TetraScience: IoT for R&D
TetraScience is connecting scientific equipment to the web. Their mission is to do for the laboratory, what Nest has done for the home. By connecting all of the instruments in a laboratory to the web, scientists, engineers, managers, and safety officers will be empowered to monitor & control remotely their experiments, and ultimately, capture all of their data in the cloud automatically.
The team is composed of serial entrepreneurs from Harvard and MIT who began working together over a year ago through a collaborative research project at Harvard on 3D printing. Though that project did not work out, the team realized they could address a much big pain-point in labs. When trying to perform a simple experiment, it took two scientists, who each are quite expensive, to perform a simple experiment. One scientist had to check the temperature, and a second had to write it down in a notebook. They realized that such laborious and menial tasks impeded innovation and created massive inefficiencies.
The three founders have extensive experience in R&D, IoT, optics, nanotechnology, and more:
Alok’s first job in high school was doing lab automation for nanotechnology. He also started a company during his PhD, PreScouter, that helps Fortune 500 companies with open innovation. He is currently a Post Doctoral Fellow at Harvard in the lab of George Whitesides.
Spin studied Applied Physics & Electrical Engineering at Cornell, before pursing a PhD in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at MIT. He has published multiple papers on sensors and micro fabrication, built web-based software for the past three years, and constructed an IoT platform for labs.
Sal focuses on the hardware side of the business: he has built scientific hardware for optics for over ten years, was a big data analyst at Micron Technologies. A former research fellow at the University of Southampton and Boston College. He is also a Post Doctoral Fellow at Harvard.
The team has achieved major milestones in the past nine months. They won a grant from Digital Science, grew the team, landed their first major customers ranging from large pharmaceuticals and biotech companies, hospitals and academic institutions. In August, they will manufacture their 100th hardware module and are on track for 1,000 by the end of the year.
A big congrats to all of your success TetraScience team, and welcome to the Rough Draft family!