The Future of Food, Energy, and Space
Technology that will shape the next decade
Over the last few years I have had the privilege to serve and support some of the brightest minds in technology. Today, I would like to highlight 3 entrepreneurs who are all driven by the common goal of improving the quality of human life across the globe. They were all recently interviewed by our partner, Tony Robbins, on his podcast. Tony led a deep dive into their technology and the “why” behind what is driving them to pioneer their respective fields.
Bill Gross
Founder Bill Gross is the most prolific entrepreneurs in our modern era, with more than 45 IPOs and acquisitions, 7 of which were valued at over a billion dollars. In the podcast episode we learn that Bill is driven by the belief that in order to lift people out of poverty’s gravity, we must create and enable low cost energy proliferation, worldwide.
Bill has dedicated his life to solving this problem and we hear about 3 of his latest companies that have made tremendous progress on this front.
Heliogen
Using a system deploying thousands of computer controlled mirrors, Heliogen can continuously reflect sunlight to one spot and produce 1500 degrees centigrade of heat (⅓ the heat of the sun). Currently 20% of our energy is used to make cement, steel, aluminum, and other building materials. Creating these materials requires a significant amount of heat, so much in fact, that electricity alone cannot achieve the levels required. Typically we burn natural gas and coal to produce the heat needed for these manufacturing processes. The process is enormously wasteful and harmful to the environment.
With Heliogen’s technology we can now make these materials using the power of the sun, which implies that we can, hopefully, soon produce building materials in completely green fashion.
Carbon Capture
Carbon Capture is a solar powered way of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and turning it into something useful such as hydrogen. Bill has made significant progress in developing a method that will allow him to produce products that cost more than the extraction of the CO2.
Energy Vault
We can now make energy from the sun cheaper than fossil fuels but only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. The problem that we currently face is that we cannot store the energy in an affordable way that can be used by major power grids. Energy today is used as it’s made, and only 1% is stored by pumping water up a hill (pumped hydro power).
Energy Vault is using solar energy during the day to power a software automated crane that can stack big blocks to be as high as a 25 story building. At night, the crane unstacks the blocks producing electricity. What makes this technology a breakthrough is that you can put it anywhere, it’s cheaper than pumped hydro, and each unit stores 35 megawatt hours which is enough to power a major city.
Future of Energy
This decade we will be able to make energy around the clock cheaper than fossil fuels. The way to make people shift from fossil fuels is by making energy production more economical.
Jason Green
Jason began his career in neuroscience, helping neurologically injured patients to regain the ability to walk and relate with gravity. These experiences had Jason working in multiple labs where they did extensive modeling of the brain’s external environment. Jason used virtual reality to control every aspect of a patient’s environment, and through this he was able to attune and train patients to rely heavier on sensory inputs that were previously weak.
Through the process of creating specifically tailored environments for the brain, Jason naturally progressed to plants and indoor agriculture. Having come from a computational biology background, Jason saw what other indoor agriculture companies were ignoring: the microbiome. This is the key differentiator that sets Upward Farms apart.
Upward Farms
The microbiome is an invisible layer of bacteria that lives in and around all living things and it can account for up to 90% of the genetic activity for organisms. Jason is not just focused on developing the plants, but developing the whole ecosystem that could cultivate all of the microbiology out in the field. This is important because this is where all of the biological processing is happening.
In their ecosystem they are cultivating fish and microgreens. The process starts with fish, the waste from this fish is then broken down and transformed into organic fertilizer. The fertilizer is then provided directly into the roots of the plants that are growing. Upward Farms is able to reduce the amount of water wasted by 90–95% because they are controlling for the runoff and evaporation, which avoids water loss.
Future of Food
Over the next decade we will see improvement in flavors, nutrition, and texture leading to more delicious and more affordable food than it is today. The process for creating food will become much more efficient and we will be able to significantly reduce the amount of pollution we create during the process.
Mikhail Kokorich
Mikhail has been an entrepreneur his whole life, at the age of 19 he started his first company in Siberia, where he was born. Over the next decade he built multiple billion dollar businesses.. Mikhail ended up selling his businesses in pursuit of something more fulfilling.
In 2011 he co-founded Dauria Aerospace and in 2014 he joined another space company in the private sector that was launching satellites into space. Mikhail identified a major problem in the industry, which was, launching and moving cargo in space was still too expensive.
Momentus
Currently with the existing players in the market, it is only cost-efficient to deliver large cargo to one orbit and inclination. The proliferation of cubesats and small sats has created massive demand for a “last mile delivery” service to get to their final destination. Momentus was created to solve that problem by utilizing their proprietary water-based propulsion system.
After countless trial and error, Mikhail and his team came up with the idea to use water as a propellant. This means that their technology not only has short term advantages of cost efficiency, but it is also a long term and scalable solution because water is one of the most common materials in the universe. Today, Momentus has over $100 million in sales as the first in-space transportation provider in the world.
Future of Space
The future of space will bring us a new category of services that will aid us in solving some of our most challenging problems. Some examples include detecting forest fires within one hour with the use of satellites, detecting moisture content for agricultural purposes, and internet connectivity in the most remote places on earth. We will become more self sustainable and the price of launching things to space will become cheaper over time.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
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