CoMotion-supported companies enter the marketplace
CoMotion at the University of Washington supported the launches of 12 spinoffs in FY24, which ended on June 30. We described several in our February 2024 roundup and highlight four others here.
These ventures have all spun out of and licensed technology through UW on their path from the lab to the market. They are built on technologies that range from software to support off-road autonomous driving to novel cell and gene therapies to bolster heart health.
Some of these teams have taken advantage of CoMotion’s innovation development programs, including the I-Corps customer discovery workshop and the competitive CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund awards, among others.
Overland AI is commercializing software—developed in the lab of Byron Boots of the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering—to support navigation and off-road autonomous driving capabilities. The technology has been awarded funding from DARPA’s Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program, including a $35M extension grant, and a $10M seed round. The company will continue collaborating with its UW research team over the next several years.
Precision Sensing is designing a wearable technology to measure radiation levels in cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy, a process that might otherwise involve multiple office visits per week for several weeks. The company, spun out of UW Medicine’s Department of Radiology, has developed a vest for these patients to wear at home, for only a few minutes at a time, that remotely reports to their doctors. It should be available to patients within the next five years.
Procero is developing software solutions to optimize existing GPU hardware to improve performance, without requiring code or architectural changes. An important part of the technology, developed by Henning Lange, a former postdoc in applied mathematics at UW, reduces the need for costly upgrades and delivers higher performance using less energy than existing methods. The software is versatile and compatible with any platform, from computers and servers to gaming consoles and phones.
StemCardia is engineering cell and gene therapies to repair and strengthen the heart and improve the standard of care for patients suffering from heart failure. Advancing a pipeline with an exclusive license to technology from UW Medicine’s Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology, as well as Cardiology and Bioengineering, StemCardia is leveraging breakthroughs in the manufacture, use, and potency of cardiac cells to restore muscle mass and contractile function.