Thruwave

MATT REYNOLDS: Sure. I'm Matt Reynolds. I'm the founder and CEO of ThruWave Incorporated. We're based in Seattle, Washington. I'm a three-time MIT alum-- bachelor's, master's, and PhD at the MIT Media Lab. And after finishing up at the Media Lab, I started off my career in the startup world here in Kendall Square with a company called ThingMagic making RFID tags and readers.

And then I ended up going back into academia. I'm now a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. And ThruWave's technology base is spun out from the University of Washington. We had a long series of contracts with the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security in millimeter wave imaging, and I realized that there was an opportunity outside of the defense sector for commercial and industrial applications of millimeter wave imaging. So we spun the technology out from UW in 2018, and we're busy working toward our first commercial pilots this year, 2019.

So ThruWave builds a combination of technologies. We build the millimeter wave sensor itself along with software that turns the millimeter wave sensor data into 3D high-resolution images and further software that analyzes those images to extract business process variables-- for example, item count or the fill fraction of a cardboard box or template matching, some type of kitted product to the objects that are supposed to be in the kit.

So ThruWave, right now, is a small company. We are nine people. We are funded by a combination of federal small business innovation research funds and three early stage investors. We're working on a couple of pilots with very large companies this year, and we're expecting to have our product in general availability by the end of the year. And that will allow us to expand to a much larger base of companies in the e-commerce and in the high value manufacturing space.

Sure. So our team is heavily focused on millimeter wave science and technology. We have a team of nine people of which seven have PhDs in electrical engineering or in physics. So we are experts in millimeter wave system design and image reconstruction and in high-performance computing to turn those millimeter wave sensor data into 3D images.

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MATT REYNOLDS: Millimeter waves are electromagnetic waves. They're a form of radio waves. But they're much higher in frequency than the radio waves that you use for Wi-Fi or your smartphone. They're about 10 times higher in frequency.

And what that means is that they have very short wavelengths. And the short wavelengths allow millimeter waves to make high resolution images of objects. And because they're radio waves, they go through many types of objects that are opaque to visible light. So we can see through things like cardboard boxes to the goods or items that are inside.

If you're a manufacturer and you're expecting to receive parts on a production line from a supplier, but you don't know the item count of those parts prior to receiving the shipment, we can count those objects without opening the cardboard box. So you can receive goods, count the objects inside, and know that you have the correct item count before you start work.

As we approach general availability for our product, we're looking for a much broader base of customers. So we'll be able to supply millimeter wave sensors and a broader software suite that will enable that sensor data to be used in business process automation.

So if you're a manufacturer who is producing high value goods and you need to count items to audit packages in manufacturing o either on the incoming or on the outgoing side, or if you're doing high throughput e-commerce and you need to count objects inside the packaging, please contact us. We would be happy to work with you to determine whether a millimeter wave sensor would be appropriate for that application.

MATT REYNOLDS: So the main advantage of ThruWave's technology is that it's human safe, meaning our millimeter wave sensors can be used in close proximity to people, to human workers. The competitive technologies are based on X-rays. And the problem with X-rays is that they're not safe for humans.

So you can't expose people to X-ray radiation. That requires a lot of shielding, and that requires large machines that keep people away from the X-ray source. In our case, with the millimeter wave signals, people can work in close proximity to the sensor all day long without any health hazard.

So our technology got its start from the security space. We had a contract from the Department of Homeland Security to develop high speed airport security scanners. The challenge there, obviously, is that that's a very demanding application and has a very long cycle time. So it's not something that's appropriate for a startup company.

When we looked for commercial industrial applications, we're looking for fast-moving, high growth industries, where parts or objects are coming through in quick succession. So we focused on high value manufacturing and e-commerce, where goods are flowing very rapidly. UPS And FedEx are today handling about 20 million packages per day from the e-commerce supply chain. We think that a large fraction of those will need to be audited for item count or for picking accuracy. And we can do that with the ThruWave technology.

MATT REYNOLDS: I got my bachelor's and master of engineering degrees from Course 6, electrical engineering and computer science in 1998 and 1999. And during that time, I had a UROP, Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, opportunity to work in the Media Lab. And so I started working in Neil Gershenfeld's group in the Media Lab.

That was a very exciting time when the internet of things was being born. And Neil was busy working on 3D printing. And I was working on object localization, so tracking objects in 3D inside a building. I graduated from the Media Lab in 2003 and immediately went into the startup world, although I'm currently a professor at the University of Washington.

So MIT has probably the most advanced startup and industry relations ecosystem in the country. There's a long history of interaction between MIT and major industries, starting-- dating back over 100 years. There's such a global base of companies that are involved with MIT and across a huge variety of industries that it's a tremendous opportunity for us at ThruWave to work with ILP and try to get our technology understood and adopted by as many of those ILP member companies as possible.

So it's a fantastic opportunity to be part of STEX25. We really appreciate the visibility into MIT-connected industry. We think there are a number of very high end potential partners for us in the ILP cohort. We're looking forward to working with companies in e-commerce and in high volume manufacturing. I think there's going to be many opportunities for us to work with those companies.

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LAEL ODHNER: Well, the decision to come back to Boston and in particular, to be near MIT was a no-brainer. My co-founders and I have lived in this area for a while. They were at Harvard, I was a MIT student, graduate.

And when we went to go look for new employees, MIT is, of course, the first place we went.

So we tapped into our friends networks. We have a lot of friends who are veterans of other MIT-related startups. So our first employee was also an early employee at Akamai. Our other early employees were at MetaCarta and Cygnus, companies that were in the area and that had a lot of MIT people in their networks. And that has actually, been a tremendous benefit, especially in the early stage.

Partly because when nobody knows you, when you're just starting out and you just have a great idea, you rely very strongly on your friendships and on the credibility that having a good team provides. And MIT has really done a lot of that for us.

Well, just this past winter, we announced the closing of our B round. We raise $23 million from Menlo and from Google Ventures. And that for us was a major milestone. We now have the resources to really scale this technology up.

So we have just announced RightPick2, the second major version of our picking appliance or integrated picking system. And everything about our system now is new. Everything about our system is mass manufacturable. So we are able to scale up from dozens of systems to hundreds or thousands of systems. Everything can be ordered and assembled, and that, for us, is a major feat.

One of the things we've realized about the robotics industry, in general, is that it's one thing to do something once, it's impressive to do it 10 times. But really to do this at scale, we are going to be talking about fleets of hundreds or thousands of robots in order to really make an impact. So we are focusing. We're taking our investment and we're focusing it on turning this from a very interesting prototype into something that is going out everywhere by the thousand.

MATT REYNOLDS: My name is Matt Reynolds. I am founder and CEO of ThruWave Incorporated in Seattle, Washington. Our mission is to make the invisible visible with human-safe millimeter waves.

Millimeter waves are electromagnetic waves, radio waves, that allow us to see through many types of common packaging materials to the items or goods inside. That gives us the other sense of making the invisible visible. We allow companies to have visibility into their products even though they may be obscured by packaging materials.