SXSW Startups: UbiGro
The Forrest Four-Cast: February 23, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in Hyper-Connected Communities, which will pitch at 5 pm Saturday, March 9, UbiGro is a nanotech-enabled greenhouse film by UbiQD, Inc. that red-shifts the sun’s spectrum for improved crop yield and quality. It’s a glowing film that sits above crops in a greenhouse and transforms sunlight to make crops grow faster. UbiGro has produced significant crop yield enhancements for tomatoes and cucumbers. It works on cannabis too! UbiQD enabled this innovation with safer, cheaper, and more reliable quantum dot technology that it’s licensing from M.I.T., Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the University of Washington. UbiQD envisions a future where quantum dots are ubiquitous across a range of different applications, and they will be the leader by focusing on large area applications in agriculture and windows.
UbiQD Founder and CEO Hunter McDaniel, PhD, explained more about how UbiGro works.
What is your competitive advantage?
Our materials are very special, and hard to make. That is, we have patents and trade secrets that make it nearly impossible to compete with us head on. We are also an early mover in this space of spectrum optimized greenhouses, with a killer team executing faster than anyone else.
What are your goals for UbiGro in 2019?
We have struggled to keep up with UbiGro film demand, and so we are planning to significantly expand our production capacity this year. In order to do that, and achieve our aggressive growth plans, we will need to raise capital. So closing our series A is one of my top goals this year. I truly believe this is the year where quantum dots make a name for themselves in agriculture, and so its about marketing, sales, manufacturing, and generally about traction in the market.
Your team has had incredible reviews on the UbiGro agricultural product. Can you tell us how the greenhouse film mimics the late summer sun?
Our product uses nanomaterials called quantum dots that glow with a color that we can control during the manufacturing process by changing particle size. We can make green, yellow, orange, red, and everything in between, simply by changing the size of these particles. Therefore, we can create almost any arbitrary glow spectrum, for example, to mimic the late summer sun in a specific location like Northern California. Plants love it.
In October, UbiQD was one of the five selected companies for the Wells Fargo Incubator program. Tell us more about your product to improve energy utilization in commercial buildings.
We are very humbled and excited to get into the Wells Fargo IN2 program. Our solar window technology sounds and looks like a completely different concept, but in fact is well aligned with our greenhouse products. We are using the same quantum dot materials, but different colors. It’s actually a near-infrared grey for windows instead of yellow/orange/red for greenhouses. For windows we adapt sunlight and guide it to small solar cells hidden in the frame of a window, whereas in the ag products we adapt sunlight and guide it to plants. Solar cells like near-infrared light best, and plants prefer yellow/orange/red. You can read more about our window technology in the latest issue of Chemical Engineering Progress.
From security inks to sunlight harvesting with windows, your product range is wide. How do you choose which to focus on?
Great question. It looks from the outside that we are less focused than we actually are, we are very disciplined about staying focused. All of these applications require the same enabling material that we manufacture; safe, stable, bright, and efficient quantum dots. However, we have to do some heavy lifting to develop and prove out use cases, and that’s where our value proposition analysis comes in. We look at how much value a gram of quantum dots will bring to the customer, and how big is that addressable market opportunity. The higher the value-add, and the bigger the market, the better. That’s what led us to agriculture. There are other soft factors like sales cycle speed, marketing potential, competition, defensibility, and technology readiness level. We are focused on agriculture, but if a partner comes to us or if resources are available, we will also work on other exciting use cases like security inks.
UbiQD’s sunlight harvesting windows use quantum dots to turn solar energy into electricity. Is it possible that with this technology, future buildings could attain zero net energy consumption?
Achieving net-zero is a lot harder than most people think. Commercial buildings are energy guzzling things. The answer is yes, eventually, but not today. With a typical commercial building, and assuming our current performance, our windows will only provide up to 20 to 30 percent of the electricity it needs. That gap will close as we improve our performance, but more importantly, as the buildings utilize energy more efficiently. Things like LED lighting, improved thermal insulation, and smart HVAC systems can play an important role in reducing the energy needs of commercial buildings. However, you definitely must have efficient energy generation embedded into the façade of the building in order to get anywhere close to net-zero.
Your company has diverse areas of focus from agriculture to urban planning. What other frontiers are you interested in tackling in the future?
We have a partnership on anti-counterfeit security inks, which can address the global $500B counterfeit goods problem. We’ve filed patents on use cases in medical diagnostics; imagine a real-time cancer detector! Several of us are excited about the interested use cases in art and design. The biggest market for quantum dots right now is display and lighting (LEDs), but it’s not an area we want to compete in. Something that isn’t a huge market opportunity, but has us really excited, is the use of our dots in pollen tracking. We supplied the materials used in some recently published work where they showed a glowing quantum dot labeled honey bee. You can see our dots!
What have you learned from other pitch events and/or tech conference?
I pitched at ArcView (cannabis investor network) recently in Santa Monica. Previously, I went through the Keiretsu Forum (largest angel investor network). I have done quite a bit of public speaking because prior to my current role I was in science/research, and spoke at conferences like MRS and ACS a lot. The best advice I can give is to practice. Even the best speakers need to practice. Once you have the content down, then can you relax and be conversational, with good jokes. The key to a well-received pitch is to make it feel conversational and insert natural humor. Your comfort and confidence on stage is often more impactful than the content. Also, try to avoid text on your slides. Just a single phrase and a great picture is best. And no technical jargon! Try to keep it simple.
UbiGro is currently based in Los Alamos, NM. Tell us about the startup ecosystem there.
Well Los Alamos a town of 18,000 people so there is not really an ‘ecosystem’ here. The other startups that spun out of Los Alamos National Lab in recent years, like Descartes Labs and Viome, quickly left town for larger cities. Actually, there is an excellent R&D ecosystem here because of Los Alamos National Lab. It’s also a very, very nice place to live up here in the mountain. Tomorrow I will drive 20 minutes from my house for a fresh powder ski day. I’ll then be able to work in the afternoon if I want, because my office is just as close. We get 300-plus days of sunshine. The state of New Mexico has many supportive programs from tax credits, to capex funding, and technical assistance from the national labs. We are actually in the no. 1 best place in the world to build a deep tech company, but please don’t tell anyone.
How and when did your team come together and please fill us in on any relevant startup experience?
Several of us worked together or collaborated while we were working on our PhDs in graduate school or later as postdocs. We collaborated at the Los Alamos National Lab, the National Renewable Energy Lab, and University of Illinois. I founded the company in 2014 on my own, but was able to recruit key guys over two to three years. We didn’t have a ton of startup experience, so I recruited some folks who did after that. One worked at a different quantum dot startup based in the UK that’s now publicly traded, another built a vertically integrated cannabis company in Oregon. We have co-founders of QDVision and Innovalight, both nanocrystal technology companies that were acquired on our advisory board. All together, we have more than half a billion dollars of ‘exit’ experience on the team.
Looking at the entire tech industry, what trend is your team most excited about?
We are very excited about the resurgence of funding for so-called cleantech or sustainability-focused startups. This is really important because humanity faces a major global challenge with climate change, and the only true source of technology progress is startup innovation (in my humble opinion). It’s been really sad to see the startups working on the hardest problems that actually can save the planet, struggling to get the funding they need. I listened to a great podcast on this topic by GreenTechMedia recently.
What has the startup experience taught you about life?
It’s better to get a good night’s sleep than getting all of the tasks done. Make sure to take a deep breath, smell the flowers, and enjoy the ride, because you only have one shot at this. If you are miserable in the startup life, as many are, then do something else. Life is too short to be unhappy. I also think life is too short to commute.
What’s one piece of advice you wish you’d had that you’d give to others wanting to join the startup journey?
Nothing is easy, and the path to success is littered with failure. You have to fail A LOT to learn how to succeed, so be prepared to take a lot of arrows and keep hustling. From the outside it looks great, but most of the time it’s extremely stressful, lonely, ugly, and physically painful.
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
