by Katie Calabro | Sep 24, 2022
Cuyana is a B2C, slow fashion company that encourages customers to purchase fewer but better-quality pieces that they will love and treasure for years to come. They are a women-built, heritage-led company that produces responsibly and supports customers in the repair and care of the items.
Cuyana was founded in 2011 by Karla Gallardo ’05 and Shilpa Shah. Both founders were recently profiled by WhoWhatWear. Cuyana recently launched Revive, a resale platform that allows customers to sell, donate, or purchase preloved Cuyana merchandise. Read more about this launch here.
From Left to Right: Shilpa Shah and Karla Gallardo
Photo Credit: Cuyana
by Jonas Clark | Sep 20, 2022
goTeff is a snack brand powered by Ethiopian super-grain teff. The versatile snack can be enjoyed as a straight-from-the-bag snack, or as a cereal, yoghurt topper, or as a crouton alternative for salads. Products are gluten, nut, and dairy free. The startup was profiled by Boston Globe.
Additionally, goTeff works directly with Ethiopian farmers to bolster their trade. Currently, goTeff is partners with Girls Gotta Run, an organization dedicated to helping girls stay in school. goTeff, a 2019 BVP Second Place winner, was founded by Saron Mechale, ‘19.
Photo Credit: Saron Mechale
by Jonas Clark | Sep 19, 2022
Tracking down lead pipes in the U.S. is an extremely timely and expensive task. In fact, there is still relatively little data on the location of lead pipes across the country. H2OK Innovations is an IoT-enabled analytics platform providing data-driven optimization of industrial liquid systems for manufacturing. In other words, the contaminant management platform that helps industrial and manufacturing businesses optimize water usage and treatment through predictive diagnostics.
H2OK Innovations, a Brown Venture Prize Finalist, was co-founded by David Lu, ’20. Lu was a part of BrownEP and Startup@Brown. The firm was recently named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for Manufacturing & Industry. Customers include Cargill, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Ecolab and the Dairy Farmers of America.
Photo Credit: David Lu
by Jonas Clark | Sep 16, 2022
Imperfect Foods was founded by Ben Chesler, ’15, a food waste entrepreneur who is actively working to change the food system to reduce waste and increase the amount of affordable produce available to consumers. After co-founding the Food Recovery Network, the largest student movement against hunger and food waste, Ben Chesler moved into the for-profit space with Imperfect Foods.. At Imperfect, Ben created a supply chain of “ugly” produce and other groceries that would normally go to waste in the supply chain, and turning that into products that can be sold to consumers.
Imperfect now has over 200,000 customers across 25 markets and has rescued over 100 million pounds of food. In September 2022, Imperfect Foods was acquired by online grocer Misfits Market to take their impact to a larger scale.
Photo Credit: Ben Chesler
by Jonas Clark | Sep 4, 2022
Due to the laborious, time-intensive, and expensive nature of soil testing, farmers typically only sample their soil once every four years. Perennial (formally Cloud Agronomics) leverages machine learning, ground observations, and remote-sensing to measure and map soil carbon and land-based emissions at continent-level scales, providing innovative best practices to assess and predict global agricultural production health.
Recently, they raised $18M in their Series A funding round, bringing their total amount of funding to $25M. Its product that measures the amount of carbon in global farmland soils was also recently selected by the United Nations as one of the Top 100 Global Projects using AI to solve UN Sustainable Development Goals. Perennial was founded by Brown alumni Alex Zhuk, ’20, Jack Roswell, ’20, and David Schurman, ’20. Read their Forbes profile here.
From Left: Alex Zhuk, Jack Roswell and David Schurman
Photo Credit: Brown University
