Techstars and the U.S. Air Force are teaming up again for the second Boston-based edition of the Air Force Accelerator Powered by Techstars, a three-month program for ten heavy-scientific startups whose products the U.S. Department of Defense could find helpful.
This year's program, which kicked off on Monday and will last until May, is a tad different from last year's, according to Warren Katz, the program accelerator's managing director and former president of artificial intelligence company Neurala.
"The 2018 program was extremely successful," Katz said. "[The program] is an experiment, the Air Force was trying it out; but they were very happy with the results, so they simply turned up the gas on 2019."
First, this year's program recruited companies in an additional category: training and education technologies for the military; last year, the focus was only on autonomous systems. Also, this year the Air Force is bringing a number of military people to the program; they will meet with the companies and determine whether they can find customers in the military force.
Before teaming up with Techstars, the Air Force was "not happy" with the limited access it had to early-stage, innovative startups, Katz said. "They were also unhappy about their own method of acquisition, which never really got the state-of-the-art products directly into the war fighters soldiers' hands," he added.
Hence, the partnership with Techstars, which last year resulted in all ten companies winning U.S. Department of Defense contracts, commercial proof-of-concept projects or private investment.
This year's class is made up of companies from the U.S., Canada and Australia. While at different stages, all the startups are working on products that are both relevant for the Air Force and viable on the commercial marketplace. Also, they all carry interesting pieces of intellectual property, Katz said—a difference with how Techstars tend to operate in its other programs, where they tend to privilege the qualities of founders instead of the actual business idea.
"With our Air Force program, the idea is very important," Katz said. "Some of the companies already have products in the marketplace and are selling, some of the companies merely have a prototype and are beginning the process to refine the prototype and to find the value proposition."
In the next three weeks, the startups will be paired with mentors. The teams are based at WeWork in One Seaport Square, next to the courthouse.
Here are the 10 companies that were admitted to the 2019 program (descriptions provided):
• AirShare: Complete, end-to-end, non-destructive counter-drone system safely tracks, intercepts, and neutralizes malicious drones and drone swarms.
• Avocado Systems: Internal cloud threat detection that can identify zero-day vulnerabilities after intrusion.
• Bitwoke: Edge-based AI for cybersecurity of IoT devices.
• Botanisol: Handheld Raman Spectrometer that can identify molecular composition of substances in near real-time.
• Cleo Robotics: “Hockey Puck” drone that can be thrown and bounce of floors and walls for special operations reconnaissance and inspection of constrained spaces.
• FLITE Material Sciences: Proprietary surface treatment making materials naturally water and ice repellent, and rust resistant.
• SafeFlight: Drone incident reporting app and cloud SaaS service to inform public safety and homeland defense of malicious drone and swarm events.
• SliceUp: Ultra-low latency Time Series Database (TSDB) for autonomous vehicle data analytics, IoT, and financial data processing.
• SmileML: Emotional recognition AI to feed back user experience data to user interface designers, courseware designers, for improving customer experience and interface effectiveness.
• Vita Inclinata: Stability device for sling loads under helicopters and cranes to counter dangerous chaotic motion due to high winds, sea motion, and vehicle dynamics.
The Demo Day for the accelerator is scheduled for May 16, 2019.
