Excerpts from the Innovation Economy blog.
Two Boston-area venture capital firms are getting behind a Wonka-esque concept: that instead of sipping coffee or nibbling on a chocolate bar, consumers might prefer to take a hearty huff.
Breathable Foods, of Cambridge, recently raised $8.5 million from Flagship Ventures and Polaris Venture Partners and is planning to launch its first product, AeroShot Pure Energy, early next year.
The company was founded by David Edwards, a professor of biomedical engineering at Harvard University who earlier in his career helped start Pulmatrix, a Lexington company developing inhalable drugs to fight respiratory infections.
AeroShots are intended only to fight fatigue. They will cost $2.99 and contain caffeine, Vitamin B, natural sweeteners like Stevia, and natural lime flavor, all distilled into tiny particles of about 10 microns. At that size, they dissolve in your mouth and are swallowed, rather than entering your lungs, the company said. One AeroShot contains about 100 milligrams of caffeine - roughly the same as in a cup of coffee.
Breathable Foods will also market another product Edwards launched in 2009: Le Whif, a calorie-free chocolate.
Edwards said the company plans to develop other products that can deliver flavor without calories.
Noubar Afeyan, managing director at Flagship Ventures, said the Cambridge firm invested in Breathable Foods because “the platform could be used to deliver nutrients and health-related products’’ in a convenient way - and in a product that is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.
Good chemistry
Donald Sadoway, who runs a research lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focused on “extreme electrochemistry,’’ has a knack for the serendipitous.
A student who took Sadoway’s “Introduction to Solid State Chemistry’’ course online was a somewhat successful software entrepreneur from Washington state who one day asked to see the professor during office hours.
It was a Friday in September 2009 when Bill Gates showed up for a discussion about education. Sadoway was happy to chat; he also told Gates about work being done in his lab on a new kind of battery composed of liquid metals. Gates became an early investor in the company, LMBC.
And an introduction made by a local venture capitalist connected Sadoway with the executive he would later hire to run LMBC, Phil Giudice. Giudice was the third employee of the pioneering “demand response’’ company EnerNOC, and after EnerNOC’s IPO he served as the state’s undersecretary of energy. He started work at LMBC (Liquid Metal Battery Corp.) this month.
The eight-person start-up is not saying much about its technology. But it uses liquefied metals at high heat as the battery’s three main components: the anode, cathode, and electrolyte. In contrast, the lithium-ion battery inside a laptop has an anode and cathode that are solids.
LMBC says its approach can bring down the cost and complexity of building massive battery installations, such as those that might be able to store a few megawatt-hours of electricity at an industrial plant or a wind-powered generator. The goal would be to have a stash of electricity to use - or sell to the grid - when prices are highest.
Liquid metal batteries “are easier to assemble than conventional batteries,’’ said chief technologist David Bradwell, “and they use earth-abundant materials,’’ such as antimony and magnesium.
Giudice and Sadoway won’t divulge how much the company raised in its seed round of funding earlier this year, which included Gates and the French oil company Total.
Sadoway said the company is focused on “getting the science and engineering right,’’ building prototype batteries at the desired price and reliability levels.
For the full Innovation Economy blog, visit www.boston.com/innovation.