2024 MIT Digital Technology and Strategy Conference: Startup Lightning Talks Introduction

Catarina Madeira: Hi, everyone. Every I'm Catarina Madeira, the director of MIT Startup Exchange. I'm delighted to be here with you today to present the startup lightning talks. We've invited 11 startups for you to meet. First, they'll present here on stage and then you can meet them all at the startup exhibit that is taking place in the room next door. But, first, I'd like to take a few minutes to tell you about our program.

Startup Exchange was created within MIT Corporate Relations to support MIT connected startups grow, expand, and solve the world's great challenges. And we do that by fostering collaborations and partnerships with industry such as ILP corporate members, as many of you are, and the MIT innovation ecosystem.

At Startup Exchange, we focus on startups that have a strong connection with the institute, and this connection might come through the founding team, the technology, as well as through their affiliation to some of our peers on campus, who vet and support the startups, like Start.nano or MIT Csail Startup Connect Plus, just to name a couple.

Today, our programs has a network of about 1000 startups. Virtually working in any sector. And this is possible because the startups we support, they can come out from any part of MIT, any of the five schools and one college. Some graduate from MBAs, other courses, and a considerable number of companies, they graduate from the MIT entrepreneurship resources. And there are over 80 across campus. You'll find most of them listed at Orbit.MIT.edu that our colleagues from the Martin Trust Center created.

The other two data points I'd like to make here is that besides sector agnostic, Startup Exchange is also location agnostic. That means startups can be literally located in any country, to benefit from the program. And we typically start working with them when they have a technology or a product that is ready to be tested or used in real environment.

Now, everything we do at Startup Exchange is to expose and connect startups and corporates in a highly curated way, and we also provide learning opportunities for them. This includes launching calls for startups throughout the year, based on corporate challenges, facilitating one on one meetings and hosting different kinds of events and do workshops. We co-organized them with our peers.

And I forgot to make a point here. So the goal of all our activities is to, on the one hand, help startups validate, pivot, expand, and help corporates learn about technologies and products that are coming into the market, to help you speed up your innovation or transformational processes, and even expand your portfolio of products or create new business lines.

This slide features a small sample of the success cases we had to date, that typically range from proofs of concept, pilots, joint development, and even acquisitions. This is Startup Exchange in a nutshell. If you'd like to learn more about our program, happy to talk over the course of this day. Please reach out to my team and I.

And before passing the word to the entrepreneurs, I'd like to invite you to our upcoming events. Next week we're hosting the Health Science Forum, and in October, we have a webinar about advanced design manufacturing. And on October 22nd, we'll be back here, at the Marriott, for our annual Sustainability Conference.

And now it is my pleasure to kick off the-- start the presentations. As I mentioned earlier, each one of them will do a five minute pitch, followed by the exhibits.