Wow! What a day. Last week Greentown Labs hosted its fourth annual DEMO Day, a showcase of its member companies and a celebration of their many achievements. DEMO Day is our favorite event because it’s the one day out of the entire year that we can pause, take a step back, meet and mingle with fellow cleantech innovators and enthusiasts, and congratulate all of our entrepreneurs for their accomplishments.

In years past we’ve had the great honor of having Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker and Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone serve as keynote speaker at DEMO Day. We’d also typically have one of our member companies speak about their company but this year, for the first time ever, we hosted a “Popcorn Pitch” competition as the key event during the speaking program. The mission of DEMO Day is to welcome investors, sponsors, strategic partners, corporates, manufacturers and friends of Greentown Labs to our space to ultimately facilitate valuable connections between attendees and our member companies.

With nearly 400 attendees representing each sector mentioned above, we’re confident we achieved that mission! Our event was a great success thanks to our member companies involvement, our speakers Jonas Svedlund, General Counsel of GE Ventures; Eric Graham, CEO and co-founder of CrowdComfort; and our event sponsors, InTeahouse and Zipcar.

InTeahouse is a global network that powers the international innovation economy by connecting ideas, capital and tea. They’re eager to share more information about their InFriends service which offers a variety of funding, advisory and educational services for startups. Zipcar is a great sponsor of our community, providing access to wheels when our members need them! At DEMO Day they showed off their next generation service, still in employee alpha, which will let users find cars, interact with the vehicle and end their trip from all from their Smartphone. This new service is the most flexible Zipcar yet.

Jonas Svedlund shared important remarks with the audience about GE’s long partnership with Greentown Labs and the industrial pioneer’s plans for collaboration within the Boston cleantech innovation ecosystem. We’re thrilled to have Jonas and the entire GE team based in our great city! 

Immediately before we kicked off the Popcorn Pitches, our CEO, Emily Reichert, and Eric Graham took the stage to share exciting news: CrowdComfort has signed on as Greentown Labs’ first-ever Alumni-Sponsor! We’re incredibly proud to have Eric and his team maintain membership within the Greentown Labs community as a sponsor. CrowdComfort has a special founding and evolution story which we’ll share soon — stay tuned!

To close out our speaking program, 10 of our member company CEOs took the stage to share a ONE-MINUTE (!!!) pitch about their companies. Hats off to these members for knocking their pitches out of the park:

• Sasha Huang, AquaFresco: Is the smart, localized wastewater solution.
• Eamon Carrig, Autonomous Marine Systems: Is a marine data-services company.
• Jamie Byron, Grove: Is reimagining the home as a living ecosystem.
• Kyle Flanagan, Prime Lightworks: Builds electric propulsion systems for space satellites and spacecraft.
• Arron Acosta, Rise Robotics: Is advancing the industry with breakthrough mechanical components to enable wearable ExoSuits in the future.
• Sarah Haig, Silverside Detectors: Is building for the next generation of nuclear security.
• Sean Becker, Sparkplug Power: Has developed a revolution in the electric power grid to build a better energy future.
• Will Vega-Brown, Tagup: Is reinventing how businesses manage equipment data.
• Amos Epstein, Tank Utility: Is taking propane tank monitoring to a new level.
• Ryan Wright, WrightGrid: Designs, engineers and manufactures industrial-strength, point-of-use power products to enhance mobile connectivity.

If you’re interested in learning more about any of these companies or any Greentown Labs member companies, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

We closed the DEMO Day program by providing brief updates about our expansion project: construction is underway at 444 Somerville Avenue and we expect our Global Center for Cleantech Innovation to open in Q4 2017!

Thanks to all who attended our DEMO Day and joined the celebration for our member companies! We believe we can all go farther, faster, when we convene, connect and collaborate, and our annual DEMO Day is a testament to the entire regional cleantech community sharing that belief. We’ll see you around the ecosystem!