|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
It’s May — time to celebrate Mother’s Day, Pleasanton’s annual rose show and Memorial Day and the Innovation Tri-Valley Leadership Group’s GameChangers awards.
Each of the five Tri-Valley municipalities selects one game-changing start-up to honor at the event staged at Joe Madden’s Goal Line Studio in Pleasanton on May 9. The huge 120-foot screen, installed in time for the 2023 event, remains amazing.
In addition to the five companies, the organization recognized one of its founding members, Las Positas College as well as saluting its formal partnership with the Livermore-based Hertz Foundation. One of ITV’s early board members, Jay Davis, is both a retired senior Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory exec and Hertz board member. He connected them and the group met at the foundation’s Livermore office.
The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, established by the Hertz rental car founder, provides multi-year fellowship grants to gifted science and technology doctoral candidates. And, once a fellow, always a fellow in the talented network. Incidentally, Livermore lab co-founder Edward Teller was a founding board member and current Director Kim Budil is a Hertz fellow having earned her PhD from the University of California Davis campus at the lab.
The GameChangers ranged from a woman-owned audio-visual design firm in San Ramon to an employee-owned company that has developed the most precise measurements to a six-year-old Livermore firm that is just launching its revolutionary technology to measure cannabis impairment using saliva.
KMT Technical Services, headed by founder and CEO Angie Toussaint Billingsly, was in the full range of audio-visual services prior to the pandemic, but pivoted entirely away from live events to focus on design.
During her introduction, her friend Mino Sastry from Stanford Health Care, remarked on her depth of involvement locally: San Ramon Chamber of Commerce, the city’s economic development committee and the East Bay EDA. She emphasized that she’s open for business.
Vector Atomic, as they told it, was founded by three Ph.D. physicists who knew the science and technology and nothing about business. They’ve built their company debt-free and investor free by winning grants from government agencies such as the Defense Department and NASA. They are a product of the advanced manufacturing lab on the Livermore Valley Open Campus.
CEO Jamil Abbo-Shaeer said they made a point of locating in Pleasanton so they would stand out as opposed to being in the Silicon Valley. They now employ 52 people that he described as very smart with degrees from top universities. They just signed a lease for their headquarters in Pleasanton.
Greg Hitchan, managing partner of Tri-Valley Ventures, introduced Rezolve AI CEO Saurabh Kumar and said they’d spent many nights together discussing what type of service he wanted to provide. He’s a veteran of two large firms in human resources. His AI solution for call centers is so effective that he had annual recurring billing of $2 million before he reached that number in venture capital. Tri-Valley Ventures invested in the firm in both of its funds.
His monthly reporting metrics to Tri-Valley Ventures are so thorough that they show it to other companies as an example of what they should do. They are far from the largest company in the AI-assisted customer service, but their product is so superior they’re attracting plenty of major corporations.
Buzzkill incubated in both founder George Farquar’s garage as well as Daybreak lab when it was working out of the former JCPenney building on Second Street in downtown Livermore. The company has progressed to the point that it has leased space next to Daybreak’s new location in eastern Livermore.
It’s tackling a major problem—cannabis, like alcohol, is legal to use. Alcohol levels are easily detectable with breath or blood tests and the body assimilates it relatively quickly. Not so for THC. It lingers and the only accurate test is a blood draw.
Assuming Buzzkill’s technology works as advertised, it’s a huge break through for police and employers to ensure no impairment for employees on the job.
Two race car drivers partnered to found Greenlight Simulation in Danville to pioneer a new way to teach teenagers to drive. There were plenty of open ears because a few other founders had children of that age.
Jason Zimmerman has developed a simulator to teach fledgling drivers the basics, as well as classroom instruction for the legal side, before students hit the street. Think back to the days of putting a teenager behind the wheel with the instructor sitting in the passenger seat able to grab the wheel or push on the brake. They’re operating in Danville now and looking to expand soon to other Bay Area locations.
It’s always an uplifting evening and what a showcase for the Tri-Valley’s $49 billion GDP economy and its diversity.
