TECH Talk: an ICR collaboration

136 South Dubuque Street,Iowa City IA 52240

29 November, 2022

Description

NewBoCo, JPEC, ICAD, Iowa EdTech Collaboration, and Hills Bank come together to present future entrepreneurs with an opportunity to network and hear from successful startups. Featured guests include:Jon Lensing- OpenLoop Narayan Iyer- Laminar Scientific and others -TBA The event will include food from Estela's Fresh Mex as well as coffee from Daydrink. Tech Talk is proud to support local businesses. **guests pre-registered via Eventbrite will be entered to win a gift valued at $100** Dr. Jon Lensing is a rural Iowa native from Pella. While earning his undergraduate degrees in Biology and Biochemistry, Dr. Lensing started GR Drone, an aerial surveillance company in Grand Rapids, MI. After graduation, he successfully exited the company before coming back to his home state for medical school. He simultaneously worked as VP of Research for Swinetech, an ag-tech startup, while earning his doctorate. Upon graduating from medical school, Jon matched into plastic surgery for residency, but had also started OpenLoop during his final year. Jon ultimately made the decision to discontinue further clinical training to run OpenLoop to better deliver Healing Anywhere. Narayan Iyer: In Dec 2016, I graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Aerospace Engineering and started work at Collins Aerospace where I had interned for several summers. Several years in during Covid, I started to get time outside of work to develop some ideas that were in the back burner of my mind: different ways to capture energy from ocean waves. I filed a couple of patents and started to believe I was onto something interesting. I hired an excellent student at UIowa, Brady Kakert, to work with me on some of the prototypes. We then demonstrated it in the ICOE 2021 conference, where we attained a lot of interest from marine energy specialists, regulators and scientists; they conveyed that these were very interesting novel perspectives in the field of marine energy. That is when I formed a C corp and started hiring more interns. The growing pains were certainly tremendous, especially for a hardware company, with higher costs of MVP development and burden of proof. But with a can-do, can-learn, coachable attitude, our team has been making great strides: with $162K crowdfunded ($152K crowd, $10K RegD), in addition to $200K F+F round and $150K simulation grant from the US DOE, we have now attained a regional tech-licensing deal with a mid-size SE Asian energy company. This licensing deal is worth $1M paid in milestones as we build their first prototype (costs covered by them), in addition to royalties as they take up manufacturing and deploy the technology. However, there is still a long way to go as we embark on this incredible climate tech journey. Change Comes in Waves™.