AKRON, Ohio – TKM Ballistics CEO Thomas Milo whacks an inflatable ballistic shield twice with a baseball bat.
The man holding the shield barely flinches. It’s the technology that makes it unique, Milo says. The shield absorbs the impact.
The Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, based company makes the shields and other equipment for law enforcement and the military.
“So if you get hit by a high-powered rifle round, you don’t feel it,” he says of the shields. “There’s no bruising, there’s no soft body tissue damage so you can keep on moving forward in an active shooter environment, take the hits and return fire.”
The shield is made with multiple polymer laminated fibers and TKM also uses a special bonding agent and proprietary laminations between fibers.
TKM is one of nine companies selected to participate in the Synthe6 Materials Accelerator cohort at Bounce Innovation Hub in Akron. It’s a 12-month program for polymer and materials science startups offered by Bounce and the Polymer Industry Cluster. The first cohort began last September. A new cohort will start in August.
The startups receive $25,000 in nondilutive funding and $20,000 in covered professional services expenses.
“Akron is becoming this hub, reinvigorating being the global area for polymers and innovation in that space, so we are one arm of that entire proposal in that we’re here to train the next class of entrepreneurs and innovators to level up their technology, integrate into the marketplace and become the leaders of this industry in the future,” says Nick Glavan, the accelerator’s program director.
All of the companies selected have an Ohio presence, as the project is state funded. One company, Materium Technologies, based in New Jersey, set up operations in Ohio to become part of the program.
“We are looking at this program as, how can we bring in the best national talents and the best innovations around the entire country to come honestly, even internationally,” Glavan explains. “I’ve had some people from Canada express some interest about joining in this program, because there just isn’t an accelerator that caters to this type of startup anywhere right now.”
Specialized Startups
The Synthe6 focuses on those startups, acknowledging materials sciences involve a longer timeline to get to market, he says. They also require a specialized skillset.
Participants gather weekly at Bounce, learning about a variety of topics involved in starting and running a business including accounting, marketing and branding, leadership and artificial intelligence. On a recent Friday morning, cohort members heard from an attorney who talked about contract covenants, intellectual property, noncompete clauses and other legal considerations.
Besides the Ohio requirement, startups must be validated businesses to be selected.
“But other than that, we’re looking for innovation. … What’s really going to bring market pool and bring that innovation to make a bunch of successes for our industry and our region,” Glavan says.
The companies selected represent multiple industries although the program director says they were chosen because they rose to the top, not for variety. The founders are at different stages in their businesses.
“Some of them are later stage,” he says. “They’ve been working and they have a business that’s running on the side. Others are fresh out of their Ph.D. program and starting up for the first time. So having those different ideas all come together – those different life experiences – they end up teaching each other in these classes every week that we meet with them, just as often as the expert facilitators we bring in.”
Milo says TKM’s ballistic shields are lightweight and come in rigid as well as inflatable options. The rigid version folds up and the inflatable may be rolled up so each is easy to transport and takes up less space than some other ballistic shields.
He says they’re also applicable for schools.
“We can also make them look like art,” Milo says.
Because the shields are manufactured in house, the company can make them in a variety of shapes. They can be fashioned, for example, to look like a sign promoting school spirit. “If it’s needed, a teacher could take it down, use it as a cover for the students,” he says.
GelPure, based at the University of Akron, is another Synthe6 startup. Founded by Moni Ghosh, Brandon McReynolds and Sadhan Jana, GelPure is developing filtering material to remove per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or forever chemicals, from drinking water.
“So, EPA came up with the regulation limiting the amount of such chemicals in drinking water, and we are developing a solution that can help capture or reduce the level of such in drinking water, especially,” Ghosh, who is pursuing his doctorate, explains.
Potential customers are drinking water utilities. GelPure’s founders participated in a National Science Foundation program and were looking for the next opportunity to develop their business and secure funding. That led them to apply to participate in Synthe6.
“We just thought of applying,” Ghosh says. “We didn’t know if we’d get in the first time, but then we were lucky and we were selected.”
GelPure uses different polymers to draw out the chemicals.
“Basically, think of it like a sponge,” Ghosh says. “It has a lot of cavities inside so your water kind of flows through those cavities. And then these pollutants, they get out of the water phase and into the solid phase.”
Opening in Ohio
Materium Technologies is another member of Synthe6’s first cohort. Scott Daniel of New Jersey is the co-founder. The company started at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. After joining the Synthe6 program, Materium Technologies set up operations in Cleveland.
The company makes nano composite coatings and polymers and its specific blend is black copolymers, small molecules and tunable nano particles.
“It has a lot of different applications,” Daniel says. “We have looked very closely at the barrier properties – barriers against moisture, oxygen, VOCs. It’s also a dielectric, so it prevents any sort of static or electrical leakage. And because we’re down at the nano scale, we can also manipulate wavelengths, so it has optical properties that are, again, tunable depending on how we structure the coatings and which nanoparticles we use.”
And Materium Technologies’ product is different from other nano composite coatings. Making precision devices or components mandates thin, defect-free coatings that demand chemical vapor or physical vapor deposition, he explains.
It requires a vacuum chamber and coatings must be applied layer by layer in a batch process that’s slow, expensive and energy intensive. It’s difficult to remove the coatings too and recycling the different electronic components is challenging.
“We sort of solve all those problems because [in] our process, the mechanism self-assembles, so it creates these nano sheets without having to do anything externally with it,” Daniel says. “It can be done at room temperature without a vacuum chamber. It takes about 30 minutes, instead of multiple hours, to do it. And it’s recyclable. You can literally redissolve these coatings and use them again. So it solves the rework or end of life problem as well.”
The founders wanted to be involved with the Synthe6 Materials Accelerator and started operations in Cleveland because of what Akron offers.
“This is the center of the universe for polymer science,” Daniel says. “And as we look to bring this out of the laboratory and commercialize it, we need this infrastructure, knowledge, workers, manufacturers, partners.”
Elyse Ball, vice president of programming at the Bounce Innovation Hub, says the Synthe6 Materials Accelerator marries what the innovation hub and Akron do well.
Bounce excels at helping technology based startup companies to reach their next inflection point to make their businesses successful, she says. And Akron excels in the polymers and advanced materials space.
“When you think about the historic, phenomenal companies we’ve had here in Akron, be that things like Goodyear and Firestone, Bridgestone, or more modern companies like GOJO [Industries], a lot of them are really heavily polymers based,” Ball says. “So getting to bring those things together in a business accelerator that focuses on something Akron is already good at is very exciting.”
Pictured at top: Nick Glavan, program director of the Synthe6 Materials Accelerator program at Akron’s Bounce Innovation Hub, and Elyse Ball, Bounce’s vice president of programming, pose inside the downtown Akron innovation center.
