Tag: Bill Gates

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Radar love: Echodyne attracts $135M in new funding

Echodyne radar and drone
A drone flies above a radar antenna in front of Echodyne’s headquarters. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

KIRKLAND, Wash. — Echodyne, the radar platform company backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, is announcing its biggest influx of funding to date: a $135 million round co-led by Gates and Baillie Gifford, a high-profile investment management firm based in Scotland.

Other investors include Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group and Vulcan Capital, as well as Northrop Grumman, NEA and Vanedge Capital. Echodyne CEO Eben Frankenberg said the newly announced round brings total investment to $195 million, which makes the trend line for the eight-year-old company’s fundraising efforts look like a hockey stick.

“It’s the hockey stick on the raise, and we hope it’s the hockey stick on the growth of the company,” Frankenberg told me.

Echodyne is one of several Gates-backed ventures that make use of metamaterials — a type of electronic array that makes it possible to “steer” a flat-panel antenna without moving parts. Frankenberg’s company focuses on compact radar systems that can track drones and other aircraft, or can be installed on drones or autonomous vehicles.

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Bill Gates gives a fresh boost to clean energy

ZeroAvia aircraft illustration
Artwork shows a commercial airliner with a hydrogen-electric powertrain. (ZeroAvia via PR Newswire)

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is putting his money as well as his mouth behind the push for new energy technologies.

First, about the money: Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures is doubling down on its investment in ZeroAvia, a startup that’s working on a hybrid hydrogen-electric powertrain for aircraft capable of flying more than 50 passengers.

Back in December, Breakthrough Energy Ventures led a Series A funding round that raised $21.4 million for the U.S.-British company, with Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund joining in the round. This week, ZeroAvia said Gates’ energy innovation fund is participating in a follow-up investment round amounting to another $24.3 million.

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QuantumScape pursues ‘breakthrough’ in batteries

QuantumScape pouch cell
QuantumScape’s single-layer pouch cell relies on lithium-metal technology. (QuantumScape Photo)

Bill Gates isn’t just investing in QuantumScape’s potentially revolutionary lithium-metal battery technology — he’s giving the venture advice as well.

“I didn’t honestly think he knew anything about chemistry, and we are all about chemistry,” Fortune quotes QuantumScape CEO Jagdeep Singh as saying.

But Singh found out that Microsoft’s billionaire co-founder is a quick learner. “When he thinks something is important he can dive really deep and become an expert in that area,” he told Fortune. “He has gotten very deep into this area.”

Today QuantumScape reported eye-opening progress in its campaign to produce a solid-state alternative to lithium-ion batteries, the current industry standard for energy storage applications ranging from smartphones and laptops to electric cars and airplanes.

The Silicon Valley company said its tests with prototype single-layer cells demonstrated the ability to recharge batteries up to 80% capacity in just 15 minutes. The data suggest that the technology could produce car batteries capable of lasting hundreds of thousands of miles and weathering temperatures as low as -30 degrees Celsius (22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit).

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Bill Gates sounds the alarm on resurging pandemic

Bill Gates
Bill Gates chats with TED curator Chris Anderson as part of TED2020: Uncharted. (Photo Courtesy of TED)

Tech leaders typically use their TED talks to sketch out an optimistic vision of the future, but today Bill Gates used his to warn about a rough autumn ahead due to the continuing coronavirus pandemic.

“There’s good progress … but nothing that would fundamentally alter the fact that this fall in the United States could be quite bad, and that’s worse than I would have predicted a month ago,” he told moderator Chris Anderson during a live-streamed TED2020 Q&A.

Although Gates didn’t mention President Donald Trump by name, he faulted a lack of American leadership for making things worse.

“We need leadership in terms of admitting that we’ve still got a huge problem here, and not turning that into almost a political thing,” he said. “You know, ‘Isn’t it brilliant, what we did?’ No, it’s not brilliant. … We need a leader who keeps us up to date, is realistic, and shows us the right behavior as well as driving the innovation track.”

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Bill Gates: We’ll need 7 billion doses of vaccine

Bill Gates has been big on vaccines since before the start of the coronavirus pandemic, but in a new blog posting, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist says the only way to end the pandemic for good is to offer a vaccine to almost all of the planet’s 7 billion inhabitants.

That’s big.

“We’ve never delivered something to every corner of the world before,” Gates notes.

It’s especially big considering that a vaccine hasn’t yet been approved for widespread use, and that it may take as long as a year to 18 months to win approval and start distribution.

Some companies are aiming for a faster pace: Oxford University says its vaccine candidate has shown encouraging results in trials with rhesus macaque monkeys, and if it clears accelerated human trials, a few million doses could be available by September.

Meanwhile, the White House is pressing an initiative called Operation Warp Speed that Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, could result in hundreds of millions of vaccine doses being manufactured by January.

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Even Bill Gates feels the pandemic’s psychic punch

Sal Khan and Bill Gates
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates discusses the repercussions of the coronavirus outbreak with Khan Academy founder Sal Khan during a “Daily Homeroom” live-streamed session. (Khan Academy via YouTube)

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates may be one of the world’s richest individuals, but even he sometimes finds it hard to cope with the huge social changes brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

“I never lived through anything this dramatic,” Gates admitted today during a “Daily Homeroom” live-streamed chat with Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, a non-profit online learning venture.

That may seem ironic, given that the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been working for years on efforts to tamp down diseases, and that Gates himself issued a warning about a global virus outbreak in a prescient 2015 TED talk. But now that it’s happened, Gates isn’t immune to the outbreak’s effects.

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Gates Foundation to boost COVID-19 detection

Bill Gates
Bill Gates at the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2020 annual meeting in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)

By Todd Bishop and Alan Boyle

A report says the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is preparing to fund at-home testing kits for the novel coronavirus in Seattle.

However, the Gates Foundation cautions that the plans aren’t final.

The kits, to be available in the “coming weeks,” would quickly identify hot spots where the disease is spreading, according to The Seattle Times. The newspaper quotes Scott Dowell, leader of coronavirus response at the Gates Foundation, as saying it the initiative “has enormous potential to turn the tide of the epidemic.”

Dowell cautions in the story, however, that there are many details to work out, and a launch date hasn’t been set.

In a statement to GeekWire, the Gates Foundation said, “The Seattle Times article today addressed the potential to adapt the Seattle Flu Study to support local public health agencies in the greater Seattle area in detecting COVID-19.  Our team has and will continue to actively explore ways that we can contribute to local response through the application of the study. While we’re working quickly with our partners to determine what’s possible, details of this support have not yet been finalized.”

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Bill Gates touts AI and gene editing for global health

Margaret Hamburg and Bill Gates
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates makes a point during a Q&A with Margaret Hamburg, board chair for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been working to improve the state of global health through his nonprofit foundation for 20 years, and today he told the nation’s premier scientific gathering that advances in artificial intelligence and gene editing could accelerate those improvements exponentially in the years ahead.

“We have an opportunity with the advance of tools like artificial intelligence and gene-based editing technologies to build this new generation of health solutions so that they are available to everyone on the planet. And I’m very excited about this,” Gates said in Seattle during a keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Such tools promise to have a dramatic impact on several of the biggest challenges on the agenda for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, created by the tech guru and his wife in 2000.

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Heliogen claims solar power breakthrough

Heliogen plant
Heliogen’s commercial facility in Lancaster, Calif., was able to concentrate sunlight at a temperature high enough to replace fossil fuels in industrial processes. (Heliogen Photo)

By Todd Bishop and Alan Boyle

A solar energy tech company founded by serial entrepreneur and inventor Bill Gross — and backed by investors including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates — says it has developed a way to create concentrated solar energy at temperatures hot enough to replace fossil fuels in industrial processes that contribute significantly to global carbon emissions.

It works by using cutting-edge computer vision technology to align a large array of mirrors to reflect sunlight to a precise target. The process creates immense heat, exceeding 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 Fahrenheit), that can replace traditional fuels such as coal, gas and oil in the production of materials such as cement, steel and petrochemicals.

The Los Angeles-based company, Heliogen, said this morning that it achieved the high-temperature milestone at its commercial facility in Lancaster, Calif.

It described the innovation as a “major step towards solving climate change” that could dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industrial processes. Such processes are thought to account for one-fifth of the world’s carbon emissions.

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Bill Gates predicts the future of global health

Bill Gates
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates lays out his predictions for global health in 2040 during a lecture given at the Cambridge Union in honor of Stephen Hawking. (Cambridge Union via YouTube)

What’s the shape of global health to come? Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates issued two hopeful predictions for the year 2040 today during a lecture given at the late physicist Stephen Hawking’s home university in his honor.

Spoiler alert: Gates says insights into how our microbiome works, and efforts to cut down on infectious diseases such as malaria and HIV, will make life dramatically better for wide swaths of the world’s population by 2040.

Gates drew upon his experience as the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — and upon data relating to global health trends — to support the case he laid out in the Professor Hawking Fellowship Lecture, presented by the Cambridge Union.

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