10.3.23-Showcase-Osaka-3D_Architect

RYO N. ISHIBASHI: The next, I want to give you a brief introduction to MIT Startup Exchange, and we have a presentation that's going up on the screen. Already there, OK.

Before I start, though, I do want to say thanks to Tricia Dinkel, who couldn't make it to Tokyo. John made it sound like I did a lot of the heavy lifting. I didn't. She did most of it. So see you on the other side, Tricia.

All right, so this presentation was built by me. I can still go through it by reading the notes, but I do want to give you guys a good understanding of how our office works and how this Startup Exchange program works. So Startup Exchange is led by MIT Corporate Relations, which John is, obviously, the executive director of, and it's a home as well to the Industrial Liaison program, which is a program that we run.

The two programs are highly integrated, and while we focus on taking large corporations and connecting them with MIT resources, the Exchange team identifies and selects MIT-connected startups, and together with us, the two parties help industry explore collaborations and partnerships based on common interests and needs. The Startup Exchange team's mission is to support startups and help them expand to, ultimately, solve the world's greatest challenges.

So next, I want to explain the qualification process for startups that are accepted into the Startup Exchange program. They must have a strong connection to the Institute, which are then called MIT Connected Startups. So the connections might come through the founding team or the technology, so the intellectual property was born from MIT, or their affiliation to Startup Exchange peers who vet and accept them into their respective cohorts. So the fund that actually Steve runs, the Met Fund, is a peer accelerator that's at MIT.

Next slide. Next, I want to talk about the sheer size of the Startup Exchange, and I know the number of 1,000 was thrown out several times, but our network includes over 1,000 startups. They typically join the program when they reach pilot stage, and that means when they have a technology or product that is ready to be tested or used in a real-world environment.

They are mostly B2B and can be working in any sector and located in any geography. And within this broad network, there's a group to which we call STEX 25 that receives customized support throughout 12 months. This includes increased visibility and connection to industry like yourselves.

So when it comes to value, part of Startup Exchange are exposed to a global network of industry and to its decision makers, as John had alluded to earlier. By industry, we mean [INAUDIBLE] corporate members. And while corporates that engage with Startup Exchange have curated access to vetted MIT connected startups, everyone in our network can participate in our events.

Our office organizes over 30 conferences and webinars throughout the year. Conferences typically include startup lightning talks like today. And while some take place at MIT campus, we do co-organize and host events with our members, like this one. And these can take place in any country. This is one of the most valuable offers we have for both parties, especially for startups, because we take them to the markets they're aiming to enter, for corporates, because the events are tailored to them and to help achieve their goals.

The program was created eight years ago, and since then, the program ignited many successful collaborations. This slide features a sample of the kind of collaborations we see coming to fruition more often, such as joint development, manufacturing, proof of concepts, and even acquisitions. Now, before passing the word to the entrepreneurs, I'd like to invite you to some of our upcoming events, all of which will be live streamed.

So that's it with the Startup Exchange presentation. Next, I want to introduced to you Dr. Kai Narita, co-founder and CEO of 3D Architech.

KAI NARITA: Great. Thank you for the introduction. [SPEAKING JAPANESE]

So let me start this presentation today. So first of all, here's our team, me, I'm a co-founder and CEO of the 3D Architech. I'm a visiting scientist at MIT and also, our company is directed by OnStar Nano Program, which is one of the accelerator program organized by MIT.nano, which is a research facility at MIT.

So here's our vision. We revolutionize metal manufacturing platform to realize the imagination with a complete freedom of materials, microarchitectures, and production volumes. So behind this vision, we see that two fundamental problems in the metal manufacturing space. The first problem we see is the manufacturable resolution.

So the performance and efficiencies of the metal devices are currently locked by the limited micron scale control and some material selections that can achieve such a small micron-scale control. A good example is a heat sink. The traditional manufacturing heat sink has 100 micrometers-thick fins. If you could make it smaller, you could increased surface area and improve the cooling performance. However, we already reached the limit of how fine we can make.

And the other problem we see is the trade off between particles and production volume, for the metal manufacturing, we always need to make more to reduce particles because of the high upfront CapEx. The traditional example is a metal injection molding. It costs $100,000 per mold, which means per design.

And metal 3D printers have emerged around 2015, and people are really excited about this technology because we thought that we could do on-demand production. But that was not really the case. The reason is that metal 3D printers is also expensive. It usually cost $4 million, and the most affordable one still cost $100,000.

So to solve these problems, we invented a new technology, which is gel-based metal 3D printing. So it's completely different way of making metals. We developed new gel materials, which can be 3D printed by commercially available 3D light-based printers, which can be used actually to make a plastic today. So we create a 3D structure of gel, which has a form factor with the final product. We have a chemistry to convert from gel to metal so that we can make 3D structure of metal by this technology.

And what we can offer here is that we can offer 10 times smaller feature size than any other metal printers can offer, which is a 10-millimeter size, 10 times smaller than human hair thickness. We have certain material selections, and this type of 3D print is very affordable, which costs around $1,000 per printer.

So we can offer 100 times our equipment cost, and this allows us to the low part cost production, even from volume production. So this is an example of how we can make, and you have those products in our booth, here interesting. Please come by.

So here is one example. You can see the 40-micrometer features. It's a half of the human hair thickness, and with this small, fine feature, we can make more than 3 centimeters size, which is the copper lattice sheet used for the heat sink application. We have a capability of making different alloys, which is a combination of different metals. And one of the examples is one of the strongest metal, which is tungsten nickel alloy.

By taking this technology, we have gained so far more than 13 companies with a study request for application development in different markets here-- the heat sink hydrogen production, electrical motors, and jewelry. And today, I would like to give you one example from the heat sink on device of product, especially for that data center cooling.

So in a data center, heat is a huge problem. The thermal design power, which is basically represents how much heat is generated by one CPU, or GPU, has nearly doubled recently and will increase more and more. So the new cooling solution is necessary for the data center cooling. And also, if you look into the data center energy consumption, 40% of data center energy consumption comes from cooling. So we need to reduce the energy consumption to cool down the data center and the server.

So here, we offer the 10-micrometer feature size against the 100-micrometer feature traditional manufactured sink, with a topological optimized structure, which gives us a full, more energy efficient heat cooling devices. And also, offer the competitive price point to $20 per unit by our technology.

And in Japan, actually, we have just launched the R&D site in Sendai Tohoku, and also you have some discretion for the application development with more than 20 companies, and there is ongoing PLC studies with seven Japanese companies. So today, we look forward to discussing the partnership for the application development, especially the heat sink market and as a water reserve for the hydrogen production for fuel cells and electronics and MEMS devices.

And also, try to scale up our technology. So here how interesting we would like to discuss about the partnership with 3D printing service bureaus and the 3D printer manufacturers. With that, we got through 3E Architech revolutionizing metal manufacturing.

[SPEAKING JAPANESE]