IPIRA Startups

IPIRA Startups

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...

Tenaya Therapeutics

Brief Description

Tenaya Therapeutics is shaping the future of heart disease treatment driven by a mission to discover, develop, and deliver curative therapies that address the underlying drivers of heart disease. Tenaya is developing therapies for rare genetic disorders as well as for more prevalent heart conditions through three platforms: Gene Therapy, Cellular Regeneration, and Precision Medicine. The company was spun out of a new method for creating three-dimensional human heart tissue from stem cells, developed in a collaboration between UC Berkeley Professor of Materials Science...

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...

nEye Systems

Brief Description

nEye Systems is a next-generation optical switch company. Their programmable photonic integrated circuit integrates high-radix optical circuit switching on a Si chip and is a future-proof solution for Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) systems and other high-performance computing environments. Their optical switches are poised to solve some of the biggest challenges facing the growth and adoption of AI/ML – the excessive costs of power requirements and network expansion.

nEye’s wafer-scale optical circuit switch offers direct optical connections,...

Evergreen Saponins

Brief Description

Evergreen Saponins is commercializing a sustainable, scalable production method for saponins, unlocking a new supply chain for an essential ingredient in processed food, bio-pesticides, medicines, vaccines, and more. Early in his career, company founder Dr. Ricardo San Martin developed techniques for harvesting saponins from the wood and bark of mature wild trees in Chile, fueling demand for the additive worldwide. Now the chemical engineer has invented a breakthrough method to extract commercial-grade saponins from the leaves of Chilean soapbark trees, Quillaja...

Knit Health Technologies

Brief Description

Applying artificial intelligence to clinical decision making in healthcare.

Timeline 2025. Company founded Inventors

Jonas Raphael Knecht, Maya Petersen, Jonathan Kolstad

ProMOF, Inc.

Brief Description

ProMOF is commercializing molecular weaving, a method of creating materials by interconnecting organic threads at the molecular level, much like weaving fabric. The technology, pioneered by UC Berkeley Professor of Chemistry Omar Yaghi, makes polymer composites stronger and tougher without compromising function, with potential applications in energy storage, gas separation, and other fields.

Timeline

2024. Company founded Inventors

Omar Yaghi, Yuzhong Liu, Ting Xu, Cornelius Groop, S. Ephraim Neumann,...

ScaleLight

Brief Description

ScaleLight is developing surface-emitting lasers that boost efficiency and scalability for powering everything from manufacturing and fusion plants to data centers and quantum computers. The company was founded by UC Berkeley Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Boubacar Kanté, whose groundbreaking research solved a longstanding optics challenge to create compact, lightweight, high-efficiency lasers, called Berkeley Surface Emitting Lasers, or BerkSEL, for greener manufacturing and energy.
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Sift Biosciences

Brief Description

Sift Biosciences supercharges existing cancer therapies by leveraging artificial intelligence and high-throughput cellular screening to discover and design immunotherapy boosters that significantly extend cancer patient survival. The company was co-founded by Yue Clare Lou (BS ’18 Microbial Biology; PhD ’23 Microbiology) and Maddie Williams (PhD student '23-present, Molecular & Cell Biology) to commercize technology developed during their doctoral research at UC Berkeley.

Timeline 2024. Company founded Inventors

Yue "Clare" Lou, Madeline Dee...