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By: Josh Sloat
Julia Yan and Sarah Beth Gleeson, founders of Baleena
A RISE'ing Tide With AquaAction
For our 2024 RISE Awards, we partnered with our good friends at AquaAction in recognizing the winners of this year's Great Lakes AquaHacking Challenge. It's impossible to overstate the importance of protecting our most important natural resource, and Aqua's HackingChallenge presents a huge opportunity to help accelerate technologies that will both improve and protect our precious water ecosystems, as well as boost the local innovation economies they touch. Given the program's focus on bolstering post-secondary students and young professionals looking for a hands-on way to apply their talents and fight the freshwater crisis, we felt like the RISE Award was a natural fit in continuing its purpose of giving Aurora a way to do our part in helping to support innovative startups in their incredible, diligent efforts toward vital missions.
Read on to learn more about AquaAction, the Great Lakes Challenge, and the three winners of the 2024 RISE Award: Baleena, Wave Lumina, and Amphoral Solutions! AquaHacking Great Lakes Challenge
AquaAction is a charity that was created to disrupt the status quo with innovative ideas and engage youth in the fight against the water-related climate crisis. AquaAction has developed three programs focused on water innovation and technology, including the AquaHacking Challenge.
The AquaHacking Challenge is a tech innovation program focused on developing solutions to pressing freshwater issues within the Great Lakes watershed region. The program is open to American and Canadian post-secondary students and young professionals looking for a hands-on way to apply their talent and fight the freshwater crisis. This year's competition was the 13th installment and the first binational. The competition began with 170 participants across 40 teams. After months of intense preparation, the 10 finalists presented their groundbreaking solutions to compete for $35,000 in cash prizes in addition to this year's RISE Awards. The Challenge was hosted by Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) in Traverse City, Michigan and marks a very important step toward Traverse City becoming a blue-tech innovation hub. RISE Impact: Protecting Freshwater Innovation
The winners of this year's RISE Award and the AquaHacking Challenge are pioneering necessary solutions for microplastics, PFAS, and lead contamination. It's hard to imagine a more impactful area of technology development to focus on promoting and investing in when you consider the following:
Water runs through our health, our environment, and our economy. As the US elevates water security as a foreign policy priority, the need for AquaAction’s programs has never been more urgent. But the challenge is only the beginning of the journey for these entrepreneurs and that's why the RISE award can be so important to their long term success stories. We focus the output of the award on provisional applications and patent searching, whenever possible, to help these young innovators avoid two of the most common mistakes we see around public disclosure and competitive IP landscape awareness – making sure we're helping to establish the strongest possible intellectual asset foundation upon which to build their companies. As with prior years, we awarded a free provisional application or $5,000 towards a non-provisional U.S. patent application to the first place team and two other $2,500 service-based awards to the runners-up, customized based on need, for patent-related services such as application drafting, patent searching, and competitive landscape analysis. We can't say it enough, but the recipients are a truly gifted collection of entrepreneurs who will surely do great things. We couldn’t be more thrilled about the potential to be a part of their journey! 1st Place: Baleena (Microplastics)
Baleena won first place at the AquaHacking Challenge, taking home the grand seed funding prize of $20,000 from AquaAction and a $5,000 patent service-based RISE Award from Aurora. Cofounders Julia Yan and Sarah Beth Gleeson have designed microfiber-trapping filters for household washing machines, tackling microplastic pollution at its source! They are aiming to reduce microplastic pollution from synthetic clothing by empowering consumers to contribute to environmental protection with each load of laundry.
Our thought bubble. You want to talk about impact? How about being able to improve the water leaving every single washing machine in the world? Microplastics are destroying the environment and poisoning our food supply, and Baleena's incredibly innovative filter is a universal, practical, and low-cost approach to crowd-sourcing a big chunk of the solution. Beyond crafting a great product, Baleena also has two of the most impressive young entrepreneurs we've seen in a RISE class. Having a great product is not enough. You also have to have founders with the DNA to see it through to execution and market success. That is no doubt the case with Baleena. Winning the AquaHacking Challenge and the RISE Award are just two more notches on an increasingly impressive list of accomplishments for Julia and Sarah Beth that already includes this great invention, landing some major pilot partners, raising over $500,000 to-date in mostly non-dilutive funding, and earning their way onto the 2024 Forbes 30 Under 30 list! >> Learn more about Baleena 2nd Place: Wave Lumina (PFAS)
Wave Lumina won second place at the AquaHacking Challenge, taking home $10,000 in seed money from AquaAction and a $2,500 patent service-based RISE Award from Aurora. Wave Lumina founder Vernon LaLone has developed a portable device for swiftly detecting ultra-low levels of PFAS and other contaminants in environmental samples, revolutionizing on-site environmental assessments. Before environmental engineering firms and government response teams can clean up forever chemicals like PFAS, they need to locate them, but lab testing is currently expensive and very time consuming. Wave Lumina's device, which they're calling the Containment Field Screening Device, is a groundbreaking new product that will enable onsite total PFAS testing and screening (including PFOS and PFOA) technology with same-day results! This can save months – or even years – of time for anyone working on contamination site remediation and PFAS destruction processes.
Our thought bubble. While chemical companies and regulators SLOWLY and FINALLY begin to own up to the problem, and we work toward a broader awareness (and hopefully reduced reliance on PFAS) – identification and remediation are next up for solving this massive health crisis. Wave Lumina's device will be instrumental in tackling a problem of incredible scope with an efficient, cost-effective, and truly scalable solution. Beyond impact, we also look to recognize great humans with the RISE Award, and Vernon is simply one of the nicest, smartest, hardest-working people you'll meet. We love to see it when good people do great things! >> Learn more about Wave Lumina 3rd Place: Amphoral Solutions (Lead Contamination)
Amphoral Solutions won third place at the AquaHacking Challenge, taking home $5,000 in seed money from AquaAction and a $2,500 patent service-based RISE Award from Aurora. Amphoral Solutions (previously Proto StLo) is developing an algal filtration technology that reduces lead concentration in industrial wastewater through powered algal extract and pH regulation. Amphoral Solutions was founded by the youngest team in the challenge – Merrick Marshall and Alejandro Poirier Corcuera, both students Champlain College St. Lawrence in Quebec!
Our thought bubble. Innovation knows no age boundaries! Merrick and Alejandro are two inspiring young inventors, well on their way to making a big impact – and that's really a sweet spot for the RISE Award. There's an unfortunate tension when it comes to patenting – and it's that you most need it when you can least afford it. This can be especially true for college students who are trying to balance innovation investment against the essentials of exorbitant tuition costs, books, room, and board. Lead presence in water is a problem domain that unfortunately hits very close to home in Michigan, so we're very happy to be helping Merrick and Alejandro protect their critical invention in any way we can. >> Learn more about Amphoral Solutions Past Winners
To learn more about past recipients and hear stories about their innovation journeys, check out our Patently Strategic Podcast episode where we interviewed winners from the 2021 RISE class.
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Ashley Sloat, Ph.D.Startups have a unique set of patent strategy needs - so let this blog be a resource to you as you embark on your patent strategy journey. Archives
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