A Costa Mesa-based nonprofit workforce development and entrepreneur accelerator opened an innovation center at The Cove in Irvine, the physical space of the University of California-Irvine’s Applied Innovation institute.
Base 11, which does business as the Center for Innovations in Education, opened the center on May 24. The lab is spread out in two of the buildings that The Cove partially occupies in University Research Park. Two-thirds of it is in the primary Cove space, and the other third is in The Cove’s new space in the same building as Starbucks, which is still being built and will officially open for business in the fall. Only a handful of people are using that part of the lab.
Part of the lab is what’s known as a digital fabrication lab called a Fab Lab and contains 3-D printers, a laser cutter and a CNC router, a computer-controlled cutting machine used for cutting various hard materials, such as aluminum, used in the making of circuit boards. Another part of the lab contains equipment for molding and casting composites and a Shopbot Desktop Max Pro, another CNC digital fabrication tool. CNC is short for computer numerical control.
The total cost to install the lab was $250,000, Chief Executive Landon Taylor said.
It’s intended to be used by everyone at The Cove, including student entrepreneurs, those with offices at The Cove, and Base 11’s students, including community college students from across the region.
Base 11 focuses on the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and math. It also recently received grants from two companies, the amounts of which it declined to disclose. One grant, from the Stamford, Conn.-based Deloitte Foundation, will enable Base 11 to replicate its Orange County model at Cristo Rey Philadelphia, a private high school that serves low-income students. The second grant is from the France-based Dassault Systèmes U.S. Foundation. Dassault recently opened a U.S. office in Waltham, Mass.
The grant will provide students at the Samueli School, along with community college students participating in Base 11’s summer fellowship program, with training in collaborative 3-D engineering design platforms used by many large employers, including Boeing.
Frost Partnerships
San Juan Capistrano-based quasi-incubator Frost Data Capital created Swarm Engineering, an allusion to complex problems in nature being solved by cooperative behavior in a swarm of insects.
Swarm uses data from industrial sensor technology to “visualize” a team of machines and uses artificial intelligence to enable the machines to execute a process as a team.
Take blending raw materials, for example, a common step in the food manufacturing and oil and gas refining industries. A six-way blend of raw materials from 500 containers has more than 21 trillion combinations, according to Swarm. Traditional analytic approaches can’t calculate all of the options in the required business time frame, which might take a few minutes in a dynamic environment, so many businesses rely on local experts and guesses to pick the containers to blend, Swarm Chief Executive Anthony Howcroft said.
“The end results are suboptimal,” he said. “Swarm has been able to show 3 to 5% improvement in effectiveness delivered in real time by having each container act as an individual agent that uses an … algorithm to look for the best blending partner.”
A 1% improvement in oil blending is worth $25 million in savings per year for a midsized refinery, according to Swarm. Competition in blending optimization includes AspenTech and Honeywell, but Swarm is more of a general platform for “multiagent systems,” so it competes more directly with other artificial intelligence startups focused on agent technology, Howcroft said.
The company is partnering with two other firms that Frost Data Capital created, ThinkIQ in Aliso Viejo and Maana, which has offices in Palo Alto and Bellevue, Wash. Both have strong data platforms and clients looking to optimize blending solutions, Howcroft said.
Frost Data Capital invested $650,000 in Swarm, which is seeking an additional $1 million in seed funding to enhance its engineering team and accelerate its software design prior to launching a series A round next year, said Howcroft, who’s also chief strategy officer at Frost Data Capital.
One of Swarm’s advisory board members is Dave Bartlett, chief technology officer at Current, General Electric’s $1 billion energy division, which applies “lab experiments” in the real world.
Frost Data Capital originally incubated 22 companies from an initial fund in the $55 million range; 17 are still active, Howcroft said. He declined to give an update on a fund of up to $250 million that Frost has been working on and that the Business Journal originally reported on last year.
