Innovator of the Month Interview with CompPair

Innovator of the Month Interview by Gianmarco Gatti and Alvaro Charlet.

CompPair is an up and coming Swiss startup led by Amaël Cohades, developing composite materials with healable and recyclable properties. The company was born as a spin-off of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and its mission is to increase the lifetime of composite parts, reducing their costs and environmental footprint. The technology, developed at the Laboratory for Processing of Advanced Composites (LPAC) led by Véronique Michaud, can heal microcracks, which are at the root of fatal failures of composite materials, simply by heating them to moderate temperatures. CompPair products are textiles which have been pre-impregnated with this special technology, with the aim of producing full part applications. Scale up has already been demonstrated with various prototypes.

Can you tell us what composite materials are and how does your technology work?

Composite materials are for example glass, carbon or natural fiber textiles, where each layer is superimposed on top of the other. These layers are then consolidated by impregnating them with resin, so that the final output is a composite material made of fibers and resin. With this process, the materials can reach high structural mechanical properties while still remaining a lot more lightweight than metals. Therefore, applications are plenty: from sport and sailing, to transportation and windmills. However, there are some drawbacks: these materials are in fact really sensitive to damage and their restoration is complicated and costly. In addition, due to the complexity of the process and the high cost it requires, these materials are almost not recycled.

From the early 2000s, some people started to think about ways to make these materials healable. The main problem is that the superimposition of many layers prevents access to the damage. No efficient strategy was found to treat the damage without dramatically reducing the mechanical properties of the material and/or being competitive for a commercial application.

Five years ago, Professor Véronique Michaud decided to adopt another strategy for self-healing composites research in her laboratory. Heating moderately the composite up to 150°C should be enough to start the recovery reaction, without affecting the good mechanical properties at room temperature. I dedicated four years of my PhD research to this project and after many unsuccessful trials, we finally understood how to reach efficient healing of composites using heat together with mechanical properties similar to commercial systems. After additional research, our tests were working exactly as expected and we realized we had something very interesting: a composite with healable properties, competitive mechanical properties and with easy recyclability. Once the technology was patented, I decided to develop the project into a startup.

How do the diagnostics of composite materials work and how do you know if it requires healing?

Diagnostics, as well as healing, depend on the sector you are working in. In particular, there are three main cases: cyclic damage, preventive regeneration and safety in critical applications. In the first case, you have a part where you get cyclic damage, which means that you know how often you should heal your material. The prevention case is related to the use of your material instead. Let’s say you use your mountain bike for a day of downhill racing. You know there’s a high chance of having microcracks, since you could hit a rock for example; so you just preventively heal your material using a hair dryer in the evening in your garage for a couple of minutes. In the third case, which involves safety critical applications, like airplanes and windmills, there are established non-destructive techniques to scan the part for any cracks to see the damage directly. Now, once you find the damage, for instance in a windmill blade, you just need to locally heat the material to remove the cracks.

What market segments will you be addressing?

In principle, we could target any segment where composites are already being used. The beauty of our system is that we can implement it onto any fiber system, glass, carbon and natural fibers. We also have the capacity to slightly change the chemistry to adapt to all client needs. However, at the moment, we are focusing on marine and sports, but in the future we want to reach also the windmill, aerospace and automotive industries.

Do you have any competitors in this field?

There is rarely a new technology without competitors. But it is true, we are the first ones to have this additional feature on the market. However, we do have competitors, which are the big well-established semi product composite material producers. Nevertheless, we do have our technology as a key competitive advantage in our favor.

What kind of support did you receive from EPFL, or other mentorship programs here on campus?

We quickly realized we needed a prototype to show the working principles of our healable composites. Thanks to the support of the ENABLE program of EPFL in summer 2018 we managed to develop our model [the dome-shaped part in the figure, which is typically used in the aerospace industry]. Later on, I applied for coaching at EPFL Innovation Park, and then continued to get great support from the LPAC laboratory. After that, we won the first stage of Venturekick in February 2019. In June 2019, we then received an Innogrant from the EPFL Vice Presidency for Innovation and an InnoBooster, from the Gebert Rüf Foundation. Therefore, we secured enough funding for an additional year, but if we want to scale-up the production we will certainly need additional resources.

You are speaking at the Innovation Forum Lausanne Annual Conference, can you give us a sneak-peak and tell us how your application is more sustainable than traditional composite materials?

There are two key aspects: firstly, we can increase the lifetime of our parts, which dramatically reduces CO₂emissions and the environmental footprint of the application. Secondly, CompPair’s mission is to provide long-term, full circularity, of the material: unlike most traditional composite materials, we can easily separate the resin from the fibers, thus greatly increasing the recyclability of the composite part.

Can you tell us more about your team?

We are expanding quite quickly! On the technical side, Robin Trigueira, Co-founder, takes care of product development, proof of concept, demonstrations and pilot testing. Cecilia Scazzoli, is finishing her Masters, and writing her thesis related to the product we will be launching. She will continue with us early next year. On the business development side, there is Bertille D’Agay and Nicolas Gandar, who I met at the InnoSuisseBusiness Concept course. They take care of finance, sales, marketing and management. I am supervising the whole project. Prof. Véronique Michaud continues to support us with many different aspects, from science, to product, and industry. In addition, we are being well advised by experts! Also, many students are linked to the projects, which helps to boost our venture! We are quite a big team already, but complement each other well and get along well together.

Right now I’m working on obtaining a seed round from March up to Summer 2020, to be ready for when we will have the beta version of our product by the end of 2019 and to welcome our first customers in early 2020.

How has your personal experience been so far leading CompPair over the past year?

It is really demanding, but I love it. When you do 4 years of research and you suddenly see a spot for integrating it into a real commercial application, well, that’s the dream. Even if I had other great things that awaited me after the PhD, I knew that if I had left such a great opportunity, I would have always regretted it.

Do you have any suggestions for the next entrepreneur in Material Science?

At this point, I need to thank my research advisor, Véronique Michaud. She is an incredible scientist. She always told us that in addition to doing deep science, we should be able to upscale our system to meet industry requirements. We can process samples at a research level but with industrial relevant processes. My suggestion is: always think in terms of applications, even if you don’t immediately see it in your research, because you never know what you might reach in the future.

Innovator of the Month Interview with Swoxid

Swoxid is a Swiss pre-launch start-up led by Endre Horváth, developing filters to sterilize water. Their innovative material based on titanium oxide is activated using sunlight, and requires no electrical power. The filters can be used in remote places, and require little maintenance. The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) spin-off is aiming to have a social impact on low income communities, where access to clean water is key to improve life quality and reduce child mortality.

Hello Endre and Claude, can you tell us more about your story. How was Swoxid born?

We met in 2009, at the swimming club here in Lausanne, and thanks to this hobby both of us have previously experienced the visual clarity and water odor in many swimming pools and natural rivers, lakes in multiple countries. I had recently started my PostDoc here at EPFL, and Claude was a PostDoc in Mathematics. But the roots of the project started earlier. I started working on the main material, titanium oxide (TiO₂), during my Bachelor. The photocatalytic properties of TiO₂ powder is well known since the 70s, with more than 40 000 scientific publications. This wonderful material is present in many everyday items such as plastics, paint and paper as a white pigment, it protects our skin in sunscreen, is present in emerging solar cells, such as dye sensitized and perovskite solar cells, and even in some edibles such as marshmallow or M&Ms as a colorant and anti-cake agent. The world production reaches 9 million tons per year. However, our innovation comes from the shape of our TiO₂ particles. Unlike commonly used spherical particles, I have developed manufacturing methods to produce fibers of them, as well as upscaling the fiber’s production. Together with my colleagues and enthusiastic, talented students we have worked 10 years at EPFL on this process and during this time we envisioned the creation of Swoxid.

Can you tell us a bit more about the technology, and how the filtering panels work?

We first start by making a free-standing film out of the TiO₂fibers. Then we bake them together on a surface, to merge them into a mechanically robust mesh. This mesh has nanopores, small enough to avoid bacteria and other microorganisms to go through. Moreover, since TiO₂ is a semiconductor with an optical bandgap in the solar spectrum, when illuminated with light, energy is released. The released energy splits water molecules into free radicals. They can decompose organic material during their very short lifetime. By this mean, any surrounding algae, fungi, bacteria or virus gets cut down into small pieces that can go through the filter. These leftovers are harmless to humans, making the initially contaminated water drinkable once it goes through the filter. After the filter is fabricated, we place it between two glass slides, and a panel to hold it all together. We then only insert an inlet on one side, and an outlet on the other side, place the panel in the sun, and let the water run through the filter using gravity!

Do these filters ever clog or need to be changed?

Here is their great advantage! First of all, they decompose any organic materials that might clog it. Furthermore, since the material is a ceramic, it is resistant to organic solvents, acids etc. You can easily backwash the filter with vinegar or any other acidic solution, and it will appear as new! However, since the water quality varies a lot from region to region, we are currently testing our prototypes with samples from different natural water sources in South Africa aiming the determination of the sterilization efficacy of the Swoxid panels. These tests are possible thanks to several foundations and the Swiss African Research Cooperation. We also have two motivated students here on campus conducting experiments with water samples from the local river in Lausanne.

Do you know if you have any competitors?

We have mainly seen similar technologies in air filtering, such as nonwoven nanofibrous TiO₂ air-con filters prepared by electrospinning, but only few companies are tackling water filtering systems with this material. We are, of course, in direct competition with traditional water filtering methods. But we are aiming at a particular primary goal, which is social impact. According to the World Health Organization, worldwide, 780 million individuals lack access to improved drinking-water and each year diarrhoea kills around 525 000 children under five. A significant proportion of diarrhoeal disease can be prevented through safe drinking-water. We hope that this technology could help the poorest people living at remote places without safe and reliable water infrastructure. We can remove pathogens, like bacteria and viruses from their local water source, without the need of chemicals, electricity or boiling water.

A challenge in our project, is to define a new business model for such social applications in line with the targets of the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals. The people using the filters are our users, but can’t be our customers as they cannot afford such filters. Therefore, we are investigating less classical business models, as well as additional more lucrative ones, for example water filters for aquarium applications. Initial results show that we are able to filter out 40% more pathogens than the current state of the art commercial filters. This niche market enables us to demonstrate the viability of our technology, until we can apply it to other, bigger markets such as the food industry, air sterilization and wastewater treatment.

What did you learn in the process of creating a startup?

We are still in the process! Thanks to EPFL and the local ecosystem, we followed entrepreneurship trainings, and learned a lot on moving from our scientific engineering mindset, to a more entrepreneurial one. It is not just about the numbers, you also need to think about the product and how to present it in order to reach a broader audience. We enjoy the process of transforming basic research, into technologies that will actually help people. I see that as a dream of a scientist to work towards developing innovative products from promising results of basic science.

We recently participated in the ImagineIF competition at EPFL, which helped us evolve a lot. Beyond the coaching, we have also made many new contacts, that opened us doors to humanitarian organizations. It was a great leap forward for Swoxid!

What are your plans for the future?

We first need to establish a detailed validation of our prototype under different environments. This will enable to quantify how often the filters must be backwashed for example. We also want to hand-in the prototypes to more people that can test them, and make them as user-friendly as possible.

We hope, one day there will be statistics on the product, showing how many lives we can actually help. Even saving a single life would already be a great achievement for us!

Innovator of the Month Interview with LakeDiamond

LakeDiamond, a Swiss start-up led by Pascal Gallo, is leading the way for lab-grown ultra-pure diamonds. Their synthetic diamonds have numerous potential technological applications, beyond jewellery. Their custom-developed Micro-Wave Chemical Vapor Deposition reactors grow the highest quality diamond on earth, mono-crystals up to the centimetre in scale. The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) spin-off is currently undergoing an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise 60 million CHF, to expand its production capabilities to meet high market demand.

Hello Pascal, can you tell us a bit about your story. When did you envision that you could build a start-up based on the growth of diamonds?

It all started during my post-doc at EPFL where I was investigating ways to enhance laser power. One day, along with the lab leader, Eli Kapon, we realized that by putting diamonds in lasers we could dramatically enhance their power. Although the potential of this idea was great, we were missing the first raw material: extremely pure diamonds. It was at that point that we decided to
create them; it took us about 10 years of development to come up with a reactor in its industrial version suited to the mass production of diamonds, especially for photonic applications. Once we had the opportunity to grow diamonds, we realized that we could address several other applications beyond lasers.

Was the shift beyond laser applications a turning point for you, or is it still a core goal of LakeDiamond?

The main project within LakeDiamond is still focused on lasers, but we have started to diversify the applications. Behind each application there is a collaboration with a different research group at EPFL. For example, we are working on the development of micro mechanical gears for the watch industry. Also, as this may be the first association you make with a diamond, we grow some for jewellery applications, which are quite successful with millennials: the younger generations appreciate our sustainable production methods. A third application involves transistors. For the latter, we are collaborating with Prof. Elison Matioli (POWERlab). Finally, we are investing in the use of diamonds in quantum physics: due to the nitrogen vacancy centers in diamonds we can
actually measure extremely weak magnetic fields. With this power, we could do
cardiomagnetometry and brain imaging with sensitivities comparable to the best devices in the world and at a fraction of the cost.

LakeDiamond has now moved on from being just a start-up and for each new application we are creating small spinoffs with dedicated industrial partners. Currently we count partnerships for the more stable applications: laser drone industry, watches and jewellery. For the more scientific and technical applications (i.e. transistors and magnetic sensors), we are still in the research phase.

You are among the very first companies doing an ICO in Switzerland; can you tell us something about your experience?

Organizing an ICO is not straightforward. It is like organizing a small Initial Public Offering (IPO), especially in terms of budget and legal framework. However, the principle is completely different.

The main difference is ICO’s democratization, which is achieved by giving access to a much broader public. We are making a token representing one minute of production, which you can directly use to grow diamonds. Otherwise, you can use your token to have diamonds grown for a certain party, who will pay you for using your production time. It is like a cryptocurrency linked to our production time and it finances our production capacity and our research and development. I would say we’re being quite successful because we are distributed by Swissquote, a Swiss bank. This allows us to address normal people, even those who are not aware that cryptocurrency exists or how it works. You just log onto the Swissquote website and purchase our token as if it was a traditional share.

I would like to mention that organizing an ICO is very expensive, especially the legal framework. We would be very happy to share our business model with other start-ups that would also like to organize an ICO. We will share our knowledge free of charge because we think that it is a great way to raise money. The underlying technology is there. It’s an ERC20 token, based on Ethereum.

You announced a plan to keep the whole production in the Lausanne area. How important is this to you?

Maintaining production in Switzerland is actually cost favorable for us. The stability of the local infrastructure is key to successfully grow diamonds, which can take up to a month. We purchase our electricity from Romande Energie, that was produced from renewable resources.

Another good point for remaining in Switzerland is given by the proximity to EPFL where we collaborate with five research groups.

Furthermore, the global Swiss environment is really good for start-ups. First of all, you have access to a lot of investors, which is mainly my job, and this is a major plus when financing your start-up. In addition, being a start-up gives you economical and financial benefits. For example, we have a tax holiday, meaning that we don’t pay any taxes for five years with the possibility to extend this for another five years (see Service de la promotion de l’économie et de l’innovation du Canton de Vaud).

What about the early stages, maybe before even thinking of investors, were there people that helped you establish a good team?

It is very important to find someone knowledgeable in law, corporate law and finance, with a good track record in the industry. I was very lucky to meet my main associate Theopile Mounier (Chief Financial Officer) at a very early stage. I met him by chance, like most of my team actually; networking can help you a lot. I met my first investor on a plane. You need to pitch all the time. You never know who could be your next investor or associate!

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Author: Alvaro Charlet