StartUp winner has NASA interested in product
Alchemy Geopolymer Solutions was selected as the first winner of the Louisiana StartUp Prize on Sept. 28.
The business competed in the first StartUp Prize weekend competition along with the Top 5 other finalists. Each of the businesses pitched their concepts to a board of directors and a select group of investors and consultants.
Alchemy Geopolymer Solutions is part of the LA New Product Development Team, an organization of students and alumni of Louisiana Tech University. The team works on products, technologies, software and Web solutions.
Dr. Carlos Montes is a research scientist at the Institute for Micromanufacturing at Tech and a principal in Alchemy Geopolymer Solutions. He said he enjoyed the challenge of the competition. “I come from a scientific background, so it was definitely a challenge for me, traveling in this entrepreneurial world,” he said.
He described his venture as “a startup dedicated to the manufacture and design of geopolymer concrete. We use ecological concrete; that means it is not based in Portland cement, it’s produced from fly ash.”
The Environmental Protection Agency defines fly ash as a product of burning finely ground coal in a boiler to produce electricity. Ironically, Montes said, those boilers could be made of his fly ash product. Physically, fly ash is a very fine, powdery material, composed mostly of silica. It is mainly silt- and clay-sized glassy spheres, giving the material a talcum powder-like consistency.
The geopolymer material has several practical applications, Montes said, corrosion resistance, refractory ability (the ability to withstand high temperature), and a use for the fly ash produced in electrical generation. Montes said they have also gotten some interest from NASA in using the product to protect buckets used in the testing of rocket motors. In addition to heat resistance, the material is tougher than regular concrete where harsh chemicals, acids or other corrosives are present.
“Just to give you a perspective,” Montes said, “the structures that are designed with regular concrete are usually designed for 50 years. In some harsh environments, they’re only designed for 20 years, like buried sewer pipes or infrastructural marine environments like offshore platforms.”
This product would significantly lengthen those structure’s useful lives, he said.
Director of the competition, Gregory Kallenberg said the prize was comprised of a $25,000 cash prize, $10,000 in accounting services from Heard, McElroy, and Vestal, $10,000 in marketing services from Williams Creative, $5,000 in legal services, a year of rent at the American Tower worth $20-thousand, a $5,000 corporate video from Fairfield Studios, and a $500 credit from Ark-La-Tex 3D.
Kallenberg said all of that was considered the “little” prize. “The big prize is the ability to get invested in by an investor to help them with their ventures,” he said.
He credited the success of the first year to several factors.
“It was this nexus point of willing mentors and gurus, of willing investor types,” Kallenberg said. “Of a startup community that is burgeoning here but very sort of open and willing to be a part of something bigger and to build something bigger.”
Kallenberg said the approach to this competition is different from others like it. “When you look at really what the propulsion of this thing was, it really was looking at the whole entrepreneurial competition backward,” he said. “We went to the investors, and we said what is it you guys need so that you can find an investment at the end of this? These are the people, the mentors and the gurus, the ones who gave their afternoons and their evenings and the phone calls and the emails and all those other things, these are the guys that got the entrepreneurs ready.”
Kallenberg was optimistic as he looked ahead to future competitions. “This is something that at least has been proven to us as we march into 2015,” he said.
“This is something that is going to build a beacon for independent business in the United States.”
–Joe Todaro
