The Future of the Bioeconomy Episode 2: Power in Scale

Speaker 1:
Cool. Welcome everyone. I’m Drew Wandzilak at Alumni Ventures, and this is another video in our greater kind of video podcast series around the future of the bioeconomy. I am joined by Adam and Jack, the co-founders of Unicorn Bio. Great to see you guys.

Speaker 2:
Hi.

Speaker 1:
Hi. Cool. Jack or Adam, I’d love to hear an introduction from both of you, hear a little bit more about yourselves—we’ll keep it brief—and then either one of you can share a bit about the history of Unicorn Bio and where you guys are at now.

Speaker 3:
Hey Drew, thanks for having us. Yeah, so I’m Jack. I’m one of the co-founders of Unicorn Bio. Very quick introduction to me: I started out life as a wannabe chemist, worked in industry, ended up coming over to Europe and the UK where I met Adam and got into Unicorn, where we’re doing some cool things in biomanufacturing.

Speaker 2:
Hi, I’m Adam. I’ll go back to the front maybe. I started out life as a scientist—an R&D scientist. I’ve got a PhD in cancer cell biology. I worked on stem cells before, during, and after my PhD. I jumped towards a big industry. I was a tiny cog in a massive machine. I ran away from that, went back to the university sector, did a couple of postdocs, got frustrated with that because the impact on the world just wasn’t there for me. Then I worked in a couple of startups myself, and then met Jack, and that’s kind of how we started off building Unicorn.

Speaker 1:
That’s awesome. Incredible background, and we’ll dive back into that a little bit more later. Admittedly, I invited both of you into this interview with very limited information—just this concept of talking about the future of the bioeconomy, which, if you know anything about the bioeconomy, is just a massive thing to try to talk about in 30 minutes. But that’s a really interesting place to start.

When I say “bioeconomy,” I’m curious how that lands with you and what that means to you personally. Is it even the right term? Coming at this as someone not deeply educated in the space, what does “bioeconomy” mean to you, and how do you think about that trend, that industry, that market as a whole?

Speaker 2:
Maybe I can go, and then Jack can follow. I think “bioeconomy” is a good term. To me, it means using biological systems to produce useful things for any number of applications. My background is cell biology, but mixed with engineering—as in device engineering. So when I think of bioeconomy, I always think of cells, no matter what people say, that’s just my default go-to.

I also think about automation as well, because I think it’s mad to think it’s going to be feasible to do all this with human beings. So those two things, for me, are kind of where a lot of what we are trying to work on comes from. I’ll pass over to Jack for what he thinks.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, I’ll echo Adam’s sentiment. “Bioeconomy” is a cool term. I thought it sounded cool the first time I heard it. I think it’s perhaps a bit vague in that, like you said, it encompasses so much. Folks who are working on stem cell-based therapeutics all the way to regenerative agriculture fall under this umbrella term of working in the bioeconomy.

Sometimes it can be a bit difficult to know. Like Adam said, it means something totally different to him than it does to you, Drew, and than it does to me. My background, like I mentioned, I started out life as a chemist. Whenever I think of “economy,” I go right back to those big chemical reactors I used to work with—which is just not how most bioproduction works. So everyone probably has a different take on it, but it’s quite a cool place to be.

Speaker 1:
Of course. And maybe to help contextualize this for our audience, who may not be that educated on biology or chemistry or the bioeconomy at all: automation, cell-based biological systems—it’s this massive market. Why is it important? This might be what drives either of you to keep doing what you’re doing, but why should people care about this?

Cool, it’s automating, it’s having these biological systems, really cool in a lab—but why does it matter on a global scale or on an economic scale? What’s the big need you guys see that makes it important to spend time in this space?

Speaker 3:
Yeah, maybe I’ll start first on this one. I’ll give the really high-level answer, and Adam will follow and tell me it’s not specific enough.

You see a lot of folks get up on stage on a soapbox and say, “The 21st century is the century of biology.” That’s really great, but what does that actually mean? To me, what gets me really excited about what we do is the fact that in the 21st century, we’re actually developing the tools and technologies to engineer or manipulate biological systems to make useful products. Bare bones, that’s the underlying premise for the bioeconomy.

So what does that mean? Like I mentioned earlier, it’s a super wide range of things. On one end of the spectrum, you have stem cell therapeutics where we, as a species, are able to engineer living mammalian or human cells and turn them into new types of therapeutics—potentially curative treatments—helping the blind see, the deaf hear, and new types of treatments for cancer. That’s pretty cool right off the cuff.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have folks working in the cultivated meat space, where you’re trying to grow meat from cells in a factory as opposed to needing to raise animals. There are really cool projects out there that are going to have impacts on human health, sustainability, and ultimately—without sounding cheesy—they’re going to reshape the world that we live in over the next few decades. I think that’s pretty cool.

Speaker 2:
Good answer, Jack. I like it—it was fair.

Speaker 3:
Yeah.

Speaker 2:
The only thing I’d add is, from my personal perspective, I’ll take a slightly different take on it. I’m not sure who said it, but you don’t get to the LED by iterating on the candle. That’s a premise I like.

For some of these problem spaces, we’re taking technology stacks from historically different places and bringing them into another industry. That’s where disruption tends to happen. We don’t notice it, but all of a sudden it’s there. A lot of things I’m hopeful for in the bioeconomy are that we’re going to reshape other industries.

The incumbents might not like that—you’ve got Nokias, Polaroids, Netflixes. All of those industries initially go, “Oh no, we’re not going to do it like this.” But as Jack mentioned, especially with engineering biology—and for me, I’d tackle automation—because we need to engineer biology and automate it to scale it. Production is a problem.

It’s all well and good showing things in an academic lab at small scales, but to have real impact you need to manufacture it at scale, whatever it is you’re doing. You’re going to have to make a lot of it to have a large impact. For me, that’s why the two bits go together.

Cell therapy, for example, would be a replacement for taking conventional drugs. If we can reproducibly produce these at scale and treat tens of thousands of people, that’s going to be a transformative difference compared to giving people a pill and asking them to take that. These are the kinds of things that excite me about the bioeconomy.

Speaker 1:
Incredible. And Adam, you mentioned the term “scale” a bunch, and I think that’s really the difference. For people trying to understand, especially in hard sciences in biology and chemistry, it’s about how you can get this out of the lab. Maybe it works, but the next big breakthrough to have any sort of world-changing effect is scale.

How much can you automate? How much can you scale? What are the challenges in your mind—and maybe this is a foray into describing Unicorn a bit more—but when you think about scalability within this realm, what does that mean? Is there a common thread of barriers or challenges across the industry to scale that you keep seeing? What’s hindering us from having those cell-based therapeutics that could be world-changing if they could get to the right scale?

Speaker 2:
For me, there are a bunch of things. I’ll say scale is one big challenge, and then there are a few others as well. There’s logistics—does the thing actually work? If you show the thing actually works, then you’ve got a scaling problem because you need to do things like clinical trials and have enough material to test on.

We do that via human labor. Humans are wonderful—obviously, we’re all great—but we’re also not very reproducible in the way we work. Science is kind of artisanal. If you come into our lab, you’ll see people—the classic news picture of a person with a pipette holding liquid, transferring it between different containers. That’s not the most accurate way to do things.

You want machines that automate and are more reproducible. If you do that and apply it at scale, then you have something you can treat lots of people with. If it’s a therapeutic, or if it’s a food product, maybe reproducibility doesn’t matter as much, but you’re still going to need to scale it. That’s my take. I’m not sure I fully answered the question, but I’ll pass it over to Jack to see what he says.

Speaker 3:
Yeah. Oh no, this is great. I’m loving the click-clack dynamic. I’m going to answer the question with an anecdote. Adam puts up with my anecdotes all the time, so hopefully you don’t mind, Drew.

As a company, Unicorn is based in Sheffield in the United Kingdom. I’m an American originally, from the US, and the only thing I knew about Sheffield is that steel came from here. Turns out it’s actually a lovely city full of lovely people.

Just down the road from us, there’s a museum about the industrial history of Sheffield, and it’s where something called the Bessemer process was invented. The Bessemer process is a metallurgical process to basically mass-produce steel.

It blows my mind that this gentleman, Mr. Bessemer, back in the mid-19th century, found a really interesting market—the steel market—with very manual, human labor-driven production methods. There was a real impact that could be made if you could scale it up.

Steel makes skyscrapers, steel makes boats. He asked the question: how do we take what a human being does, automate it, and then apply it at scale?

As a history buff, I’m tickled pink by the fact that Adam and all the wonderful people at Unicorn—we’re still asking the same question 200 years later. I think it’s quite cool. Fundamentally, that’s it—that’s the question.

You can have the greatest product on planet Earth—it could be steel, it could be a stem cell therapy, it could be a semiconductor, it could be a polio vaccine, it could be an automobile—but if you don’t have a way to mass-produce it, you just have a really interesting project and not an industry.

So yeah, I’d say that’s the real challenge in the bioeconomy writ large right now: how can you make it scalable? How can you actually take the interesting science, put it inside industrialized production processes and machines, and have something that can crank out high-quality products and therapies at affordable price points?

Speaker 1:
Within that—because that market is so broad—there’s rarely a silver bullet that can scale for everything. I imagine that’s not necessarily the case here. Are there practices or technologies that can apply across the verticals that the bioeconomy touches that solve that issue of scaling?

And if not, are there common bottlenecks that people working on therapeutics versus working on cultivated meat experience—similar issues in scaling? What do you guys think about that? Maybe it’s a plug for Unicorn, but I’m curious about your thoughts around that.

Speaker 2:
Maybe I can go. The answer is “maybe,” which is not an answer at all.

Thinking about cells, there are some great technology stacks that we use to produce recombinant proteins and things like this. They’ve taken a technology that was more used for the fermentation industry and evolved it to be able to produce biopharmaceuticals—and that’s fine, that’s good, and I want that to continue.

But some of this is kind of iterating on the candle idea. Sometimes you’re not going to get the LED. We do have ways to scale these up—otherwise we wouldn’t have vaccines and things like that.

The problem becomes when the cell is the product. Without going too much into cell biology, usually the thing—the vaccine or the recombinant protein—is a byproduct of the cell. Whereas if you want the cell to be the product, there aren’t, in my opinion, as many technology stacks that can do this.

That’s why we work on the approach we do. We’re fitting biology into preexisting engineering rather than building new engineering around biology. That’s what we do at Unicorn—that’s one of the theses: taking what we already know how to do and scaling it out rather than scaling it up.

Speaker 3:
Yeah. I should stop going after Adam—I’m really having to rack my brain to come up with something cool to say.

No, I mean just to echo the sentiment: there’s no one silver bullet that will solve every single problem in the bioeconomy.

Adam was saying—the tech that works for making vaccines today just isn’t suitable for making cultivated meat or stem cell therapies. That’s why we exist. Vice versa, the first range of machines and technologies that Unicorn is making will be useful, but they probably won’t solve every single problem out there.

The bioeconomy is so big that there’s a lot of problems that need to be solved—and frankly, a lot of opportunities for new businesses to get out there and solve those problems.

Speaker 2:
Just one more comment building on what Jack said. The thing with biology is that it’s not surprising it’s diverse. We’re all carbon-based lifeforms, we all have DNA and things like that, but when you start to grow, it’s nonsensical to think that a mushroom is going to grow in the same way as a human cell, for example.

An example of this: for some fermentation systems, they need cooling, not heating, because they get too hot. Whereas for the mammalian cells that we work with, we need to heat them. That directly impacts how you design the engineering from a fundamental level.

So yeah, I don’t think there’s going to be a single technology that solves everything. There’s more likely going to be an array of them.

Some technology already exists from the fermentation industry, the beer industry—that’s the approach you want to take: big tanks, huge scale, massive factories, probably with a wind farm and solar panels on the side to make it sustainable. But for other things, you’ll have to think differently to get to scale and make an impact. That’s how I’d follow up on what Jack said.

Speaker 1:
That was incredibly helpful. Changing gears a little bit: I’m curious—and we can start with Jack because he’s been following up a lot—it’s easy to get into these bubbles of education and understanding, especially in highly technical roles and businesses.

What are some things that you’ve noticed when talking to people outside of Unicorn Bio, outside of the bioeconomy or a biology or chemistry background, that either frustrate you or make you want to say, “No, that’s not how this works”? Or just feelings of people not being as educated on a specific angle of the industry that would be really important for them to know?

Speaker 3:
Alright, great—stoked to go first this time. I’ll tell you how I got into cell biology.

As a bit of background on me: I actually started out my life as a cook. I worked in kitchens, I loved doing it, and through that I got interested in science—the science of food. That led me to chemistry and then ultimately down the career path I’m on. I’ve always tried to go after what I saw as the most interesting problems.

After a few years of working, I landed in cell biology as a space where, like Adam said, you could have the most impact. It’s really early in terms of technological development, and quite literally, stem cell therapies have the potential to treat cancer and develop treatments for heart failure or blindness.

To me, I don’t even need to justify why that’s cool—that’s just so impactful, let alone any of the sustainability efforts.

When I first started working with cell biology, I was in for the rudest awakening of my life. It turns out biology is extremely complex, extremely nuanced.

When you start talking about things like stem cells—which most people have maybe seen in a New York Times article once—it’s easy to say, “Ah, it’s that sciencey thing.”

The reality is stem cells are extremely complex, extremely exciting, and extremely different from other types of biology out there.

The number one problem I’ll speak for Unicorn on is that when we talk with folks, we talk about the bioeconomy and scaling as if it’s this monolithic thing, this one thing. Sometimes you just want to wave your hand and say, “No, stop. You can’t try and fit a square peg into a round hole. This isn’t Apollo 13—biology doesn’t work like that.”

I think that’s been my biggest rude awakening. When I started working, I was like, “What do you mean biology isn’t automated and we don’t understand how the building blocks all work? I thought this was the case.”

So I hope—if anyone’s not watching this on TikTok and they’ve paid attention this far—the take-home message is that biology is really cool, but it’s really diverse, and you need different techniques and technologies to make different things.

Speaker 2:
Okay. Jack mines is, I suppose, yeah, we’ll just start. So there’s a thing—when me and Jack participated in Entrepreneur First, they would say a lot about the curse of knowledge. It’s actually difficult for scientists in academia or those who have started up on their own or are spinning out companies—you just take for granted some of the stuff that you do on a day-to-day basis.

When you bring people into your world, they’re like, “Oh, a cell doesn’t look like a fried egg. It looks completely different than a fried egg when you look at it through a microscope,” and you’re like, “Yes. How did you not know?” Well, of course you didn’t know.

So for me, Jack’s point about stem cells—there are different types of stem cells. I think it’s good we’re moving away from the idea that there’s just embryonic stem cells. When you say “embryonic stem cells,” people think negatively—there are ethical considerations, things like that. People have started to realize there are actually different types of stem cells.

When I had conversations with outsiders 10 years ago, everyone thought “embryonic,” which meant babies, and the sources were questionable. I won’t have a debate about that, but people have moved on from that. Now they know there are different types of stem cells.

Internally, there’s an even different thing within science. We have an interesting mix of scientists and engineers, and the engineers see biology as a bit of a social science sometimes. They’re like, “What do you mean there are laws and physics?” And the biologists throw their hands up and go, “Yeah, we know how to get it from A to B, but we don’t fully understand how we got it from A to B. We’ve just figured out a way to do it.”

So even within science and engineering, the interesting thing I see when I talk outside of, let’s call it, a cell biology domain—what we’re trying to do at Unicorn is bring engineers from different classical industries into stem cell biology. That’s part of our strength.

On one hand, you’ve got people outside—the public—who, like Jack said, might have read a New York Times article. But we also have it within the ecosystem that sometimes we’re not even speaking the same language to each other because the technology stacks and everything is quite different—because they have to be.

Speaker 1:
That was great. For both of you, it’s really interesting around stem cells and even just speaking the same language. People might think research, academia and science are all the same language. Maybe I don’t know enough about it, but it’s definitely very different.

Great. My last question—we’re keeping this brief—is really around: if you guys weren’t building Unicorn Bio, what would you want to be doing? Obviously, you probably don’t have a lot of brain space for knowing the founder’s life, but what would be the second thing? If you couldn’t work on Unicorn anymore, where would you spend your time? We can start with Jack, if that’s helpful.

Speaker 3:
You have to forgive me. Sorry, I was laughing because a couple of weeks back, we were just having a chat in the office and someone asked this question. It was like, “Jack, what would you guys do if you weren’t doing Unicorn?” And without even thinking, Adam said, “Starting another biotechnology company, building bioproduction systems.”

I wish I had that level of conviction in my career path. No, yeah—honestly, if I wasn’t working on Unicorn right now, I’d probably take a month off, have a holiday, go to the beach, and probably come back and go into another venture. See if Adam wanted to have another go with me. Maybe we can still be friends after this.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, I don’t know how to respond to that. For me—I use this quote, and I don’t know if I stole it from somebody else, maybe I have—but believe it or not, frustration gives me a lot of fuel.

For 15 years I’ve been doing stuff like this in labs, R&D positions, and you just look at it and you’re like, “Why is no one doing this?” There are only two reasons: either it’s a mad idea and will never work, or it’s a huge idea with massive impact and everyone’s just ignored a blindingly obvious thing. I’m hoping it’s the latter.

One of the things I do in my spare time is try to help support other people’s startups, so maybe I would do that more full-time. Mainly because I have nothing against Oxford and Cambridge, but I think there’s a world outside of it—talent is distributed quite widely.

I think societies in every country around the world hone in on certain regions, but there are really innovative people that don’t necessarily live in those regions and don’t want to. I’d like to see more distribution of things like that. Helping other people start up might be something I’d do.

The only other thing is something to do with healthcare management on a completely different subject. The UK healthcare system could be improved. Although ML and AI are buzzwords, I think there are lots of opportunities to improve the patient pathway.

Although we talk about scale-up, it’s part of a complete path. You need to make enough of this stuff and then treat a number of people. Then you need someone to treat the people—how are they going to deliver the treatment? You have to have a joined-up strategy for the whole lot; otherwise, it doesn’t really work.

I love technology, but if it’s not part of the entire infrastructure, then it doesn’t matter as much. I’d probably do something in that space—helping other founders or something in another point in the translation of anything that will make a difference to people on planet Earth would be my thing.

Speaker 1:
Incredible. Thank you both for taking the time to do this. It wasn’t so bad, right? Pretty painless, and I think we had fun doing it. There’s definitely a part two somewhere in the future, and we’ll get an update on how you guys are doing and on the market and everything.

This was fantastic. Thank you both for joining today.

Speaker 2:
No problem.

 

Narrator:
In a world captivated by criticism and negative clickbait headlines, it’s easy to overlook the scope and power of technologies propelling us forward. At Tech Optimist, we delve into the vibrant intersection of technology and entrepreneurship, shining a light on innovators who are building a better future. As members of the most active venture capital firm in the United States, our unique vantage point offers us insights into the real-world impact of technology. Join us as we explore, celebrate, and contribute to the stories of those creating tomorrow.

Mike Collins:
Welcome to the second episode of the Tech Optimist podcast. We have three blocks for you today. In the first, we’re talking about nuclear energy with one of our young associates, Drew, interviewing a founder. In the second block, Noreen and I again have a chat about what’s going on, what’s buzzy in the venture capital community. And in block three, I speak to another one of our founders, CEO of Nanopath, a company she founded with a classmate while she was getting her PhD, who’s doing some very exciting work. Enjoy the show.

As a reminder, the Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized financial advice, and it is not an offer to buy or sell securities. For important additional disclosures, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

Okay, here we are with block one and the conversation between Drew and Matt.

Drew Wandzilak:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to our video series on some of the great founders, industries, and technologies that are taking place across the US and across the world. I’m here with Matt with Aalo Atomics. Matt is one of the smartest, most innovative, and thoughtful founders I know in the space of nuclear energy, and I really appreciate having you on, Matt.

Matt Loszak:
Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited.

Drew Wandzilak:
Fantastic. Well, today we’re going to dive into a couple of topics around nuclear energy. We’re going to tackle some misconceptions. We’re going to talk about what’s happening right now and what the future may look like. And this is an area that we’re really excited about here at Alumni Ventures.

I think a great place to start, Matt, would be just why should people care about nuclear? Why should people be researching and learning about this energy source, this energy storage source? And how does it stack up against other sources of energy that we may know in the world today?

Matt Loszak:
Yeah. So for me, I studied engineering and physics, so I had a background in understanding the science behind solar and batteries and fission and fusion. But it wasn’t until the past few years when I started really diving into the political, economic, and more mass-psychological sides of these things. And the more I looked into nuclear, the more I felt like it was just essentially the most misunderstood energy source out of them all by a long shot. I’ve almost never seen something where there’s such a huge disparity between the public perception of something and a lot of the realities.

And so if we look at the different energy sources one by one, all the others are fine—they’re decent—but nuclear is just so much better in all these different, interesting dimensions that people don’t really understand. Solar and wind are great and clean. However, they don’t work everywhere and they don’t work all the time. If you’re at a more northern latitude or somewhere where it’s cloudy fairly often, it’s really hard to build economical, utility-scale plants that can compete with thermal base-load style energy sources. If you’re in Australia or California or even parts of Texas, then solar can be great, but it does have these limitations. If you want to make it base load, you’ve got to do overbuilding and storage, and it just gets complicated. So it’s not quite the silver bullet many people would have you believe.

And then you’ve got things like oil and gas. Oil and gas is actually pretty cheap and reliable, but as we know, they don’t really take accountability for their waste. They basically just spew it out into the air, and for some reason we’re all cool with that—which we probably shouldn’t be. Obviously, with things like climate change, smog, and hospitalizations with asthma, that’s becoming more prevalent in the general psyche as a problem. That’s definitely a major factor driving more attention to nuclear power.

Then you’ve got geothermal or hydro, which again are good and fine, but they’re limited based on geography. If you’re not next to fast-moving water or a magma pocket close to the earth’s surface, it’s tricky. And we’ve already tapped out quite a few of those locations.

With nuclear, it produces clean energy whenever you want it. Contrary to popular belief, it can do that economically, and it’s already statistically just as safe as solar or wind. To me, nuclear is just this insanely cool underdog that we should be leveraging much more.

Drew Wandzilak:
No, it’s fantastic. And it leads to this next question. It feels almost like this underdog energy source, this sleeping giant. Those of us who know this space feel that way. It hasn’t always been like that. It’s definitely an industry that’s gone through some rocky periods—public perception, regulation, policy. What’s different about right now? What’s different between our nuclear and our grandfather’s nuclear? What pieces of that made it so exciting for you to jump in with the company you’re building?

Matt Loszak:
I think you’re right—nuclear has gone through a bit of a roller coaster with adoption and public perception. For those who don’t know, nuclear energy research began in the ’40s and ’50s, and we saw the first deployments in the ’50s and ’60s. That was the dawn of the first atomic age. Roughly 52 or 53 different test reactors were built at Idaho National Lab to explore nuclear technology. Then, during the slowdown in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, INL pared that down to three.

What we’re seeing now is a resurgence—a start of a second atomic age—driven by a few things. On the one hand, people are realizing their fear of nuclear power might be misplaced. Fear of nuclear weapons is totally valid and fair, but people are realizing just how different nuclear energy and nuclear weapons are. At the same time, climate change and decarbonization are increasingly pressing, and nuclear is such an obvious, incredible solution that we’ve been ignoring. Not everyone has been ignoring it though. Ontario fully decarbonized its grid in the ’70s and ’80s. France did an amazing job with their build-out. Other places tried to go all-in on renewables like Germany, but that hasn’t worked as well yet.

On the political side, we’ve seen a huge momentum shift toward nuclear. At the COP Climate Conference two or three years ago, nuclear wasn’t even mentioned. This past year, 20 countries signed on to triple their nuclear capacity by 2050. Governments are responding to the public’s shifting perception.

A big driver of this change is small groups of nuclear advocates. Groups of 5–10 people have saved entire gigawatt-scale nuclear power plants. They’ve also been vocal on social media like TikTok, Twitter/X, and YouTube. This small movement alone has created a strong change in public opinion. All these factors combined suggest nuclear is entering a pretty interesting expansion period in the coming decades.

Drew Wandzilak:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. You touched on the changing political landscape and public perception. I want to address some of these public concerns head-on. When you talk about nuclear to an average person, the first concerns are safety and waste. From where I’m at now in understanding this industry, my mindset has completely shifted. Can you talk about that? These are the biggest fears for a lot of people. They pass by an old reactor and think, “Thank God I don’t live near this.” But safety and waste have changed—and not changed—in a lot of ways, and the perception is different from reality.

Matt Loszak:
Exactly. It’s important not to dismiss people’s fears as meaningless, but it’s equally important to look at the numbers rather than relying on hearsay or emotions. Nuclear is statistically as safe as solar or wind when measured in deaths per kilowatt-hour, which is a morbid but useful metric.

There are two main fears: waste and meltdowns. The fear of meltdowns is really a fear of relocation or environmental impact. It might surprise people to know that of the three major nuclear accidents people have heard of—Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island—in the latter two, nobody died. In Fukushima, the relocation aspect scared people more than fatalities. Obviously, we want to prevent relocations entirely.

Waste is the bigger misunderstanding. First, the total amount of nuclear waste is incredibly small. All the nuclear waste ever produced worldwide fits on a football field stacked 10 meters high. That might sound like a lot, but compared to oil and gas waste—which would fill an entire city stacked as high as Mount Everest—it’s tiny.

If you see nuclear waste in person, you’d say, “Is that it?” It’s not green goo leaking everywhere. It’s solid, easy to contain, and most of its energy content is still in there, so you actually want to keep it on-site.

Matt Loszak:
So nuclear waste is essentially like taking a bite out of a sandwich and setting it aside. Ninety-five percent of the energy content is still in there. So we actually don’t want to go and bury it deep beneath a mountain or send it off into outer space. We want to keep it close by because it’s so easy to handle. There’s such a small amount of it, and there are actually good resources in there to use again in the future.

So the waste issue, I think, is interestingly a bit of a talking point. You might ask yourself, “Why do we fear waste if all that is true?” And I think the waste was actually a bit of a talking point contrived by people who wanted to end all things nuclear. They wanted to end the weapon, and they thought, “If we’re going to end the weapon, we have to end the energy source.” And it turns out that’s just not true—not only the assumption that you have to end both and throw the baby out with the bathwater, but also the assumption that waste is quite dangerous.

So that’s my take on the waste issue. But I think the fear of meltdowns, even though they’re very uncommon, is valid because even if it happens once every 20 or 30 years, you don’t want to have to relocate. What we’re doing at Aalo is trying to make reactors that are essentially relocation-proof. Obviously, technology can never be 100% perfect, but what you can do is engineer the system such that if anything goes wrong, it’s just contained within the building. We’re looking forward to proving that out in the next couple of years with deployment and demonstration of some test reactors.

Drew Wandzilak:
That’s fantastic. And if we are as interesting as I think we are and people want to go learn more about nuclear after listening or watching this, one of the things they’ll see in a lot of these advanced reactors or new reactors is the term meltdown-proof. You guys are looking at it as relocation-proof. There’s the term meltdown-proof, and I think it touches on this broader question of what’s happening in nuclear on the reactor side today with some of these advanced reactors that maybe wasn’t even technically possible a few decades ago. These reactors don’t necessarily look the same as the reactors you picture in your mind or see in the media. Talk a little bit about the landscape and some of these technical advancements that have improved efficiency, safety, or even waste, even if it’s not as huge a problem as many people think.

Matt Loszak:
Yeah, so first I’ll address the fuel side. Our reactors are going to use a fuel called uranium zirconium hydride. This is a really interesting fuel that’s often used in university research reactors. People don’t often realize there are 30 of these reactors around the US on university campuses, and students walk by them without realizing they’re next to a nuclear reactor. The reason they don’t know is because there’s no big concrete dome over the reactor. That’s because the fuel is so inherently safe.

Students are allowed to try to make the fuel melt down, and they can’t. The fuel has an inherent physics property where the hotter it gets, the less reactive it becomes. This is the fuel we’re using for our reactors. It helps simplify some of the civil structure and shrink down engineering and cost to the physics level.

You might ask, “Why didn’t we use this type of fuel for other reactors around the world?” The reason is because this fuel is finicky. All the water-based reactors around the world can’t take heat away from the fuel fast enough, so the fuel shuts itself off too quickly. But with our reactors, because we use liquid metal, we’re able to take that heat away super quickly. When you touch metal, it feels cold to the touch—not because it’s actually cold, but because it’s taking heat away from your hand quickly. Using liquid metal with this fuel is an amazing combination for our reactors. It’s simultaneously incredibly energy-dense, which is great for economics, and incredibly inherently safe, which is good on its own and also economically beneficial because it allows us to shrink safety systems.

In terms of other big differences with reactors today versus reactors of the future: for utility-scale nuclear, 60–80% of the cost is CapEx, and a large chunk of that is interest. The reason is these reactors take five to seven years to build in the best case, and you have to borrow a lot of money, which compounds year after year while you’re not making revenue.

There’s a vision in nuclear that instead of building one or two huge plants, you build 10 or 20 much smaller reactors. That way, you can start making money much faster because these would be quicker to install. For the same reason that your Tesla doesn’t have one big battery cell but hundreds of small ones, if there’s an issue with one small reactor, you can keep the rest operating. This helps with redundancy and other factors.

The challenge is that while this might save CapEx, it could inflate operational expenses (OpEx). The engineering challenge is how to automate maintenance, refueling, and turbine sharing to keep both CapEx and OpEx low. A good analogy is SpaceX. Everyone knew that lowering rocket costs meant reusing rockets, but it took SpaceX to actually prove it. Similarly, in nuclear, many have thought of using SMRs or microreactors for utility-scale power, but no one has yet delivered and proven how much this could lower costs. This could be a future path for utility-scale nuclear that unfolds in the coming decades.

Drew Wandzilak:
So it’s almost this distributed network of smaller reactors that cost less to build and are faster to build. If you finance them, the interest payments don’t add up the way they would with large-scale reactors. Is this leading to a future where there are small reactors on top of hospitals or apartment buildings? Or will this still mostly happen behind the scenes for most Americans and people worldwide?

Matt Loszak:
I think what might actually happen first is that utility-scale plants will eventually leverage this solution. The problem is utilities are very risk-averse and slow-moving. They don’t want to take a big risk that could threaten their entire balance sheet.

Where we might first see a lot of these microreactors deployed—and certainly the markets we’re targeting—are the long tail of behind-the-grid applications like you mentioned. This could include data centers, which are a huge growth area. I heard of a data center for AI training that will need a gigawatt of power—that’s the equivalent of a million homes. There are also smaller data centers for internet and other machine learning needs.

Then there’s the EV challenge. If we’re going to electrify all vehicles, that’s massive. We’d have to double or triple the entire grid to power all those cars, trucks, and buses. People don’t realize how much energy that would require. Right now, EVs are still a small fraction of cars on the road.

It’s also a distributed challenge, not centralized. Cars travel on a network of roads across the country, so we’d want microreactors—just as safe as university research reactors—along the interstate. That saves building tons of decentralized generation capacity and transmission infrastructure. And people have NIMBYism not only about nuclear but even about simple transmission wires.

This is another major application. Like you said, maybe one day hospitals, neighborhoods, remote communities, desalination plants—the list goes on. There’s a long tail of applications. As utilities see deployments over the next 10 years, we’ll likely see much more utility-scale adoption as well.

Drew Wandzilak:
Got it. I want to bring this into the political and geopolitical context. There’s regulation, policy, and changing sentiment. What’s happening globally? You mentioned France and other countries that have brought nuclear into their grids or refused it. Where does the US stand globally in nuclear development or in bringing nuclear into our energy grids?

Matt Loszak:
The US is still doing well in terms of the number of live reactors, though there have been attempts to close some plants. Luckily, nuclear advocates have kept many alive. Internationally, we’re seeing Russia, China, and South Korea creeping ahead in their ability to deploy everything from large-scale traditional nuclear plants—which were invented in the US—to advanced reactors using different coolants and fuels to achieve characteristics like inherent safety.

Matt Loszak:
So these other countries are definitely getting ahead, and we have to make sure that we catch up. One big part of this is the research reactor angle because for schools in the US to train the next generation of nuclear operators, scientists, and nuclear engineers, we need those research reactors—and probably more of them. In many ways, we’re playing catch-up now with those other countries.

Drew Wandzilak:
Fantastic. Cool. So we’re still leaders, but everyone is moving up. I think people are waking up and understanding that nuclear power needs to be a crucial piece of this broader energy transition. It’s not a knock against solar, wind, or hydro—it’s all part of this big puzzle. But there are definite advantages here that are really exciting.

Matt Loszak:
I think another thing people don’t realize is just how little progress we’ve made in decarbonization. We see news articles about solar or wind deployment doubling or tripling, and battery sales increasing. Looking at the grid, it looks somewhat promising—you see a 20 or 30% decarbonized grid globally. But the grid is only a small fraction of global energy use.

Globally, only 5–10% of energy is clean. The rest is still natural gas, coal, oil, and other fossil fuels. This is a huge challenge that many don’t understand—we still have a long way to go. Accelerating solar, wind, and batteries is great, but we need more of everything. And as I said earlier, nuclear power is the most versatile solution to this problem. We need a lot more of it.

Drew Wandzilak:
We do indeed need a lot more of it. That leads to the final topic: there are a handful of companies pushing the envelope to create scalable reactors, doing it efficiently and faster than expected. Tell us the origin story of Aalo, where you are now, and the long-term vision for the company and its impact on the nuclear energy transition.

Matt Loszak:
We identified a regulatory catch-22 slowing down advanced reactor deployments worldwide. Regulators want you to have nuclear test data before granting a license, but you can’t get that data without a license.

Many companies are trying to build scaled-down test reactors, but those aren’t revenue-generating. We found a solution: there’s a government reactor called MARVEL, the first new advanced reactor being built in the US in decades. It’s set to finish construction this year and go critical early next year. Recently, that team achieved a historic approval—the first new reactor design the DOE has ever approved for construction since it was formed in 1977.

We recruited several core people from the MARVEL team to Aalo. We’re building a scaled-up, more commercial version. Our first reactor, Aalo-1, is a 10-megawatt electric, 30-megawatt thermal micro reactor. We plan to begin commercial, revenue-generating construction within three years—the same timeframe MARVEL achieved in the government setting.

Our initial markets will be data centers, desalination plants, and decarbonizing oil and gas processes. Our second product, Aalo-2, will be 100 megawatts electric, aimed at the utility market. We believe it strikes the right balance between economies of scale and economies of numbers. We’d love to chat with anyone interested in exploring our technology, collaborating, or joining the team.

Drew Wandzilak:
That’s great. I want to push on one point—not in a bad way but to help people understand. Maybe we can show an image here. Aalo-1 and even Aalo-2—can you contextualize their size? Aalo-1 is 10 megawatts electric and 30 megawatts thermal. What would it take to generate that with other sources?

Matt Loszak:
Good point. Physically, the Aalo-1 reactor will fit within a shipping container—it’s very small. The entire plant will take up less than an acre, including all other equipment. It’s essentially a parking-lot-sized reactor that can power about 10,000 homes.

The interesting part is that scaling energy output is more than linear with physical size. Aalo-2, at 100 megawatts electric—10 times the power of Aalo-1—will only be about double the physical size.

For comparison, Aalo-1 can replace a square kilometer of solar panels. And with those solar panels, they might not work well when cloudy or at all at night. To truly match Aalo-1, you’d need extra solar panels, batteries, and complex systems. Meanwhile, Aalo-1 is a shipping-container-sized reactor just as safe as a university research reactor. That’s what we’re trying to achieve.

Drew Wandzilak:
Fantastic. I don’t know how people can’t get excited about this. Being able to create that level of power in a shipping container on an acre of land is incredible. You guys are crushing it so far, and we’re looking forward to seeing what happens in the future.

Matt, this was great. I appreciate you taking the time. Is there anything we didn’t cover today that you feel is important for our community to know?

Matt Loszak:
I think we touched on it all. Those were great questions, Drew. I really appreciate you having me on.

Drew Wandzilak:
Awesome. Thanks, Matt.

Speaker 5:
Hey, everyone. I want to take a quick break and share more about Alumni Ventures and our US Strategic Tech Fund. AV offers smart, simple, and accessible venture portfolios for individual investors. We build diversified portfolios with low minimums, co-investing alongside renowned lead investors. This strategy has mobilized over $1.3 billion from our community of more than 10,000 individual investors.

With our US Strategic Tech Fund, you can invest in technologies critical to bolstering US national security and economic prosperity. We prioritize three key areas: homeland security, cyber AI and digital strategy, and space innovation. By investing in companies innovating in these areas, our goal is to enhance resilience against emerging threats and support early-stage ventures that encourage sustained growth and technological progress in the United States.

If you’d like to learn more, click the link below or visit av.vc.

Mike Collins:
Okay, here we are in block two. I’m having a conversation with Naren. We’re talking about NVIDIA, what’s going on with physical infrastructure, the trend toward sovereign technology, and the enormous amount of tech advancements happening in healthcare right now.

Naren Ramaswamy:
Hey, Mike. Welcome.

Mike Collins:
Hi.

Naren Ramaswamy:
Excited to chat about three things happening in tech today. Let’s start with the NVIDIA GTC Conference—the GPU Technology Conference happened last week in the Bay Area. It’s been called the Woodstock of AI, with a lot of technical breakthroughs. What were your key takeaways, and where do you see NVIDIA’s groundwork playing out in the next few years?

Mike Collins:
First, it’s really nice to see NVIDIA having its day. It’s a good company that’s been around a while, done phenomenal things. The description of the event was pretty apropos.

I think, for me, the obvious takeaway was introducing their next-generation GPU—pretty impressive, pretty powerful, but somewhat expected. What really struck me were the partnerships. It was a who’s who of deals and collaborations. This is a company working deeply and in an embedded way with the most powerful companies on the planet—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple. They’re with them all. That’s striking and remarkable. Some of the things they’re working on really point to the next generation of technology on this planet. Very exciting.

I also thought the robotics story was fascinating. One of the exciting things about this moment is that we’re not only seeing major technology breakthroughs individually, but they’re interacting with each other. Robotics, AI, augmented reality, virtual reality—it’s all coming together.

We’ve talked about this before: we have an AI fund and do a lot of robotics investing. We’re looking at combining those funds in our next vintage because there’s great opportunity in both streams, and the combination is even more exciting. When you combine hardware and software, real innovation can take place.

Lastly, I think about the blueprint for next-generation data centers. Picks-and-shovels infrastructure and computers are becoming currencies. It’s exciting to think about computers at scale with these new data center frameworks. Those were some of my big takeaways. What about you?

Naren Ramaswamy:
Absolutely. I was surprised to see NVIDIA getting involved in so many different technology areas. We’ve always known them for computers and AI, which is a natural progression. But they’re integrating through their Omniverse announcement, stepping into augmented reality, integrating with Apple Vision Pro—that’s its own emerging platform.

They’re also expanding into robotics, as you mentioned, and something I didn’t expect: their 6G research platform. It’s the successor to 5G, aiming to be ahead of the curve in connected devices. Soon, smartphones, smart glasses, even our beds and sofas will be connected to the internet to provide insights, and NVIDIA is laying that infrastructure.

The last surprising piece for me was in healthcare. They announced a partnership with Hippocratic AI, a startup funded by a16z, to create an empathetic healthcare bot. I’m curious about your thoughts on how medicine and AI will interact this way.

Mike Collins:
It was really impressive. Healthcare is at the center of this space. If you think about medicine, it’s sensors, data, frameworks—a great opportunity for innovation. It lends itself to many of these technological shifts we’ve been talking about.

I think it’s a great platform for innovators to start companies, and these platforms are going to accelerate that progress. A generation from now, our healthcare experience is going to be totally different. I’m very optimistic about that.

Naren Ramaswamy:
Yeah, absolutely. We’ve covered tech infrastructure through NVIDIA. The second topic is physical infrastructure in the US. We’ve seen Boeing issues, a bridge collapse in Maryland a few days ago, and concerns about personal data security with TikTok. A lot is happening there. Broad question, but what are your thoughts across these issues?

Mike Collins:
I think the big picture—and what I’m hearing in the industry—is a shift in perception toward sovereign technology. I don’t know if that’s the formal term, but I think as a society we’ve decided there are technologies we need to excel at and control to some extent.

Yes, there’s physical infrastructure like logistics and aerospace, but we’re also talking about chips, cybersecurity, energy technology, drones, military innovation—a dozen key technologies that, as an American citizen, I want us to lead in.

Over the last year or two, this understanding has grown—not as an opposition to free trade or cooperation with nations that trade fairly, but because bad actors exist. Our citizens demand excellence and innovation in these areas. We’re an entrepreneurial powerhouse, so there’s no excuse for not leading in these technologies. It’s strategic and important, and that’s becoming more widely accepted.

We already see action: the CHIPS Act, which ensures control over silicon. Economic power equals military power these days, and technology defines economic power. I’m cautiously optimistic people understand this.

We need to invest, innovate, and encourage entrepreneurship and cooperation between the public and private sectors to ensure leadership in cybersecurity, AI, and chips. It’s a tricky balance—we want smart guardrails but not overregulation, which could push tech offshore. Some of these technologies in the hands of bad actors would be disastrous.

Even the bridge disaster illustrates a bigger point: we need to be really good at important things.

Naren Ramaswamy:
For sure. On that note, a16z launched their American Dynamism Fund a few years ago. We’ve invested in military defense-related startups, cybersecurity, and our Strategic Tech Fund gives accredited retail investors access to these transformative companies. Want to share a few words on that?

Mike Collins:
We’re in the early stages of putting together a strategic fund designed to invest in these kinds of ventures. It’s a diversified portfolio co-investing alongside well-known firms, focused on a dozen key pivotal technologies.

We believe it’s smart investing and impactful. When you can do well and do good at the same time, that excites us and our teammates. More to come on that story, but we’ll definitely put our money and time where our mouth is.

Naren Ramaswamy:
Thanks for sharing. Moving to our third and last topic: healthcare. We touched briefly on AI in healthcare, but we know there’s a doctor shortage in the US. Healthcare costs have historically risen faster than inflation. New diseases keep emerging.

But there’s optimism: new technologies like AI are helping determine treatments, find new ones, and deliver them effectively—potentially with fewer side effects. We’re seeing this in blood cancer, brain tumors, sickle cell disease, and more. What are you seeing from your vantage point?

Mike Collins:
I think if you’re paying attention, it’s almost weekly now that there’s a really exciting announcement in healthcare. One example that just came out of Massachusetts used CRISPR technology to modify a pig kidney enough to make it compatible for transplant into a human with kidney issues. Dialysis a couple of times a week is a tough treatment option that tens of thousands of people live with, and there’s a huge shortage of good kidneys. While this isn’t at scale yet, it’s very promising.

Another development involves brain tumors using CAR T technology, where your own immune system is used to target cancer. Looking at cross-sections of tumor X-rays before and after treatment is striking. This one hits close to home—I lost my grandfather to that specific tumor type, and he lived about a year after diagnosis. Now we’re seeing really promising progress.

We’ve also talked extensively about GLP-1 drugs and their potential to address chronic obesity. Just recently, another company moved to phase 2 trials for a pill form of the drug with very early but promising results.

Internally, we also ask how we can accelerate change and disruption in healthcare. Regulatory requirements are huge—which is appropriate for safety and professionalism—but even before entering the FDA cycle, there’s a long, sometimes inefficient path from lab to patient. The motivations and incentives in labs can differ from the market.

Are there ways to bring venture capital, entrepreneurship, profit incentives, and raw capitalism into healthcare and AI technology? I think we’ll see not just promising technologies but also promising new approaches.

There’s a noteworthy example in cystic fibrosis where a nonprofit created a venture arm—sometimes called venture philanthropy. They funded technologies and startups in a traditional venture model, acting as the investor. One of those investments turned into an enormous success, both financially—it sold for billions—and medically, becoming a core therapeutic for cystic fibrosis.

This case study shows how markets and capitalism can solve problems and accelerate innovation. I think we’ll see more of that. Our organization and others we work with are looking closely at ways to innovate and be part of solutions in this space. Those are three things from just this week that are top of mind for me and others in the industry.

Naren Ramaswamy:
That’s great. Thanks a lot.

Mike Collins:
Appreciate it, Naren. Talk to you next week.

Naren Ramaswamy:
All right, see you later. Bye.

Mike Collins:
Bye.

Speaker 7:
Just a brief interruption to tell you a bit about Alumni Ventures and our Doctors Innovate Fund. Alumni Ventures enables individuals to invest in startups shaping the future. We build diversified portfolios by co-investing alongside renowned lead investors. Today, we serve over 10,000 investors who have invested more than $1.3 billion.

With our Doctors Innovate Fund, you can invest in a portfolio of around 20 healthcare technology companies. From transformative healthcare services to groundbreaking diagnostics, our founders are paving the way for a healthier future. If you’re curious about diversifying your portfolio and helping to drive the next wave of medical breakthroughs, visit us at av.vc.

Mike Collins:
Okay, in block three, let’s hear from the co-founder and CEO of Nanopath, Dr. Amogha Tadimety. Today, I’m talking to Amogha, one of the founders of AV portfolio company Nanopath. Amogha, nice to meet you. Tell me a little about your company, where you are on your journey, and we’ll go from there.

Amogha Tadimety:
Sounds great. I’m Amogha Tadimety, one of the co-founders at Nanopath. Nanopath is a molecular diagnostics company focused exclusively on conditions that affect women. We have a novel technology my co-founder and I invented at Dartmouth that allows for amplification-free detection of DNA or RNA. This enables us to detect many targets at once in under 15 minutes.

Today, for most women’s health conditions and infectious disease diagnostics, a patient goes to their provider, gives a sample, and that sample gets sent to Quest or Labcorp. Results take days. In the meantime, the patient may start on a guessed therapy or be lost to follow-up.

Our vision is to shorten the entire diagnostic timeline to that 15-minute office window, giving patients and providers clinically actionable results during the visit. We’re focused on urinary tract infections, STIs, vaginitis, and a range of women’s health conditions.

Mike Collins:
Great. This is a deep tech story. Can you go back to the origin? You were getting your PhD at Dartmouth, at Thayer. Was this your research area? How did the company come together?

Amogha Tadimety:
Yeah. Allison and I were both at Dartmouth doing our PhDs at the engineering school. We’d both done a huge variety of research before Dartmouth, but we were passionate about developing something during our PhDs that could turn into a product for real patient use.

We were in a unique program focusing on entrepreneurship and innovation alongside the rigor of a traditional PhD. This PhD innovation program allowed us to take courses at Tuck, understand company formation, and learn the basics of IP.

Amogha Tadimety:
We were both working on different diagnostic technologies. We were friends first. Allison was focusing on sample prep—how to grab a rare biomarker of interest out of a patient sample—and I was working on detection technology for DNA. We met, became friends, and thought, “Imagine if we could take any complex sample, grab a biomarker of interest, and truly analyze it to understand what’s going on with the patient. That could be game-changing across diagnostics.”

We focused on infectious disease, looked at cancer during our PhDs, and spent a lot of time figuring out where to start. Our first year of the company was 2020 during the pandemic, which added many variables. We spoke to many doctors, patients, and lab directors and found immense unmet needs in women’s health.

Mike Collins:
Where are you now in terms of milestones? From a science perspective, go-to-market strategy—you’ve raised a Series A, right?

Amogha Tadimety:
Yes, we raised our Series A in 2022. At that point, we were a team of four and had only done basic pilot studies on both the consumable and benchtop instrumentation. In the last two years, we’ve grown to a team of 12, hired experienced heads of asset development and engineering, and have been working on getting both the consumable and reader closer to a market-ready form.

The key milestone is this summer—we’ll run several clinical pilots with a couple hundred patient samples on a system we know we can produce at scale and cost. After those pilots, we’ll raise funding again to build the full go-to-market system and conduct regulatory studies for approval.

Mike Collins:
You and Allison both have technical backgrounds. What have you learned on the non-science side—building the business, recruiting, managing teams?

Amogha Tadimety:
We started as scientists thinking, “We have this technology; it will be immensely valuable.” As we’ve grown and surrounded ourselves with experienced people, it’s shocking how much our focus, attention, and happiness are tied to the team’s success. That’s been a big learning.

Diagnostics is challenging because of the cycle between target product profile, end user, and technology development. We’ve worked to put commercial considerations front and center—understanding who the end user is, regulatory and reimbursement requirements, and aligning them with our technical strategy.

Allison and I focus on setting clear priorities for the team so that R&D resources go toward the most important features: quick results, ability to detect many targets, and compatibility with outpatient settings where minimally trained users operate. Building those considerations into the product early should give us a head start in the market.

Mike Collins:
What do you see as the tailwinds and challenges at this point in time?

Amogha Tadimety:
There’s a lot of crowding in diagnostics. Many companies cropped up during the pandemic focused on respiratory viruses like COVID and flu. As those technologies settle, we face competition. But we have a head start because we’ve focused on different indications and our technology offers significant value. The challenge is clearly articulating how we’re different.

In terms of tailwinds, there’s exciting momentum in women’s health. Dr. Jill Biden has started a task force, ARPA-H launched a sprint for women’s health—there’s recognition that this historically underserved patient group also offers strong potential returns on investment. New women’s health clinics are emerging, offering holistic care from gynecology to fertility to menopause. These could become amazing partners for us.

Mike Collins:
I also see—Laura Rippy is building our women’s fund—that there’s a sea change in supporting women’s capital, with more women VCs, CEOs, founders, and technologists. It’s becoming a serious and powerful ecosystem. I agree with you.

What’s your ask for our audience? We have a large community with varied backgrounds.

Amogha Tadimety:
A couple of things: we’re still actively growing the team, so if anyone is talented and interested in this realm, please reach out to me or Allison.

Mike Collins:
Are you remote or based somewhere?

Amogha Tadimety:
We’re based at The Engine in Cambridge, right in Kendall Square. We have an engineering lab and office space here with 12 full-time staff and a rotating group of co-ops and amazing interns.

Mike Collins:
The Engine’s a great place to start a business.

Amogha Tadimety:
It has everything we need, especially for diagnostics. We need the 3D print room, the electronics studio, and the dry lab. Our team is constantly running between the different facilities as they work on things.

Mike Collins:
So people should check out your website, look at job postings, and if there’s a good fit, reach out, right?

Amogha Tadimety:
Yep, that’s one thing. We’re also constantly adding to our board of advisors. We’re looking for commercial advisors specifically—people who know reimbursement for diagnostics and understand end-user sites. Over the next six months, we’ll gear up for pilot testing with our partner sites. Anyone who has insight into clinical decision-making for adopting new diagnostics or evaluating ROI—we’d love connections or advice from the AV community.

Mike Collins:
Great. How about having a co-founder and partner—what’s been the biggest reward? How have you divided responsibilities? Talk about your co-founder experience.

Amogha Tadimety:
Working with Allison has been the greatest joy. We were lucky to know and respect each other a lot before starting the company and to share a very similar vision for the mission, the team we want to build, and the product we want to deliver. It’s been essential to have someone who sees every piece of the picture like I do and is equally skilled in science and many commercial aspects.

We do most things hand in hand, and any division of tasks is purely based on interest and passion. It’s been an absolute joy working with Allison, and I’m so lucky to have her.

Mike Collins:
We’re very excited about your company. You’re doing important work, making great progress. We wish you continued success and encourage our audience to reach out and help if they can—because it takes a community to build a business. You’re off to a great start with even better days ahead. Amogha, nice to meet you, and I look forward to meeting you in person soon.

Amogha Tadimety:
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 9:
Hey, everyone. I’d like to take a moment to tell you about Alumni Ventures and our Women’s Fund. AV offers individuals the opportunity to invest in startups shaping the future. We build intentionally diversified portfolios, co-investing alongside established lead venture investors. Today, we serve over 10,000 investors who have invested over $1.3 billion.

With the Alumni Ventures Women’s Fund, you can help us invest in exceptional female founders. We’re starting from a position of strength—AV has already invested in over 350 startups founded, co-founded, or led by women. PitchBook reports that female-led startups are more capital-efficient and exit faster, yet receive only 15% of venture capital dollars.

Join us in backing female-led startups innovating in cybersecurity, machine learning, space, FemTech, AI, and robotics. With the Alumni Ventures Women’s Fund, you can invest in a diversified portfolio of female-led, high-velocity startups as they change the world. To learn more, visit us at av.vc/funds/womens.

Narrator:
Thanks again for tuning into the Tech Optimist. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d appreciate it if you’d give us a rating on your podcast app and remember to subscribe to keep up with weekly episodes.

The Tech Optimist welcomes questions, comments, or segment suggestions. Email us at [email protected], and be sure to visit our website at av.vc. Thanks again, and until next time.