By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
The eighteen companies demonstrating at Texas Venture Labs Venture Expo Thursday ranged from those that had found a better way to harvest antibodies to companies that could increase efficiency and reduce the cost of hybrid cars to a website that aggregates the products used by various celebrities. And one surprise presenter had invented an easy way to strap a grill into the back of your pickup truck.
Dry Vax addresses the issue of vaccines that are degraded by encountering freezing temperatures. Because most vaccines contain aluminum salts, they can’t be frozen without degradation, resulting in loss of nearly half of all global vaccine supplies. Dry Vax converts liquid vaccines to dry powder that isn’t affected by freezing temperatures. The team is looking to begin with animal vaccines and eventually use its technology on human vaccines.
pairfAb has devised a process to extract antibodies from human blood in a process that is much faster than the current system of extracting animal antibodies and “humanizing” it. Presenter Dr. Peter Allen said that six of the ten best selling drugs on the market use antibodies for their manufacture. pairfAb’s process speeds the use of antibodies for research and drug manufacture by eight months. The company is seeking a CEO and $425,000 investment to create an independent laboratory and cover IP costs.
Vobi enables contextual, unified communication that lets a company access the voice, images, text, video, social media and other modalities that may be necessary to successfully complete the call with access to all media.
Amatra has created a platform that automates communication—particularly crisis communication–for institutions. Amatra can manage communications not only for people on an existing network but also in the case of a dynamic workforce of people who come and go to respond during a crisis. The company is focusing at present on the oil and gas industry to facilitate communication in case of disasters including spills, fires and explosions. It is looking for a chief revenue officer and an investment of $600,000 for customer acquisition.
NCarbon has discovered a form of carbon with a surface area per unit of weight that triples the amount of energy that can be stored in supercapacitors. Supercapacitors can store 10-100 times more power than traditional batteries. But most hybrids require six of them. With the new NCarbon, only two are required, saving production costs and increasing fuel efficiency and acceleration power.
Water Lens has developed an easy-to-read, inexpensive, on-site system to test water that is being recycled for hydraulic fracturing. At present, fracking consumes 3 million-to-5 million gallons per frac and though more operators are recycling the water, it must be tested because it requires specific balances of various compounds to be useful and not damage a well. Water Lens can test in minutes what previously took days.
ihiji and Panopticon both automate systems protection. ihiji uses small boxes plugged into a system to remotely detect, diagnose and resolve system problems, often before users interface with the system. Panopticon automatically with systems break-ins when they occur, notifying the system manager that the problem after the intrusion has been dealt with.
Eduvant provides a data dashboard for K-12 teachers to track attendance, grades and other information without a giant, complex enterprise system that large school districts use, provided by companies such as IBM and News Corp.
When one company didn’t show up, it was replaced by The Grill Mobile, a customizable grill you can attach to your pickup truck.
Other companies that presented included TeVido, Aunt Bertha, Ride Scout—which threatened to take its business to Washington D.C. if it can’t find central Texas investors—Set.fm, Equipboard, Primizie, Ten4 Ads, and eyeQ.
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