’s team believes can distinguish between healthy and cancerous cells in seminal fluid samples, founder and CEO Tobias Zutz said.
