East Coast Accelerate: The results are in.
Since our virtual doors opened eight years ago, Breakout Labs has run an uninterrupted on-line application process as the first steps in our evaluation of companies for philanthropic investment. This year, we decided to experiment with that process by putting out a special call for proposals from companies on the east coast.
During a two-week period spanning the end-of-year holidays, we received 50 high quality pitch decks from companies referred to us by friends of Breakout Labs who regularly come in contact with early stage, deep technology companies through their work with tech transfer offices, accelerators, incubators, and business plan competitions.
We heard from companies working in therapeutics, diagnostics, energy, research tools, materials, agriculture, IoT, and the microbiome; we heard from spinouts of a dozen different institutions including Argonne National Labs, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, and MIT. It was no easy task to select only 10 semifinalists to invite into our accelerated proposal process and, from there, select five teams to interview on the day after our latest showcase event in New York. Frankly, we would have been proud to work with any of them, but we could choose only two.
Today we announce the companies we selected for Breakout Labs support: DropGenie and Glyscend.
DropGenie is a research tools company operating out of Bolt VC’s facilities in Boston. DropGenie is building a desktop device to automate gene editing in mammalian cells. With increasingly powerful genetic manipulations like CRISPR/Cas systems at scientists’ disposal, a tool that gives high-throughput, reliable, reproducible results could rapidly advance cell therapies. DropGenie’s founders, Hugo Sinha and Allison Hirukawa, and Philippe Vo bring together experience in droplet microfluidics, cell and molecular biology and engineering. Our funding will allow them to complete their first prototype device for laboratory deployment.
Glyscend is a polymer therapeutics company based in Johns Hopkins’ Fast Forward facility in Baltimore and the University of Massachusetts’ M2D2 facility in Lowell. Glyscend is developing a first-in-class, oral metabolic therapeutic which is restricted to the gastrointestinal lining and designed to mimic the benefits of bariatric surgery on type 2 diabetes and weight loss. Glyscend’s team includes CEO and gastroenterologist, Ashish Nimgaonkar, MD and CSO, Thomas Jozefiak, PhD, a polymer chemist and materials scientist who developed the Glyscend platform. Our funding will enable Glyscend to complete preclinical experiments and set up clinical ready manufacturing.
In addition to the two winners of East Coast accelerate, we’ve also recently funded Bioelectric Devices, an AI-driven bioelectronics startup based in San Jose. With this announcement, Breakout Labs reaches a notable milestone. We have invested in 50 companies since our inception.
You can view our full portfolio here.
