C2Sense

JAN SCHNORR: My name is Jan Schnorr. I'm CEO and co-founder of C2Sense, the company we started out of MIT's Chemistry Department back in 2014. So we've been doing this for three and 1/2 years now and just launched our first product this year.

I moved to MIT from Germany in 2007 to do my PhD with Tim Swager in the chemistry department. Tim has been working on sensing for over 30 years. And one problem he saw over and over again is that it's really hard to have sensors that are small, simple, lightweight, affordable, and at the same time had the performance you need for the real world, especially the specificity you need to detect the gas you want and not get false positives.

So his group had been working on the next generation of the technology for a bit already when I joined. And I was fortunate enough to join a project where we were working on ethylene detection. Ethylene matters because it's a universal plant hormone.

And by measuring it, you can tell how ripe an apple is, if you can leave it in storage for longer, or if you have to eat it quickly, if an avocado is ripe enough to be eaten, or if a mango has to be shipped to a retailer more quickly so it doesn't spoil along the way. So a lot of people care about ethylene sensors in particular. There was no good solution out there.

So we worked on that project and had some very good results that were published in 2012. And at that point, him and I decided that we want to move forward, see if we can commercialize the technology and make it available to customers all around the world. And we reached out to the Deshpande Center who funded us for a year and a half, helped me during a postdoc to find our first CEO, to apply for some government funding that we received from the National Science Foundation. And then in 2014 when that government grant started, we moved out of MIT, started the company initially with only three people for the first year and a half. But now we are nine people full time with a few people part time and are getting ready to ship the first product out to the fruit industry.

We're also working on other technology, for sensors for ammonia for chicken houses or to take a leak in cooling-- leaks in cooling systems. We're looking at markers for meat, fish, poultry freshness. The technology is very broad and can be used all across these different industries.

And the key thing is that we can combine nanotubes, which a lot of people have worked with in sensing, with what we call a selector. That selector makes a sensor specific to the compounds you care about. Otherwise, you have a sensor that responds to ethylene, or to ammonia, or to biogenic amines, but it also responds to everything else. So you have all these false positives. And having that specificity makes a difference between something that works in the lab and something that works in the real world.

So we moved out of MIT in 2014. But, of course, there are still a lot of connections. And MIT is quite unique even among technical universities in terms of the ecosystem it provides-- the help it provides to startups coming out of the Institute.

So we work closely with the Technology Licensing Office. For example. We have a license to some IP out of Tim Swager's lab, 11 patent families currently. We have connections to the Deshpande Center still who continue supporting us with advice, with connections, invite us to some of their events. We have a connection to the Industrial Liaison Program and the STEX25 out of it.

And then beyond that, there are a lot of informal connections too, if it's faculty, if it's the different centers. And that's incredibly valuable. Especially these first steps, taking something that works in a lab, that's ready for publication, and taking that to start up, to the first prototype, to the first product, these steps can be incredibly hard.

And they're hard enough with MIT support. But I think a lot of startups without that support might not make it very far. So there are still a lot of connections. And we're very fortunate to have that.

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JAN SCHNORR: A key to C2Sense technology is the specificity. We've seen a lot of sensor technologies come and go over the years. We've seen a lot of very good publications from different research groups. We've seen some startups.

But one common theme when sensing companies struggle is their transition from the lab to the real world. If you take the sensor out of the lab where you're measuring, let's say, ammonia gas in a dry nitrogen stream, take it out into a chicken house where you want to control ammonia levels, monitor them, and now suddenly you have varying humidity levels. You have high humidity.

Sometimes it fluctuates. You have high temperatures. You have a lot of other compounds present. And handling those types of situations is not trivial at all.

You have a sensor, for example, that is supposed to pick up one part per million ethylene gas in a fruit storage facility in the presence of 10,000 parts per million water. So it needs to be incredibly specific for the compounds to care about. And that is the main challenge that we set up to solve.

The way we do that is we combine our nanotube-based network with what we call a selector. That selector, you can think of it a little bit like a simplified version of an enzyme. So it's designed to interact specifically with what you care about. If it's hydrogen bonding, if it's something that mimics a Diels-Alder reaction, if it's something that is similar to a metal-catalyzed reaction that involves your target compound, you have all these different chemical interactions that are built into our sensing material, and that gives us the specificity. And at the same time, we choose something that doesn't only have that targeted interaction, but also has a very weak interaction with other compounds, other interference that might be present in that environment.

A key problem of the digital world right now is to bring real-world information into that environment, make it digital. We have amazing cameras and image recognition right now. We have audio sensors, voice recognition. We have physical sensors like accelerometers. And all of these work really great.

One sense that's missing is the sense of smell, because it is not trivial at all to build gas sensors that are simple, and smart, and not a benchtop lab instrument, but something that you can distribute that could be coupled to your smartphone or that can be in your refrigerator to detect that kind of information. Now once you have that, it's extremely powerful. So you can think of a sensor that in your crisper that smells the ethylene gas that's coming from the tomatoes you are storing there. It smells that ethylene is going up. And that is an indicator that these tomatoes are starting to get ripe.

Now once that information is digital, it becomes really interesting. You can use it and send a text message to-- you can get a text message on your phone telling you, hey, your tomatoes are getting ripe. And the steak you have-- based on some other markers, the steak you have in your fridge, you can still eat it today, it's going to be great, but two days from now, it might not be.

And the app that we have that comes with it, it can tell you, hey, you have these ingredients that you should eat soon. Here's a recipe suggestion. Here are some missing ingredients. If you press this button, you can order them from an online retailer, or you can go to that shop and-- it has a shopping list for you.

And that is very powerful because it adds a lot of convenience. It reduces waste. And it can also be used to encourage you to eat more healthy food.

And so C2Sense goes about that goal step by step. Right now the first step where we can have the biggest impact is in the food supply chain. There we are working with people in the apple storage industry, with people in the poultry industry where a sensor at this stage that's a little larger that can monitor large areas can already be very powerful for reducing waste, for example.

And then step by step, we are creating more and more capabilities. And once we have that suit of different capabilities, that's when we can bring it to your home, to your fridge. And it will be small enough that you just place that little device there. And that can collect all this information for you.

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JAN SCHNORR: There are a lot of things where gas sensing can be very, very powerful. So food and agriculture can be used. So there, if you think about reducing waste because you know this shipment of mangoes has a certain shelf life left before you have to sell it. So it can help people in transportation shipping.

It can help retailers use dynamic pricing to discount this food item while it's still good and while the consumers can still use it so you don't have to throw it out. So it can reduce waste and losses in the food industry dramatically. And this is where most of the work we're doing so far is happening.

Another large area is industrial safety. So there you can use the same sensor technology to detect toxic gases. We're working with the Department of Energy that have asked us to develop a wearable sensor for toxic compounds to protect their workers on certain sites they have.

So there you have a real-time alarm, a wearable sensor that can tell a worker, hey, this toxic compound is spiking right now. You should put on a respirator, evacuate the area. And through the digital design of our product, you can send a message to a control room so they can alert other workers that are close by to also leave the area. So it's not only limited to a single person.

You can take it even a step beyond that. You can have it monitor in your home-- if it's for formaldehyde, for toxic out gassing from furniture, if it's in your fridge, if it's monitoring the air quality in your house, or in the environment. There are a lot of possibilities. And even though we start in food and agriculture and industrial safety, you can expand it to very, very many different areas that will be useful for people.

One thing that's been important for C2Sense from the very beginning is to seek industry partners to work with because you see oftentimes two challenges for startups. One challenge is if it's a platform technology that the startup's trying to do 100 different things at once. And that usually doesn't go very far.

But the bigger challenge is that people are spending years and years developing something, and then tried to bring it to the market just to realize that there is not enough interest. There's no customer who cares enough about-- there's no big problem people can solve. So to avoid this issue, we started working with a fantastic company, AgroFresh, very early on. They are storing apples. They want to use our sensors to make sure the storage conditions are perfect.

So they monitor ethylene gas, for example. They monitor some proprietary compounds. And with our help, they can make much better recommendations to their customers so they can optimize those conditions.

We started with some lab experiments then field tested them. And then last year we launched a big pilot. By now, AgroFresh has tested our technology in 12 different countries, all across the Northern and Southern hemisphere in a wide variety of facilities. And that's, of course, very exciting for a company with only nine employees to do a test at that scale with a larger partner. So right now, they are becoming our first customer. They're launching a product with us, which is, of course, fantastic.

And at the same time, we are getting into this next stage where you have a product on the market where you further want to make it available to different customers, want to improve it. And we are raising our Series A funding around right now. We have a great group of investors who have committed so far. And over the next three weeks or so, we'll complete that round. And that's, of course, a very exciting stage.

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JAN SCHNORR: We've always worked closely with ILP from the very beginning. And it's really important to have those industry connections that ILP can help us with. And what's interesting there is that they know the companies that they are working with for years in many cases. And they have a good understanding what's useful for these companies. So it's much beyond just having a website out there where people may or may not find us and might be able to reach out to us. So the type of-- the quality of contacts we've gotten through ILP has been very exciting.

Now earlier on, it was not set up with startups in mind in particular. But it was more around MIT as a whole. And this is where the Startup Exchange Program comes into play. And it's a really powerful addition, I think, to the MIT community.

And now STEX has the new STEX25 program that we were recently selected for. And, of course, that's a big step for us. And it's a chance to get the word out about C2Sense to additional companies, make new connections. And so we are very much looking forward to what's going to happen over the next 12 months with that.

It's interesting because now startups-- or the startup world has a much higher profile than it used to have maybe 10 years ago, and even more so, if you compare the US or in Germany where I'm from. So throughout most of my PhD, I always anticipated to join a large company. And I'm sure I would have enjoyed it.

But I always liked the excitement of building something new, of creating something from scratch. Growing up I did a lot of stuff with the scouts where you work on a limited budget with a team of volunteers who are just motivated about the cause, about what you're doing. And that's not too different from a startup at all. We do pay people, but it's still not the main motivation. People care about creating something new. And that's something I was always very passionate about.

But you cannot always force it. But I was lucky that I was in Tim Swager's lab at the time when the technology was ready. And it was a great opportunity to take that out of the lab and launch the company.

Now, there was an interesting past. Because early on, it's getting the first confirmation that people outside the lab care about this. Where the Deshpande Center came in, they reviewed our technology, they reviewed our estimates on the market and decided to fund us. So that was the first step to move forward with the technology, then getting funding from the NSF was another confirmation from an outside group, and then step by step realizing, oh, that actually works.

And you believe in the technology, but something else to find people outside who are willing to pay for it, and who care enough, who feel like you are solving a big enough problem that it's worth sticking around for a startup. So it was this step-by-step transition.

And I think nowadays there are a lot of founders who always know that they wanted to do a startup. For me, it's different. I thought I'd end up in a big company and would just do stuff in my free time. And now having this opportunity is really great.

And I think it might almost be beneficial to have thought about different options and then have chosen this startup because it seemed to be the best fit and not because it had to happen. So very, very exciting, but it's a long, long path. And I think everyone should understand that they should be excited about it not for the eventual outcome maybe, but for the process of launching a product, creating something, and putting it in people's hands to use.

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JAN SCHNORR: What's interesting about what we are doing, if it's for food and agriculture, or if it's for industrial safety is that most applications have this dual purpose. So if it's in food, it's something where we can void waste. So we do something that's beneficial for people, but we also save people money. The same in industrial safety, we reduce liabilities for an employer, but we can also protect workers at the same time. So doing something good, doing something that's economically valuable is really important.

But one interesting example we hadn't thought about is the chicken industry. So we always assumed ammonia sensors have been around for a while. They are a fairly mature technology, so why would C2Sense develop ammonia sensing technology?

And then we come across this huge use case in the poultry industry where people are losing half a billion dollars each year due to ammonia-related problems. And they don't have good technology to solve that problem. And as it turns out, we just completed a few tests. Our sensors work really well in the type of environment they have.

So what is important for us is to get the help from people in the industry to point us to these problems they would like to have solved because sometimes it's not exactly obvious. There might be very big problems that someone has that C2Sense or other people in the field are not aware of. And that's, I think, a really big opportunity, also through the Industrial Liaison Program and STEX25 to make those connections and help get the right technology out to people.

Of course, there's plenty of technology out there. And it would be surprising if not. It would mean that people don't care enough to try.

The challenge is that it's really hard to combine these properties that people need. So for the food industry, for food storage, for example, one technology that works really well is gas chromatography. But to use it, you have to take gas samples, ship them to a, lab analyze them there, transmit the data. It's usually a multi-day process.

What we can offer is something for a fraction of the cost, and a technology that's still accurate enough, and that's near real-time, just with a few minutes delay. And that can be a game changer. And so there are technologies.

There are color indicators. But then people have to look at a color sticker and have to interpret is it green or red? Is it reddish-green or greenish-red?

And there I think C2Sense can offer something unique, to have the specificity and digitize the information, make it available in a convenient way to our customers, and provide it in almost real time. And that I haven't seen much from other companies. And that's where I think we are unique. You have all the different aspects separately. But the combination of accuracy, simplicity, small footprint, digitization of the data, that is not that common right now.

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