Chloe Popescu
Ladies and gentlemen and please welcome to the stage are building companies out of resilient technologies panel
Carmichael Roberts
All right. Well, good morning, everyone. I have to apologize First, you'll hear a little bit of my voice from a cold that time of the year. But I'm feeling pretty good certainly about this topic today, building companies out of resilient technologies. I'm Carmichael Roberts. It's a pleasure to be on this panel right now with my two esteemed colleagues, you'll hear we're working together. And the topic in particular is something that I've been actively involved with for more than 20 years of my career, building companies out of resilient technologies. As background. I'm a scientist entrepreneur, who, much like the two founders that we have on this stage, launched my career and building companies eventually moved over to doing investments and helping others Build companies have two wonderful platforms that are focused on building companies out of resilient technologies. One is called material impact, which is focused on companies that have products enabled by materials, technologies and manufacturing, certainly core to building resilient technologies for companies. And the second is world class game changing funding climate called breakthrough energy, where I am one of the two senior investment committee members on that climate fun. Both are incredibly relevant to the topics today. The good news, my voice like this is that I don't have to do too much talking today. The bulk of the talking as appropriately will be from both Kareem and Shara. So with that, let me turn it over to Kareem so he can do a little longer introduction of his background and afterwards shower, you should do the same.
Karim Khalil
Awesome. Thanks, Carmichael. So Hey everyone, my name is Kareem Khalil. CTO and co founder of Infinite Cooling. The slides right here are C16 right now. So maybe Shara if you want to start Yeah, okay.
Shara Ticku
Yep. So supposed to switch the order I'm Shara Ticku I am the co founder and CEO of C 16 bio sciences and we are making sustainable alternatives to palm oil. I am going to start with a quick video which I don't think is playing...brief interlude Okay, great.
Shara Ticku
So, we had the Golden Globes on Sunday and all anybody could talk about was how Australia is burning. Earlier this year the Amazon was on fire and a few months before that this was Indonesia the planet is burning and palm oil is one of the largest contributors to this burning. So palm oil as you saw in this video is the most popular vegetable oil in the world. And what is it that about palm oil that leads to this destructive burning so the oil palm tree Elias kinesis, from which the product comes, can only grow right around the equator and as you see in this chart, what we normally find in the land right around the equator, is biodiverse tropical rain forest. So as demand for palm oil has grown and it's grown at an eight and a half percent kegger over the last few years. This has come largely at the hand of this tropical rain forest which has been slashed and burned in order to make way for industrial palm oil plantations. As you saw in the video palm is found in about 50% of products on supermarket shelves. So you may not think that you have anything to do with palm oil, but actually it touches each of us everyday. It's everything from soaps and shampoos, to makeup and packaged foods like Nutella, peanut butter, Ritz crackers, any packaged foods or anything that's a frying oil. So if you had dumplings or onion rings, or anything that was fried, it was most likely fried in Palm oil. At this point, everybody knows that palm oil is a problem. Over 250 companies and now nine countries have made public commitments to their stakeholders, that they're going to stop using deforestation linked palm oil in their supply chains. At climate week in New York earlier this year, investors that own sixteen trillion dollars in assets, also called for aggressive action on the part of companies to remove deforestation linked palm oil from their supply chains and governments are starting to take action too. So the EU this year passed a outstanding resolution to remove palm oil to ban palm oil as a feedstock for biodiesel by 2030. So people across the supply chain are demanding change. But until this point, they've all failed because there's been no viable alternative. Despite the call for change, palm oil consumption is on the rise. So the world is growing to 10 billion people by 2050. As we know, and as populations grow so does food consumption. vegetable oils are a core base of the consumption of people's diets, particularly in developing economies, which is where most of the population growth over the next few decades will come. So palm is the most popular is the fastest growing vegetable oil and Consumption of palm oil demand for palm oil is expected to triple by 2050. Despite all of our knowledge about the problems that it causes to the planet, my company's C16 bio Sciences is making a sustainable alternative to palm oil using biotechnology. Fermentation has a long history, we've been using it to make wine, cheese, beer, insulin and other medicines and even the impossible burger.
Shara Ticku
We use this technology fermentation technology specifically we ferment yeast the same way that beer is made using from entities to produce an oil which can look and function just like palm oil. So here on the left, you see our bio reactors which are growing our palm oil alternative. And on the right you can see a chart which demonstrates basically this is the lipid profile which is the sort of figure of merit vegetable oils. And you can see side by side, our palm oil versus the structure of today's agricultural based palm oil. So today we're making an oil using biotechnology that looks and functions just like palm oil can scale and can be cost competitive. We believe that cells are the factories of the future. So we have an industrial infrastructure today, which we use to make products. And we think that cells are going to be the factories that do this in the future. So our company is using yeast, but there's a host of other companies using bacteria, algae, and other types of cells to grow and make consumer materials whether it's the clothes that we wear, the food that we eat, or the plans that we fly in. This is really exciting space and we are thrilled to be a part of it. We believe in a future that goes from something that looks like this one that looks like this where we can provide better humane jobs for people, we can make a vegetable oil that doesn't burn the planet? And we're C26. Thank you
Carmichael Roberts
Outstanding, Shara. So please, I mean, how could you not get excited about would see 16 is doing. And just to frame it a little bit. When we talk about resilient technologies, you know, you think about what c 16 is doing is keeping the world healthy, safe, fed, warm, secure, empowered, by using technologies that play into that and develop products. clearly C16 accomplishes all of that when you look at the breath, with Shara just described. Now let me hand it over to Karim, who will talk to you about arguably one of the most important molecules on the planet when you think about where the world goes in terms of resiliency, and when things go wrong, which you really need to pay attention to protecting and that's water.
Karim Khalil
Thanks, Carmichael. Hey everyone. So my name is Kareem Khalil again, CTO and co founder of infinite cooling. And what we're really after at infinite cooling is changing the world the way the world thinks about using fresh water. And so, global fresh water scarcity is a huge problem. Everyone's heard about different parts of the world sort of comes up and down in the news cycle. But what a lot of people don't know is that one of the biggest users of freshwater are large thermal electric power plants. So thermal electric power makes up 39% of the freshwater withdrawals in the US alone, and that water is used for cooling. So you may have seen these evaporative cooling towers, the site of power plants, they're usually oddly enough in climate change studies. But in the end, this is actually just water that's evaporating at the top of these towers. And that water is lost permanently. As fresh water on the planet stays roughly the same. The demand for Power is growing, you know without bound. And we really need to come up with ways to reduce the amount of water that's being consumed by these large thermo electric power plants, it also cost a lot of money. So, these power plants use about $50 billion a year of cost on this water and that cost is increasing annually about 5% per year globally. Additionally, as waters evaporate out of these towers at forums, these large plumes that you that you see above the power plants and really actually that can be a nuisance for the power plants as well. Number one, they could have to curtail their generation just because of the site of the plume and in urban environments, due to local regulations. And this is actually not just a power problem. So evaporative cooling and cooling towers are very water hungry system as I mentioned, but these are used ubiquitously in industry. So data centers, primarily use evaporative cooling for their for their cooling needs. For Production hospitals, universities, commercial buildings like this one will typically have cooling towers to provide their cooling needs. And so at infinite cooling, we've come up with solution that can harvest large volumes of water from the cooling tower plumes so that you can reuse that water again and again for cooling, or device charges the escaping water droplets with an electric charge and then creates an electric field to attract those water droplets towards a collector that's placed near the outlet of the cooling tower. This technology was born out of MIT, where I did my PhD along with my co founder my higher democ where we did a lot of research on this technology and developed it from the from the lab scale stage. Starting the lab we built a lab scale cooling tower, we could show this technology so you can see with our device off on this lab scale cooling tower basically nothing's happening. However, when you switch the device on the plume that forms over the cooling tower, essentially is eliminated completely and the water begins to collect and drain down the Every of our device. And so this was a, you know, several years ago in the lab during our PhD. And now we've we've been able to do really is scale this up to a much larger scale. So, at MIT, there's a 20 megawatt natural gas cogeneration plant located on campus. These are 20 foot cooling towers where we've been we've been, we've been able to install a proof of concept of our technology earlier last year, which has been a really fantastic opportunity for such a young company to to really show the technology at the full scale essentially. And you can see here in this video, it's a little tough to see because it's so cloudy and gloomy up on top of these cooling towers. But you can see at the top of the video, you see the water droplets, raining down essentially from our device and being collected. So this power plant right here is using almost 300 gallons of water per minute just out of this one cooling tower just to get an idea of scale. And so when you scale up this technology to a full scale mid sized power plant like a 600 megawatt plant that powers downtown Boston, for example, we can save essentially 130 million gallons of water per year just from that single one plant. That's effectively a 20% reduction 20% reduction in their water usage. And it comes at a very high economic incentive for the customer. So about a million dollars a year saved on their water consumption in their cooling towers. The device uses very little power to do this to accomplish this, which is a really key part of the technology, about 50 kilowatts of power to power that entire power plant system of ours, which would then only add up to about you know, 50 to $60,000 of electricity costs for the power for the power plant or, or industrial customer.
Karim Khalil
And so, you know, we hadn't we wouldn't have been able to accomplish this without amazing partners like Carmichael. And here's a few others that also we've been able to, you know, really leverage and work with to really grow this technology out of the lab. And so I'll stop there. But thanks.
Carmichael Roberts
Outstanding, outstanding.
Carmichael Roberts
So, you may, since there's a recipe that's consistent between what you just heard from Kareem and what you heard a little bit earlier from Shara, you know, it's interesting all three of us, but particularly Jared Kareem have strong academic technology roots. But yet, the thing that they talk about most is the problem. And I think that's pretty much a critical component to the recipe for designing resilient technologies that create these resilient products that go after these really big problems. You start with the problem, regardless of whether or not you just got your PhD from MIT, designing a technology. Kareem didn't start with that as what he talked about. The recipe generally is start with the problem, define it extremely well then figure out what the solution is, which is almost always some sort of innovative, disruptive, unique technology. And then comes arguably the most difficult part. How do you bridge the commercialization gap? Even after you bridge it? How do you get it to scale, that it actually makes a difference? that can really have an impact on a global basis. So let's talk about that a little bit. And let's start with the problem. And if I could turn and I can start with either one of you, Sharon, maybe I'll start with you. And ask you to talk a little more about the problem and you did such a good job earlier, but you know, framing a bit how you thought about it?
Shara Ticku
Yep. So um, I addressed the problem a bit previously, but I'll just recap. Palm oil is the most popular vegetable oil in the world. It's a $60 billion industry. And it's found in some form or another in 50% of products on supermarket shelves. I first learned about this problem back in a previous life when I was working on Wall Street and I was sent over to Singapore. And I was sent with essentially a gas mask to cover my face when I was there, so this was 2013. Pregnant women were not allowed to walk outside because the air quality was so bad. The pollution standard index in Singapore at this point was over 400 and over 300 is considered toxic. So I've landed in Singapore, pregnant women are banned from walking outside and I have to walk around with a gas mask. So we started asking people what was going on? And they kept saying, oh, the Indonesians are burning the rain forest. And this is the first time I had heard about palm oil. So 2013 was one of the worst years on record for palm oil deforestation. Indonesia and Malaysia are the world's two largest producers of palm oil they make about 80 to 90% of the world's palm oil supply. And as I described previously, they they find the land that's desirable for industrial palm production. There's normally rain forest that sits on top of that land. So they burn the trees and then they burn the peatland which is also carbon rich. So it ends up being a double whammy for co2 emissions. For palm oil alone, this means that there are about one and a half billion tons of carbon dioxide released into the air every single year, just for palm oil plantation production. This is the equivalent of taking 300 football fields of rain forest and burning them every single hour. So I learned about this problem, kind of sat on it for a couple of years. And then a few years later, I was in Boston and I was in grad school and I took a class at the MIT Media Lab, which is sort of a place that's known for bringing people together. from different backgrounds to work on wacky science, I met my co founders, we all came from different backgrounds, which is a different story, then Karim's. Harry was a synthetic biologist, David was a bio engineer and my background had been in healthcare. But we were all drawn together by this problem of palm production. And so we started looking into it. And we said, okay, this is a problem that we're really intrigued to solve that we care about that we're passionate about. Climate change is the definitive problem of our generation. And this is a huge driver of climate emissions. And by the way, everybody knows that it's bad, and they're looking for a solution that they can't change because they don't have a solution. So we spend some time asking why that was true. And saying, Okay, if we were going to use microbiology or biotechnology to solve this problem, what would have to be true? And so we did some we really started with the problem without a preferred sort of hammer looking for a nail we had the problem that we wanted to solve, and we explored the tech knology said, and we had about $1,000 from MIT, which we use to make our very minimal viable prototype. So we made about a few milliliters of oil. But we got enough, I think, positive feedback on both the technology and our understanding of the market that we decided to keep working on it. And so that was sort of the first step and we kept going from there. And here we are.
Carmichael Roberts
Amazing depiction of defining the problem. Beyond just conceptually, what I love that you mentioned, Shara, is that you went to go visit, you saw you lived it, you felt it, which I think is a major component in defining the problem, incidentally, is probably worth saying, My oldest daughter is on a gap year, right now before starting college. And where did she go? But to Indonesia, what did she want to look at? deforestation and palm so you're a great role model in that regard. And I think that should to say the teenagers are also out defining the problems before they go figure out even what they want to do in school. And I think that's fantastic. So back to problem. By the way, I also love the football field, you know, visual. I mean, I think those things are important to get a sense of the scale a soundbite like that. You know, speaking of which 130 million gallons per year, correct. per plant. Holy cow. Let me hand it over to you when you talk about the problem.
Karim Khalil
Yeah, great. Yeah. So yeah, as I mentioned, industrial freshwater usage for for cooling needs and evaporative cooling towers a huge problem that not many people out of the industry know about. As I mentioned before, 39% of the country's freshwater withdrawals just go to evaporative cooling just for powerplants actually, not even industrial usage like data centers. And food, ag food egg production and things like that. And so we're really sort of came out it actually just coming coming back to an Carmichael's introduction, actually, I was I went to MIT to do a PhD in, in heat transfer, actually. So I was studying condensation, heat transfer, and improving, I was really, I was really looking at a way to improve powerplant efficiency, I was really interested in finding a way to come up with a sort of marginal improvement in something in a power plant that could have huge global impact. So for example, if you change the efficiency of a condenser and a power plant by a few percent, you can make humongous changes in global co2 production or just the efficiency of the plant, you know, so they're really interested in just single digit percentage changes. And so as I progressed through my, my, you know, my PhD, I was always looking at ways to take all the experiments we were doing in the lab, and how can we do something on an actual power plant? I was always so my grad student desk at MIT actually was just Across the street from the MIT power plant, so I was just constantly staring at the place that I wanted to, you know, showcase the technology. And sort of as we, as we got further and further along, I wasn't only interested into the energy efficiency of a plant, but also started to become enamored with the, with the water efficiency of a plant. So this is sort of the so called water energy Nexus, as it's called. So essentially, to produce energy, you need water to do so for cooling, and you need energy to usually extract water in some way. So these two fundamental, you know, resources are essentially extremely tired. And I was, I was very, you know, interested in that. I also took a look, you know, me and my co founder essentially took a look early on, and notice that the main usage of water as I mentioned in cooling is been really relatively stagnant technology over the last 50 to 60 years, the cooling towers that are being used that power plants, were designed, you know, 3040 years ago, really in the end and not know sort of fundamentally change has happened in cooling over that time. So it really made sense for, you know, a disruptive technology to come in and, and come in and sort of change the change the game and change the paradigm for how we think about cooling down our thermal electric systems or, or, or data centers. So then we sort of shifted focus and started to think about, okay, how can we, how can we make a cooling tower more water efficient? And my higher democ are my my co founder was essentially working on a fog collection system and basically an electrostatic fog collection system, where they were looking at producing drinking water, out of fog out of thin air, essentially. And so, you know, at MIT, we were taking a few classes at the business school trying to think about, you know, how to apply such a technology. And that's where actually we joined forces and thought about Well, why don't we put this on the number one place where fog is forum constantly 365 days a year, which is on top of a cooling tower, and that was sort of the the how the how The idea was born. From that obviously, we did all of our sort of our homework on the on the industry, how much they're paying for their water, as I mentioned. So, a sink, a power plant will essentially pay seven and a half dollars per thousand gallons of fresh water at their plant doesn't sound like a lot. But when you use, you know, 3000 gallons per minute of water, that that adds up pretty quickly. And so then we basically took that took that idea, and built out that lab scale cooling system, as I mentioned, to showcase the technology and actually essentially just walk up to the MIT power plant and ask, can we can we put this on your cooling tower? And, you know, lo and behold, they allowed us to do it. We got some funding from a few of these sources as students. And you know, it's been sort of growing ever since. So just last year, we, you know, we raised money as well as been growing up the team to really focus on now we know that the problem is there. But what we want to focus on obviously, it's How can we make a scalable a scalable solution that the industry is going to want to buy something that's reliable for a very, very risk averse industry? especially coming from a small company and forming the right partnerships to be able to execute on that plan? So that's really what we're focused on. Now.
Carmichael Roberts
Yeah. Thank you grim. So, you know, this problem is probably one of the most obvious ones that you almost say to yourself, do you really need to do any homework and defining the fact that water important water is on a global basis? You know, once upon a time, if I was sitting on this panel, maybe just you know, 1020 years ago, we would say oil would would be the molecule that you would think about, we'd never say that today. All you gotta do is look around unquestionably its water. That's that's taken over the top spot, and will continue in that spot for many, many years. What I love about what, Kareem that is, he began to define The problem not only in the more obvious ways, but in the tangible ways that large scale, relatively clean water is needed for industrial processes. And that's when you get two volumes done just fundamentally different. You know, we here at the conference today is a company, zero mass water that makes clean drinking water for, for consumption, right enough for houses and so forth. Cody freezin was one of the people said to me, infinite cooling and what Kareem and my hair and Cooper honestly are doing is transformational, at a whole nother scale of volumes of water from an industrial standpoint. So there's a lot of cooperation on these big problems as well, between between companies and founders, and helping define the problem. In fact, I think Cody gave Karim an award. Guys award some money to kind of get things going well The problem is really important in an often ominous and perhaps even scary. What's really cool is to hear about the technical solutions. And you've, you know, you've heard at least both Sarah and cream at least touch upon the technical solutions and, and their backgrounds. So why don't we turn back to that a bit and talk a little bit more about the the technology because that's the fun part. And, and I'm we're all firm believers, that technology would least be a major component in solving some of the world's biggest problems. And then certainly in building resilient products and so forth. So, Shara, talk a little bit, Shara, talk a little more about technology as it relates to C16.
Shara Ticku
Yep. So I said cells are the factories of the future. And that's really how we're how we're building our solution to the palm oil problem. So what we do is we take Yeast yeast, which is called an oleaginous yeast. oleaginous means oily, which means it's naturally good at producing oil or lipids, which is exactly the problem that we're trying to solve. So what we did is we said, okay, we need to make an oil, which looks and functions just like palm oil. So chemically, it needs to be identical to the product that people are using today. Physically, it needs to have all of the same characteristics because if you're using it, so, you know, for example, if you buy peanut butter, and there's a layer of oil on the top of the peanut butter, it's actually because they're not using palm oil in it. So brands put palm oil into peanut butter to keep that constant consistency. So there are these very tangible physical characteristics why palm oil is such an important and hard to replace ingredient, because no other vegetable oil can really solve that purpose. So you've got to match the chemical characteristics, the physical characteristics, and then You know, this is a $60 billion industry, there's about 60 million tons of it produced per year, you've got to be able to then plug into the supply chains and buying patterns and processes of the people who exist in the current value chain. So one of the questions that we always ask is, you know, like, what is the place where there needs to be an innovative solution? And where do we not need to reinvent the wheel, and what the way that we think about this is the the actual production method. So today we have these massive industrial palm plantations, which if you fly into, for example, Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur today, you'll fly in and you'll just see rows of homogenous oil palm trees, and then you land and you drive into the city and it's just oil palm trees. So that's what it looks like today. In the future with our technology, it looks essentially like a beer brewery. We're growing our product in big steel tanks and we Take the yeast, it means so Easter living things. So they need a carbon source, they need a food source just like you and I do. And so we have to feed them mostly a sugar source. So that sugar source can be sucrose, from from cane sugar, or it can be biomass from, for example, you know, wood or cellulose six, or it can be waste streams from, for example, large scale food manufacturers who produce trillions of tons of waste sugars every year. So you take these sugars, we feed it to the yeast, we brew them up in these steel tanks, and they're sort of ideal recipe. And through that, they produce an oil they accumulate oil. Then we extract the oil and then we do some basic refining. And from here It plugs in to what the supply chain looks like today. So you know from our perspective, the how we're making it the plantation today the forest today will look different looks different through our Technology, it goes from something that has to be right around the equator requires really intense manual labor. These jobs are tough, hard jobs to one that looks like a brewery or a pharmaceutical plant where we're making things like insulin. And then, but then the product looks the same. And it can plug into the downstream infrastructure that exists today. So one of the things that we didn't want to reinvent the wheel on is massive scale infrastructure where we're needing to raise and spend billions of dollars on capital equipment. And so the oil that we make because it matches the properties of palm oil today, both chemically and physically can plug directly into those facilities that exist. Yeah, I think technology why is that that pretty much covers that.
Carmichael Roberts
Those well said well said it was really fantastic. I don't know if you can tell. But Shara, she's she's capable being incredibly fluent, both on the business. And on the technical side, you would not know that is a lot of her co founders who helped design the technology. It's really interesting that it came out of the MIT Media Lab that, you know, in terms of that collaboration in itself, is could be non obvious to think that you'd have palm oil, you know, solution coming out of MIT Media Lab. Great. Let's know you covered your technology. And it's actually one of the more I think it's one of the more unique, unusual, sometimes even hard to understand, you know, phenomena is that you you guys have developed. Tell us a little more about, you know, the technology and you can even talk about, you know, how you benefited from the ecosystem and development?
Karim Khalil
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, one question that we get a lot is So, if, if it's so easy to just recycle the water, you know, that's evaporating out of a cooling tower, then why No one done it already. So that's typically the question that we get, especially, you know, when we showcase the technology outside of, you know, our small knit community at MIT. And, and really the reason for that is because so as water is evaporating out of these cooling towers, typically it's mostly in the case in invisible state. So it's a staying and its water vapor form where you can't see it. But as I mentioned before, you can see these large visible plumes that look like clouds that are coming out of these cooling towers, that water is now turned into liquid form. So it's essentially exactly the same as the clouds that form up in the upper atmosphere. So these are small microscopic water droplets that are forming at a fairly regular basis outside of a cooling tower. And so really, what people have done in the past to try to solve this water issue and cooling towers is to recover a portion of that water they've had to put in a lot of energy to to recover it. So what they've done is put basically a condensation heat exchanger on the top of the cooling tower. So just reuse that water. So they put basically an active heat exchanger, very costly to install, usually more expensive than the actual cooling tower itself. And then number two, very costly to operate lots of energy. And so we're what sort of aha moment of our technology and really the key is that what we're doing is allowing the natural condensation process that happens when it forms these plumes over the cooling tower, and then applying our technology completely post-process to that. So our our fog collection systems able to very efficiently with low energy consumption, capture that water those water droplets, redirect them to our device, and then recycle that back into the cooling cycle. And so that's really the key moment that we had while we were developing the technology and looking at the problem and trying to figure out do we have something here is not sort of going down the same path that had been In the research industry for recovering water in the cooling towers. And so sort of as we began, you know, applying this technology at the small scale, as I mentioned in the lab, and then scaling that up to large scale, what we've been really focused on is sort of just eliminating any reservations people would have about the technology. It's kind of a new concept, because you're putting something on top of an already existing system. So what we really focus on is essentially eliminating technical technical risk. It's really what we've been doing. So we've really been we're a small company with you know, only eight full time people right now. So what we do is really focus on what are the key sort of milestones that we can show with the actual technology, for example, runtime, reliability, maintenance, all the things that a a power plant will want you to show and that's That's obviously been a challenge for a small company. But that's really we've been been been trying to essentially just be really smart about what we focus on, on the on the on the technical solution and not try to reinvent the wheel, as you mentioned. And the last thing I'll mention about the solution is really what we want to do is think of these power plants as an alternative source of freshwater nowadays, so instead of thinking about these power plants is only consumers of freshwater, they'd really be producing water coming out of the top of their cooling tower that we otherwise lost to the water cycle completely. And so this really brings up the opportunity for upcycling rather than just recycling of the water locally in the actual power plant. So for example, if What if a power plant is getting water, in many cases, if it's right local to the, to the seaboard, they'll be getting that water for for very, very cheap, essentially free, but then they'd be able to produce this fresh water out of their cooling towers for very little No electrical operation costs. And now we have this alternative source of freshwater. So there could be, you know, public private partnerships that form around these essentially for a new source of fresh water coming out of these systems for industrial usage, you know, in other parts of the power plant or in other systems nearby, or additionally, upcycling to residential use and, and other places like that. So that's thinking about powerplants is really as a source of freshwater nowadays is kind of what we try to as what we're trying to sort of showcase at the industry. Excellent.
Carmichael Roberts
So in both cases, you know, Shara's explanation of her technology and Karim just explaining his technology. I would say, by the time I had the pleasure of interacting with both of each of them, what I realized pretty quickly, along with a team of people who are also engaged in the dialogue, is that tech, the technical viability of what they're doing is extremely high, meaning, I wasn't so much worried about the technical risk, although there's always some. I think you can kind of tell from an operator standpoint, and founders standpoint, we have two incredibly smart, dynamic individuals who are sitting next to me on stage. So I felt like from the team standpoint, not just them, but their, their other co founders, and in folks who are building the product and the company a plus. But then it gets to the really difficult part, which is assume the technology works. Assume the team is great. Now we have to actually cross that chasm to commercialization green, you began to touch on it a bit when you described some of the key milestones that you know, people would look at. But let me start with shower a bit, you know, because, I mean, I actually spent the time of my life in, in large chemical industry. And I love what you said about not needing to reinvent the wheel around manufacturing processes, structure, equipment, plants and so forth. talk a little more about when you think about the commercialization challenges, and you've got loads of questions on this. share a little bit how today you're thinking about it, so we can track it.
Shara Ticku
Yep. I think this technical advocacy point is a really important one, because it's what makes us different than for example, software based technology solutions. With with sort of technology with software based technology solutions, sometimes you can sort of you can build your sort of MVP, I was talking about an MVP earlier. And you can you can structure the front end, even if the back end is not fully built. Right. And that's a common way that startups build solutions for hard tech companies like we're building. You can't do that you have to demonstrate the efficacy of the technology for First and foremost, because of credibility reasons, because it's it normally is something that's not been done before. And people really need to see it. And I think, you know, we've seen in everything from biotech to clean tech challenges with that. And so the most important thing is you have to demonstrate the efficacy of the technology. It doesn't have to be fully scaled, it doesn't have to be cost effective, but it needs to work. And it needs to be scalable, and it needs to be economically viable. Those are the first things that are sort of the foundation without that you can't do anything. Then once you built that you have to demonstrate, okay, we built this thing. Now, how do we demonstrate that people actually want to buy it want to use it and will buy it? And so, you know, I mentioned showed the impossible Whopper on one of my slides earlier. They also use fermentation technology to recreate that sort of beef like flavor and texture and experience. years ago when they were launching. I think there were a lot of questions about what People would want to consume lab grown meat or fake meat and whether or not they would buy it. And so that's the sort of the next step after the technical officee is is demonstrating that point. You know, you think with palm oil, we sit in a really interesting place. Because people are demanding this change brands are lining up for the solution. They've been waiting for it, they want to implement it. But the key for us is really in finding the right partner. So palm is a very complex market. It's not just one product palm oil is actually hundreds or by some counts thousands of different products that go across verticals. So Unilever is the largest buyer of palm oil in the world. But companies like L'Oreal and Estee Lauder, buy tons of it biofuels companies like total US tons of it. And so really thinking about the right place to enter the market, because we we know that our solution creates a lot of value that's been demonstrated and How do we make sure we capture it in the supply chain? So the market entry point is really important. We're in an interesting position and that we have not yet launched with commercial partners. We've spent the last year or so evaluating a handful of them, trying to sort of answer that question of where we believe we are best setting our company up to capture the value. And really, I think I talked about our company as a consumer biotech, because ultimately, we're making products which are for end consumers. And so where are we going to be able to best reach an impact and hit consumers? So why have all these CPG companies 250 of them made public commitments that say we're going to stop using conflict palm oil, it's because their consumers are demanding it. And so this puts us in a very good position because it creates a great opportunity for these brands to be the first mover to start using a truly sustainable palm oil and The ROI on making the first move there is greater than you can get from any ad campaign, any loyalty program, any any marketing spend, because it's it's a decision that's based on values. And it's a decision that's based on the values of your end consumers. And as we have seen with gretta, and others, Gen Z really cares about this and they are not going to buy products from brands that don't align with their values. So we are still in the sort of final stages of evaluating what our launch will look like. But we I think there are lots of interesting brands that know their products really well and know their markets know their formulations really well and have an interesting opportunity to be the first mover on essentially a values decision that aligns them with their their customer base.
Carmichael Roberts
Great. And if I were just to pick a couple of things that you said so that we can so called double click on it you There, there are two approaches that that small companies take when they get started, you know, one approaches. Everyone Leave me alone, just give me the money, we're going to build something, we know what we're doing. And then later on, we're going to sell it to the marketplace, we'll get there and then bring some, some companies have been fantastically successful doing things in that manner. Then there's which are which is talking about, which is it's really hard to do what c 16 is doing. And that is come up with something that's going to replace palm oil and all the products that one describes and, and in scale that and scaling not just meaning make a lot, but to do the partnerships and the deals across the different industries, where that actually happens. So you can hear from shower that part of her business model. And I know firsthand from working closely whether it's to have a lot of conversations with lots of customers. words that are effectively going to turn out to be partners when you think about it, and to be very careful and thoughtful about who those are. But in fact, not to insulate, c 16. from doing that, I'd be surprised that she was back on the panel, like this next year, if she wouldn't be telling you specifically, who she decided to work with on a couple of cases, and probably loads that are in the queue. So that's, that's a big part of the business model is partnering and collaborating to solve this commercialization gap, and to get to scale, both in terms of the volume but also in terms of the breath of customers, and the geographies that need to get touched. So Karim, maybe come back around to you and I know you have a similar thing, but maybe talk a little bit more about business model. I think that could be an interesting thing for people to hear about. How are you going about selling what you're making?
Karim Khalil
Yeah, no, absolutely. And think it's a great point to talk about really focusing on where you want to enter in the, in the sort of value chain of the of the the thing that your product sort of addresses. So in this case, you know, we have many different parties that are involved in a cooling cycle of an industrial process, like power power generation. So the the OEMs of the actual cooling tower. So large companies that basically sell cooling towers directly to power plants, you actually have the end user is a power plant, who's using the water spending the money on the water, and, and really is sort of a key component of their actual power generation cycle. And then you have a lot of integrators who are basically the people who come out and install these technologies on site for them train personnel and essentially provide those services for the for the, for the end user. And so what we've been really focused on at infinite cooling is how can we enter this value chain and sort of The smartest position for a very small, you know, company with very little, you know, reputation in such a large established industry. And so there are two sort of models that we've been looking at and maybe a hybrid of both. So we've been looking at looking at selling the tech selling the technology directly to the end user. So maybe establishing a partnership with a engineering contracting firm that can actually come into an end user install the technology, and then the customer starts realizing the you know, the savings right away for an upfront cost, essentially, and then, ultimately, providing a payback period in the three to four years, essentially, depending on the cost of water. But the other model that we're interested in, and providing, especially as the sort of the global narrative around water is shifting is by providing external financing for our for our projects on a project per project basis, to the end user. And so essentially the user would be able to install these this system for free on their site, the system would be producing water and they would be buying that water from us at a discounted cost to what they pay for water right now. So you can think about this very similar to the solar PPA model that's going on really sort of spearheading the growth of solar throughout the world. And you can think of these essentially as water panels. So that's actually our trademark right now. And so these devices would be producing water on the top of a cooling tower at a power plant, co located with the power plant, essentially producing that fresh water. And then we could have the customers of the water be the power plant or other nearby, you know, people that are interested. And so this obviously has many advantages. The end user doesn't need to pay anything upfront. We really just put the bet in the technology, we know that it works. So we're really willing to willing to sort of embed that into the business model. And then the customer essentially just saving on day Want and reducing their water, their costs of, you know, cost of water on site. It also allows us to be sort of more in touch with the customer and, and also sort of be beyond that value chain for a longer period of time, we would usually lock into a 1020 year deal with that customer in that case. So we can extract more out of the value chain over a longer period of time, which obviously is a good thing. But also it allows us to sort of be have a little bit more control over the system, we can provide regular maintenance, which is another thing that is sort of a really key aspect to this heavy industry is understanding what are the operations and maintenance concern of a system and having this sort of hybrid model where where you actually provide the equipment up front. We'd essentially be providing a water service to these customers. This could be a really interesting model for us to really, as we develop the technology and perfected even more, give us some more flexibility on the operations and maintenance. system. So we're exploring both we're not tied down to either right now. But definitely there are there could be some approaches where we sort of combine the two approaches and get the, you know, the best of both worlds as well.
Carmichael Roberts
Yeah. So great. So you know, you just heard a, you know, a elegant, smart but not straightforward business model, right, that has to go out and get tested, which is not a typical when you try to develop a product that is unique, not seen before in a big industry. And you have to be clever to think about what would get customers to buy it, use it. partner with you early. Just to go back on something that Karim said. He said it pretty quickly. But they've they've raised money less than a year ago. So you know, what's really interesting, I often get a question of, hey, Carmichael did some really cool stuff that you're working on great people you're working with. But is it sort of science fiction? Where for five years, six years, we're going to be talking about what could be. I think you see with both Shara and with Karim. They're already at a stage where they're talking about commercial partnerships, and go to market strategies. They're not spending all their time talking, wondering if they believe their technical approach works. Karim was briam pretty evident about that. In fact, I think, this year 2020. If I were to go ahead and do the same for you, as I just mentioned, for sure, if I were to project forward and you were on this panel next year, you would be telling people about the three the four to five to six commercial relationships developed and how that bid those two business models are playing out. Time is obviously not our friend when we think about things like climate change and resilient technologies needed yesterday. Well, why don't we take at least a few minutes, people have a few questions. And then we can wrap it up.
Carmichael Roberts
You can repeat the question back if you
Speaker
thank you. Thank you both. My question was for Karim, when you were explaining the service model, since most countries states cities are run their water, their services, how do you see partnering with governments?
Karim Khalil
Ya know, that's a that's a great question. Especially so this this is definitely an international problem. We're really focused on the US to start obviously, as a small company, but internationally, this could be, you know, this is a real game changer for certain countries where, you know, power generation is growing without bound, but there's a This thing fresh water issues. So in the cases for that's the case, not only is the water sources being run by governments, but in that case, a lot of times the actual power generation assets are also being run by by the government. And so in that case, there's no way around it, there has to be a relationship with the government in some way. And I think in that case, what we're really you know, we're still a, a equipment provider or a in the case of the one business model, but in the other case, if we're looking at the service model, there has to be some partnerships with local, local contracting firms to allow us to sort of implement this effectively. And so there are there is this other part of the value chain that I didn't mention earlier earlier, which are people that actually provide staffing for these types of services. So there are actually existing service models in power generation assets right now people that run the water treatment, side of a power station. And typically, these are, you know, mid sized companies that are providing these services. However, they have global presence. So they're forming partnerships with these, these integrators and contracting firms globally to be able to provide their services. So I hope that answers your question. But you know that that definitely would be the approach internationally. Yeah.
Carmichael Roberts
We may have question for one more question, please. And then I'll wrap it up.
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you, Carmichael.
Speaker
You guys are definitely doing some incredible work that is required at this present time. Perhaps this particular question would be more for Carmichael because you are a little more senior than them in the industry in that sense. And I'm I apologize that I'm going to make you talk
Carmichael Roberts
That's ok, I get better as it goes along.
Seems that way. So help us understand a little bit about the definition of impact, if I may, obviously, it's very different from what they are doing is the problem exists today. And you're going after it, you have the solution, and you're making it happen. If, however, if I give you a hypothetical scenario, let's say I mean that we are all jazzed and we are seeing all electric vehicles and everything. The way things are going around or being implemented today could be a disaster for the planet. And it's a it's a disaster in the making. Would that quantum quantify for your definition as an impact problem, or a problem that is impactful for our generation or the future generations to take on right now?
Carmichael Roberts
So thank you for that question. I think I can, your question actually not only allows me to answer it, but also can tie into the wrap up of it here. How do we define impact? And let me say, in a corny way, and then let me be less glib and be more specific. You kind of know it when you know what, when you see it when you can unambiguously look at something and say, This is a major problem. And if not for this product, or this solution or this effort, we're in trouble. And and it's an ideally, it's a big problem that you're really going after. So I'm going to answer this more personally for myself. I like to focus on and I think the organizations that I'm involved with really big, global, big reaching real world problems that are scary and hard and difficult and who knows, maybe we can't solve them. I hope that's not the case. So literally, how I define impact is looking at things where if you introduce Something, does it have a profound global difference? So for example, if it's climate change, you know, we often say, Can we honestly say half a Giga ton of carbon has been removed, at least as per year has been removed from the system? Because net because of a particular product or service, that's a very quantifiable way of looking at it, let's say, but that's a big, you know, big issue or we look listen to the volume of water, or, you know, just the amount of deforestation. Can we see not incremental, but can we see substantial movement and the change of those things? And I think when you focus on those really big problems, you have an opportunity to try to really hold yourself accountable to measure that impact. And so with that, maybe, let me thank you for that question. Let me wrap up a bit by saying thank you to both of you, not only for just being today on this panel. And telling people what you're working on. But as we just pointed out, I got a little more experienced the new. The world needs young, brilliant entrepreneurs, creating problems working with older younger versions. And I just want to thank you both for what you're doing for society at large in building the businesses and addressing the problems with the resilient technologies and products that you are developing. Thank you.