Innovators who join SRI’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence program benefit from a unique opportunity to turn ground-breaking scientific advances into commercial applications.
A few fortunate startups succeed almost instantaneously. Instagram had zero users in early October 2010. In April of 2012, with only 13 employees, it sold to Facebook for $1B.
On the other hand, “deep tech” startups — startups built around fundamental scientific advancements in areas like AI, materials science, biomedicine, and quantum — take longer to mature. Perfecting solutions in the lab can, by itself, take a decade or more.
“Turning a fundamental scientific advance into a market-ready product or service isn’t normally a one-year process,” says Todd Stavish, vice president of SRI’s ventures group. “SRI created its Entrepreneur-in-Residence [EIR] program to speed up that deep tech commercialization journey. Rather than starting from scratch, we give founders an opportunity to work alongside SRI researchers, access SRI’s intellectual property, and explore the potential market for a particular solution. Sometimes, these technologies have benefitted from $10 million or more in non-dilutive R&D funding from the federal government. We invite founders to take technology that’s already been validated in a lab and give it a critical final push into the real world.”
How the EIR program works
SRI entrepreneurs-in-residence, observes Stavish, are people who are already committed to making an impact in a very focused technology niche. “They know what they want to do, and they recognize that SRI has technology that can help them do it,” he says. “The are here to explore the commercializability of SRI technology in a specific area, and define a venture concept. The goal, at the end of the program, is to land on a venture that we can spin out as an independent entity.”
As an R&D nonprofit, SRI generally retains the intellectual property (IP) it develops while advancing the priorities of federal sponsors in areas as diverse as quantum sensing, collaborative robotics, cybersecurity, and clean energy. While these inventions may have potential applications across numerous industries, they need to be further refined before they can meet industry needs.
“What really differentiates SRI’s approach to ventures is our ability to provide entrepreneurs with numerous advanced technologies and a defined program to explore and iterate on those technologies.” — Todd Stavish
Entrepreneurs-in-residence collaborate with SRI research staff to build a prototype. They also engage in interviews and industry analysis to match the prototype to a white space in the market. In startup terminology, the intent of the program is to retire much of the technology and market risk associated with a new venture.
Sometimes, the process starts with an SRI researcher who is interested in commercializing a very particular technology and is seeking an experienced business partner with a strong sense of the industry to take the role as CEO. Membravo founder and CEO Joe Sawa, for example, joined SRI’s EIR program specifically because he connected with an SRI researcher (Milad Yavari) and was attracted to the hydrogen separation membranes that SRI’s Indira Jayaweera and her team (including Yavari) had created and tested. Sawa entered the EIR program to further vet the technology’s commercial potential. When they were ready to launch, Yavari joined Membravo as the CTO.
In other cases, entrepreneurs spend time exploring a whole suite of SRI technologies. That was the case with Avsr AI, another recent SRI spinout. Avsr AI aims to improve robotic dexterity and autonomy by combining real-world performance data with best-in-class robotics algorithms. Here, SRI’s collection of intellectual property is vast. Avsr AI founder and CEO Vikrant Tomar spent his time in the EIR program exploring a range of SRI AI and robotics inventions, architecting them into a single platform that is designed to improve how we train robots for commercial deployment.
Getting from innovation to impact
Membravo and Avsr AI are two of the most recent startups in a long line of SRI spinouts that includes companies like Intuitive Surgical and Siri. Spinouts have been part of SRI’s larger impact strategy since early in its history; all told, SRI has launched more than 70 spinouts with a combined market value of $20B.
“What really differentiates SRI’s approach to ventures is our ability to provide entrepreneurs with numerous advanced technologies and a defined program to explore and iterate on those technologies,” says Stavish. “At SRI, we know how difficult it can be to turn incredible innovations into products that consumers and enterprises want to buy. Fortunately, we also get to see what happens when everything clicks into place.”
To learn more about SRI’s ventures group and our Entrepreneurship-in-Residence program, contact us.
