Zymergen, Mesosphere, Citrine & Desktop Metal named World Economic Forum Tech Pioneers

By DCVC

14 Jun 2017

Industrial Transformation, Climate

We are excited to announce that the World Economic Forum has selected four of DCVC’s portfolio companies, Zymergen, Mesosphere, Citrine Informatics and Desktop Metal, as 2017 Technology Pioneers. The program recognizes 30 companies globally each year who have the potential to significantly impact business and society through solutions that are creative and transformative.

At Data Collective, we back entrepreneurs applying deep tech to transform giant industries, which we feel is a core driver for what the Forum has termed the Fourth Industrial Revolution. All four of these companies exemplify the ethos of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is characterized as the digitization of business by fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds.

The complete list of this year’s Technology Pioneers can be found here.

Zymergen engineers better microbes predictably and reliably for industrial production processes, solving tough problems across the chemical, manufacturing, agriculture, and healthcare industries. Their machine learning and applied robotics platform enables the precision engineering of biology at industrial scale and quality, optimizing existing products and delivering breakthrough new ones, and it is already generating results. Data Collective is proud to back a best-in-class founding team uniting genomics, robotics, hyper-scale data, massive compute, and artificial intelligence to improve the industrial production of materials.

Mesosphere has creating an operating system for data centers, which enables any business to handle the massive amount of data collected in a hyper-connected world. The system aggregates server hardware and cloud-based virtual machines into behaving like a single, logical computer on which micro-services, containers and big data services can easily be deployed and scaled.

Citrine uses AI-driven insights to help companies bring products to market faster. The company’s Citrination platform continually ingests large-scale chemical and materials science data from countless public and private sources including patents, research papers, simulations, and existing client databases, and applies AI to anticipate the behavior of materials and products under any relevant condition. Citrine’s insights guide the development and applications matching of advanced materials, enabling the company’s customers to hit R&D and manufacturing milestones 2x – 5x faster than before. In line with our thesis, Citrine unites proprietary data at massive scale, deeply defensible algorithms, and the ability to transform huge vertical industries where the company’s founders are experts.

Desktop Metal develops a metal additive manufacturing technology that is 100 times faster and 10 times cheaper than previous additive processes. It addresses the unmet challenges of speed, cost, quality and convenience to make metal 3D printing an essential tool in production. The integrated system of software, parameters and materials allows teams to go directly from computer aided design, to rapid prototyping, to volume production, which accelerates product development and manufacturing.

Each of Zymergen, Mesosphere, Citrine Informatics & Desktop Metal is a stellar example of how DCVC’s thesis supports the development of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and we congratulate these incredible teams on their selection to the 2017 Technology Pioneers!