SBIR/STTR Recipient

ChemFinity Technologies

Brief Description

ChemFinity Technologies is tackling one of the most urgent challenges of the energy transition: the critical mineral shortage. The company leverages highly tunable porous polymer sorbents that selectively extract more than 20 different metals and other elements from liquids and gases. ChemFinity has developed two forms of materials: sorbent beads, which function like a Brita filter but target specific metals, and membranes that purify water while simultaneously capturing valuable metals. The technology has the potential to efficiently recover metal from various waste...

Calyx

Brief Description

Calyx is a materials science company that harnesses biology to provide low cost and highly accurate sensors for real-time detection and analysis of air chemicals in a variety of industries, including safety, healthcare, transportation, and food. The company offers commercial customers phage-based sensing and analysis of multiple gasses.

Company co-founders Ray Chiu and Benson Fan developed the company’s founding technology as a capstone project while they were students in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Masters in Bioengineering program. With the encouragement of UC Berkeley...

MuMec, Inc.

Brief Description

MuMec builds wireless transceiver technologies that drastically reduce power consumption for use with Bluetooth LE (BLE) and LoRa/Sigfox protocols. Founded by researchers from UC Berkeley, MuMec integrates Radio Frequency MEMS technology with CMOS design, offering a 10-100x reduction in power consumption, enabling consumer devices and IoT applications to extend battery life, enable always-on wireless connectivity, and operate entirely on scavenged power.

The company is disrupting the wireless communication market by offering the truly ultra-low power wireless ICs...

Ambi Robotics

Brief Description

Ambi Robotics offers advanced robot grasping software for logistics and warehouse order fulfillment, allowing robots to grasp a wide variety of objects.

Ambi Robotics grew from the Dexterity Network (Dex-Net) project at UC Berkeley and is led by Dr. Jeff Mahler and Professor Ken Goldberg, experts in robot grasping with a combined 50+ years of experience.

Formerly known as Ambidextrous.

Timeline 2018. Company founded Inventors

Ken Goldberg, Jeffrey Mahler, Matthew Matl

Organos, Inc.

Brief Description Developer of cardiac micro physiological systems designed to offer three-dimensional (3D) human cardiac tissue models for advanced analysis. The company's data science ecosystem is used to illuminate the effects of compounds on human cardiac tissue, ranging from acute cardiotoxicity and safety pharmacology to chronic studies to predict drug-induced arrhythmia, thereby enabling the health industry to perform safer and cheaper drug development activities. Timeline 2016. Company founded. 2020. Company participated in Berkeley...

Nanosys

Brief Description SiNANOdeª, a silicon-graphite anode material, improves the performance of lithium-ion batteries: Significant increase over existing solutions in full cell energy density and cycle life. Manufacturing process compatible with existing graphite-anode electrode production equipment. Scalable SiNANOdeª production processes available now for technology transfer and licensing. Timeline 2001. Company founded 2023. Acquired by Shoei Chemical, as an operating subsidiary Inventors

Ali Shakouri, Arunava Majumdar, Peidong Yang, Yiying Wu...

Algen Biotechnologies

Brief Description

Algen Biotechnologies is building a next-generation, functional genomics-based platform for the discovery of novel therapeutics for cancers with high unmet need. Algen’s research group focuses on developing and applying novel functional genomics technologies to address scientific challenges in drug discovery. The company's biologists and data scientists are collaborating to deliver innovative, patient-centric medicines for the toughest-to-treat diseases.

The company was founded to commercialize technology developed at UC Berkeley while Algen Biotechnologies CEO...

Monolets, Inc

Brief Description

MonoLets, Inc. is a systems company developing a wireless sensor network for the Internet of Things. The company builds the network with the lowest power System-on-Chip (SoC) hardware platform that can be operated from harvested energy requiring no external battery. The company's patented silicon and wireless mesh technology was developed over five years of research and development at UC Berkeley. Monolets' mission is to enable extremely reliable connectivity in challenging RF environments (metal & liquid obstruction), thereby providing access to real-time information...

Berkeley Yeast

Brief Description

Berkeley Yeast is a startup founded by UC Berkeley scientists, with grant funding from NSF, NIH, and USDA, as well as from venture capital. Berkeley Yeast bioengineers yeast strains that improve fermentation for brewers, winemakers, and beyond. The company uses synthetic biology to develop yeast strains with a variety of benefits, ranging from unprecedented control over flavors, to protection against the increasing vulnerability of crops, to greater product shelf stability and increased production efficiency. CEO Charles Denby co-founded the company based on the...

Fluxion Biosciences, Inc.

Brief Description

Fluxion Biosciences provides analytical, live cell analysis tools that facilitate the transformation of research discoveries into new ways to diagnose and treat patients. By characterizing molecular and cellular mechanisms in physiologically relevant micro-environments, Fluxion helps bridge the translational medicine gap by bringing research data closer to patients. Fluxion's innovative systems for live cell analysis are enabling rapid advances in disease research, drug discovery, and the development of diagnostic tests.

The company successfully introduced three...