With a Little Luck, Moving at the Speed of Sound
From the earliest discussions of a business idea to attending and pitching at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), most startups require more than a month. But for Ethan Castro and Valtteri Salomaki, that’s exactly the speed their business has followed. These University of California, Riverside entrepreneurs were among the six teams from LaunchPad schools that participated in the 2020 CES Techstars Startup Stage student competition. And from that “chance of a lifetime”, they’ve only moved forward, faster!
Born with a hearing impairment, music is the last area one might have expected Ethan Castro to professionally pursue. But with childhood memories of “feeling” the music his parents were listening to through speakers and subwoofers and a desire to help others have that experience, sound is exactly the space he wanted to work in. A current Ph.D student in digital composition, Ethan also helps manage the Experimental Acoustics Research Studio (EARS) at UC, Riverside. It was there, that the research basis for EDGE Sound Research was developed.
“I owe huge thanks to Dr. Paulo Chagas, who has taken me under his wing,” said Ethan. “He provided me some early seed funding as well as ‘vibratory exciters’ and ‘tactical transducers’ to enable my investigation.”
This experimentation resulted in a technology that recreates Ethan’s experience of sound
While at EARS, Ethan also met his eventual cofounder, Valtteri ‘Val’ Salomaki, an MBA student from UC, Riverside. By that time, Val had already started a number of businesses including Free Logic Media LLC (the hosting entity of a podcast the UC Riverside LaunchPad sponsors - see Virtual LaunchPad Best Practice article.) One of Val’s clients at Free Logic Media LLC was also working in EARS when he was introduced to Ethan.
“One day Ethan started telling me about tactile audio and I became fascinated,” said Val. “As a gamer and media enthusiast, I loved the idea of being able to feel the full spectrum of sound instead of just hearing it or feeling the bass. I immediately started thinking about how it could impact so many markets.”
Within a week of connecting, Ethan and Val presented an idea to the UC Riverside LaunchPad to try and get some prototype funding. While this conversation was far too early, the school did help with two other critical steps: First, they assisted with a patent application and second they nominated us to represent the school in the Techstars CES student pitch competition that January. At 9:00pm the night before CES, Ethan and Val got provisional patent protection for their technology.
The team has also leveraged other resources that are brought to students by the UC Riverside LaunchPad: They’ve both completed the school’s NSFiCorps program and have been connected to an advisor with the local SBDC (who just happens to have decades of experience and network with the entertainment industry). The team met some important players through attendance at the National Association of Music Merchants conference in January. And most recently, they’ve been connected to Dave Dratch, VP Innovation Sales at Techstars who is introducing them to more industry contacts.
“The opportunity to go to CES was the ultimate Holy Grail for me,” said Ethan. “We saw haptics technology like ours in almost everything and it really confirmed that we are operating on the cutting edge of this rapidly developing, and importantly, in demand technology.”
(For the non-technical reader, haptics technology is what enables the physical pulse alert of the Apple watch. This sensation is based on a limited low-frequency range.)
Val described attending and pitching at CES as ‘the experience of a lifetime’.
“By far my biggest goal was to take as much advantage as possible of being around 190,000 people all working on ‘the next big technology”. I think we talked to every single company that could have anything to do with our technology and came away with 25+ potential customers, collaborators, or partners.”
Like Val, founders from another company at CES developing similar technology, just happened to be from Finland. This unexpected Scandinavian connection, building a relationship (and speaking Finnish in Las Vegas) has proven highly motivating. That startup is also working with a local university and recently raised €900,000 of funding.
Recently Ethan and Val have done more research and instigation to determine the ideal product-market fit for their technology. With potential B2B and B2C applications in multiple industries (music, entertainment, gaming, and even healthcare), there are countless roads they can pursue. They’re also monitoring their competitors and maintaining a critical differentiation in product offering.
In March, Ethan and EDGE were second-runners up in the UC, Riverside GradSlam Pitch Competition and are currently applying for the VentureWell E-Team Grant and a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)/Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Grant. The team expects to have their minimal viable prototype complete by April with a summer 2020 pilot project.
As serial entrepreneurs, both Ethan and Val have learned a number of important lessons they’d share with other student founders.