DropWise Technologies

ADAM PAXSON: My name's Adam Paxson. I am CEO of DropWise Technologies.

DAVID BORRELLI: My name is David Borrelli. I did my PhD with Professor Karen Gleason starting in 2009, took five years of research focusing on chemical vapor deposition technique. Currently I'm the CTO at DropWise.

ADAM PAXSON: We have just recently spun out a coating technology from a collaboration between two labs at MIT. It's a combination of a set of advanced coding materials and some vapor-based processes for depositing these coatings onto a very wide range of surfaces. So we're going after applications in industrial processing, things like heat exchangers and filters and power components, things that have not been able to be addressed by any other coating technology so far.

So the technology started in a collaboration between the research group that I did my PhD in here in the Department of Mechanical Engineering with Professor Kripa Varanasi and the lab of Karen Gleason in Chemical Engineering. And Kripa and I had been looking at a bunch of different coatings in sort of the bleeding edge of academia for improving the performance of a bunch of different pieces of industrial equipment and we sort of surveyed the field, and a few years ago started collaborating with Professor Gleason to bring the coating processes and materials that she had been developing into the application expertise and test beds that we had been developing in the Varanasi lab.

And right away we started getting some incredible results in terms of both performance and durability for these coatings and looked into the opportunity to commercialize these, I'd say at the beginning of last year. And we assessed the market potential to be massive, and so that spurred the formation of DropWise Technologies out of that collaboration.

DAVID BORRELLI: So I did my PhD with Professor Karen Gleason in Chemical Engineering, focusing on the CVD technique. And I kind of came on board about a year and a half ago, kind of towards the tail end of their initial promising research that showed that the coatings could have a very good performance in terms of condensation enhancement and durability.

ADAM PAXSON: So since deciding to found the company, I'd say one of the really strong inflection points was really the result of an ILP connection we made with Henkel Corporation. We just announced at the beginning of this week a partnership that we signed with Henkel that was some time in the making and that we're very excited to finally be able to start working on these development projects and leveraging the more than a century and a half of expertise of Henkel in the coating space to really propel our technology forward into these often hard to reach industrial markets.

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ADAM PAXSON: This collaboration was kicked off by a meeting between Henkel and the Varanasi lab a little over a year ago, and has now blossomed into this very exciting partnership.

DAVID BORRELLI: So the partnership with Henkel really lends us a lot of credibility in terms of going to the market and going to other players that maybe would be a little more hesitant to work with a startup that maybe has no history. But now with Henkel we have a lot more credibility going to people and saying, look, this has already been tested using very rigorous techniques, basically by the people that invented a lot of these tests, essentially.

ADAM PAXSON: Yeah, so Henkel has a very large portfolio of some pretty huge well-trusted industrial brand names like LOCTITE and BONDERITE, things that people have known of for a good part of a century. And what they were looking to do is sort of expand their portfolio of expertise in working with DropWise and sort of bring this whole new set of materials and deposition methods sort of within their capabilities.

DAVID BORRELLI: So it was complementary to their existing portfolio, essentially. They have a lot of coatings expertise, but CVD was not something that they had a significant amount of experience in before. So they saw this as being a complementary relationship for them.

ADAM PAXSON: So I think one of the best examples of the type of component that we're going after is a heat exchanger. So it transfers heat from one fluid to another through a very, very thin piece of metal, and inevitably, it gets fouled or corroded by some form of material, whether it's thick films of condensate that always build up on these surfaces or biofilms or corrosion products. Even a very, very thin layer, even a micron makes a significant impact on the performance of these heat exchangers. And that's been one of the key reasons why other coating technologies have not been able to address these.

So our vapor deposition processes allow us to grow very, very precise films over very large areas. And so we can keep these corrosion and fouling products from building up on these heat exchangers and not only maintain the performance, but boost them a significant amount beyond the status quo of an uncoated heat exchanger.

DAVID BORRELLI: And just to build on that, Adam just mentioned this, but being able to get a very thin coating is what our technique really enables. It's very difficult by any solution process to get a thin enough coating where the coating itself doesn't actually inhibit your heat transfer. So that's one of our key benefits in using the CVD process.

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ADAM PAXSON: Yeah, I think there's an overwhelming desire within the MIT environment to not only do research but do research that makes a really big difference. I think everyone has their eye on some problem that is not small scale. It's always very global in scope. And so the-- sort of the excitement of working within that environment has certainly helped drive the application of this research into industry where it really makes the biggest difference.

And so Dave and I were both able to gain some entrepreneurial experience within the MIT environment. I was co-founder of another coatings company back in 2012 and, sort of, was able to cut my teeth on assessing markets and opportunities and business development. And the extent to which MIT fosters the entrepreneurial environment especially with these more difficult materials endeavors has been a huge, huge help.

DAVID BORRELLI: And I would also add that professors Gleason and Varanasi are especially in tune with trying to find industrially relevant application. So professor Varanasi comes from five years of research at GE Global Research Center. Professor Gleason has many different industry collaborations. She's also spun out another company of her own.

ADAM PAXSON: We're excited to work together with the ILP and other organizations to really help foster the energy and materials and heavy tech startups. We certainly benefit from having the intense brainpower of both professors and also the potential employee pool within the MIT ecosystem within a 10 minute walk. At the early outset of my PhD research, I was looking at some very intricate, very complex coatings and surfaces to boost the performance of the heat exchange surfaces in these applications as much as possible.

But eventually after taking more of a look towards the application and the industrial relevance of these coatings realized that the performance was reaching a point of limited gains. And what was really needed was a simple highly manufacturerable solution to these heat exchange problems. And so that led us to pursue the development of these coatings that are very robust and very capable of being applied to large areas, which is important for these heat exchange applications.

DAVID BORRELLI: Professor Gleason basically invented this form of chemical vapor deposition, this ICBD technique. It's been essentially under development for the past 15 years or so starting from inorganic CBD, a hotwire filament CBD of diamond. So going from inorganics to organic materials, and the motivation being that you want to be able to deposit these polymers using a chemical vapor deposition technique but not subject your substrates to very high temperatures.

And so by using these hot filaments, you're actually able to keep your substrate at room temperature but be able to deposit polymers from this vapor phase precursors. And so the technique itself is extremely versatile. You can get many different functionalities just by changing the precursor that you put into it. So Professor Gleason has explored this ICBD technique for many different applications.

ADAM PAXSON: So we started with this process and really honed in on a specific chemistry that was optimized for steam condensors, which has been an outstanding problem for the better part of a century, getting the films of liquid that build up on steam condensors and block the flow of heat, getting these films broken up and shed from that service as rapidly as possible. So that means optimizing not just, of course, the durability of the coating but also the wet ability in the presence of steam.

So we identified a certain formulation and then subjected it to testing within essentially a miniature power plant that we had built within the Varanasi Lab to simulate the conditions, the pressures and temperatures that you would experience inside an actual operating power plant. And the endurance data that we were able to obtain from the apparatus has been extremely useful and accelerating the business development and really giving the technology the legs and the validation that it's needed to go forward.

DAVID BORRELLI: Applying this to power plant condensors can significantly increase the efficiency of these condensors which increases the efficiency of the power generation cycle, which in turn lowers emissions, lowers water usage. So applied globally, this can have a huge impact on CO2 emissions.

ADAM PAXSON: So for a typical large scale power plant that implements this coating, the amount of CO2 it would be offset against equivalent to a few thousand cars and that's just a single plant. And with this process, you can use essentially a big truck with some deposition equipment to retrofit these plants. And it can be driving to a new plant every week.

And so with a handful of these trucks, you can have a bigger impact on CO2 than the entire solar industry installed last year. So really the personal motivations behind this we're realizing that, heck, with a handful of really smart people, we can have more impact than entire global industries have.

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ANNICA BLAKE: My name is Annica Blake. I'm the CEO of DropWise.

The flexibility of the iCVD process and the range of materials that we can use to address various issues is enormous. So the choice is going to be what are we actually going to be focusing on, whether it is to keep fouling off of components or whether it is to increase heat transfer or whether it is to reduce corrosion across components.

And then you couple that with the iCVD process, which is so flexible that it can be applied in large scales very economically, or to small components that have very complex shapes, the potential is enormous. And the question is going to be, how do we pick the right stepping stones to get to the right markets as quickly as possible?

ADAM PAXSON: The MIT connections certainly don't hurt.

ANNICA BLAKE: It is professors who talk to companies every day who come in through organizations like the ILP or other organizations or just happen to be stopping by, and a good place to stop by is MIT campus just to see what's going on. And they express that they have these issues and sometimes they say, well, come meet these guys, they're right down the road, and let's see if they can help you. So we get a bunch of those, and sometimes from press coverage and whatnot. Other people also just call us up out of the blue.

But really, the MIT community has been a tremendous help in terms of funneling people who have problems that they need solving our way. And that's not only the chemical and mechanical engineering departments, it's the Sloan School, it's other people coming out of the woodwork who are just connected to the community.

The Industrial Liaison Program certainly makes the job easier. I have certain connections from my years of working with various industries and partners. But certainly, when the ILP is able to make a phone call and bring somebody in and say, hey, we want you to meet these guys, that saves us a lot of legwork. And we're a small company, so we do need the support and the help in terms of opening those doors to us and starting those conversations. So that's great.

ADAM PAXSON: The interaction with ILP has been very strong throughout my entire PhD career. A lot of the early progress with my previous startup, LiquiGlide, originated from ILP connections. And right now our main customer is, again, also facilitated through an ILP introduction. And the start of exchange that's been going on as a result of the efforts of [INAUDIBLE] have also been very helpful as a forum because the awareness and inbound interest is actually very important.

Actually, one of our leading applications that has the potential to generate some very quick significant revenue is an application that we couldn't possibly have conceived of and gone out to solicit interest without this player coming and coming inbound. The MIT Venture Mentoring Service has just been an incredible resource. Even the email list. Any question about any topic is answered by a barrage of just incredibly helpful responses. And so that ecosystem has been fantastic to be a part of.

ANNICA BLAKE: And we've also had other MIT startups that reach out to us and offer to help. Or when we were looking for space we really didn't have a place to sit at the moment, they said, you know, you can sit in our offices, that's fine, you can use some of our lab space for a minute you know, that's OK, as we were getting ourselves out the door. So it is a very collaborative environment to be working in. And certainly, when you are a small startup and you are having discussions with these large corporations, it's also helpful to have somebody who says, this is normal, this is not normal, here are some of our experiences, here are some of the things that you might want to watch out for and make sure you don't get into different situations. So that's really been helpful to have that kind of collaboration and advice from other startups who have been going for a number of years.

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