CU Boulder Startups in the News

The Louisville-based CU Boulder startup company is moving into a 75,000-square-foot building in Thornton. The expansion comes as the company prepares to go public. In June, Solid Power announced a merger valued at $1.2B with Decarbonization Plus Acquisition Corp. III.

Meati Foods is a CU spinout company hoping that fungi, not plants, could be key to winning the protein wars and confronting climate change. Co-founders Tyler Huggins and Justin Whiteley met as Ph.D. students at the University of Colorado Boulder, where Whiteley studied material science and Huggins studied environmental engineering.

Aspero Medical Inc. received a U.S. patent for technology related to its planned medical device, a new balloon catheter for use in gastrointestinal endoscopies. The patent means Aspero can seek FDA approval this year and with commercialization to follow in early 2022 if successful. Aspero CEO Mark Rentschler invented the technology with Steven Edmundowicz and Karl Johannes. Rentschler and Edmundowicz are CU Boulder professors; Johannes was one of Rentschler’s PhD students.

Forge Nano, a global leader in Atomic Layer Deposition technology, offers advanced nano coatings that drastically improve the performance and safety of batteries.

Meati uses the roots of mushrooms to produce whole cuts, like steak ready to slice on top of a salad or chicken breast breaded and fried as a sandwich. Much of the funds from its recent Series B will go toward completing construction on an 80,000-square-foot production plant, which will soon pump out millions of pounds of Meati in time for a commercial launch in 2022. Meati was founded in 2019 by Huggins and CTO Justin Whiteley, after meeting at CU Boulder while working toward their own PhDs.

The company revealed that it has been able to trap and address 100 qubits in a large, dense 2D cold atom array. This means, that the company's quantum computer (named Hilbert) will be among the most powerful in the world and will be deployed across a variety of verticals, including financial services, logistics and pharmaceutical drug discovery. “Our Cold Atom Method stands out among other modalities by demonstrating the potential for unmatched qubit scalability. We are on the brink of delivering a compelling platform and on the doorstep of commercialization,” said Paul Lipman, president of Quantum Computing at ColdQuanta.

VitriVax, a CU Boulder spinout that is a developer of a novel stabilization and delivery platform for vaccines and therapeutics, today announced it has closed its first institutional financing round with Adjuvant Capital. VitraVax's Atomic Layering Thermostable Antigen and Adjuvant (ALTA™) technology platform is designed to enable the development of vaccines that can be transported and stored without complex refrigeration and temperature monitoring requirements.

Solid Power's merger with Riverstone Holdings LLC's Decarbonization Plus Acquisition Corporation III constitutes a significant milestone in commercialization of Solid Power's next generation all-solid-state batteries. Upon closing, the combined company is expected to list on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol "SLDP".

New ways to fight the economic and social devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic are being born and raised at universities in the Boulder Valley and Northern Colorado. Technology-transfer and accelerator entities at the University of Colorado Boulder and Colorado State University in Fort Collins are helping them get the entrepreneurial support they need to hasten them to market.

Meati co-founders, Tyler Huggins, CEO, and Justin Whiteley, CTO, are CU Boulder alumni who went into business first to develop battery technology. They shifted to plant-based meat substitutes believing they would be nutritious and more environmentally sustainable than traditionally raised animal meat.