Waterloo has been a centre for ideas and entrepreneurship for many decades. The presence of an open collaborative culture and the emphasis on ownership of intellectual property has helped the University of Waterloo gain huge success in the creation of start-up companies. In this column, I plan to interview founders of recent start-ups that have gained recognition for their novel products and ideas. In this issue I interviewed the members of Suncayr, a company comprising of fourth year Nanotechnology Engineering students.
Rachel Pautler is quite excited and animated as she talks about her start-up, Suncayr, and its novel product – a marker applied on the skin that changes colour when one’s sunscreen wears off. As she begins to realize that she is dominating the discussion, she abashedly apologises to her team members, Hayden Soboleski, Andrew Martinko and Chad Sweeting, but they don’t seem to mind. “She is the CEO after all”, remarks Andrew.
The four of them, along with fellow Nano student Derek Jouppi, conceived Suncayr last fall as part of their Fourth Year Design Project. Roughly a year later, they have achieved what many engineering students only dream of when starting university: Suncayr was recently incorporated, and their product has been getting a lot of attention and awards. Only last week, the James Dyson Foundation selected them as a national level runner-up, and they will be proceeding to the International round along with four other Canadian start-ups. Publicity has also come to them in the form of an article in Gizmodo and on 1000startups.ca, as well as an interview with 570News-Kitchener.
“We initially thought of using a patch that goes on the skin and changes colour, but then realized that direct application onto the skin would be more efficient”, says Rachel. Unfortunately, they couldn’t reveal the exact mechanism behind the working of their product. All I could glean from them is that the marker contains a molecule that changes from clear to blue on exposure to UV radiation. Are there any potential applications besides avoiding sunburns? Rachel states that it could also be used to give a visual signal to indicate the completion of UV polymerization, though this is a relatively niche research application. Their official website contains a questionnaire for their potential customers, and they hope to effectively target their product to a relevant demographic using this data.
I asked the team for their opinion of the start-up culture in Waterloo: “People have been really helpful. In fact, they might even be too helpful, though that’s not really a complaint”, says Andrew. The team originally approached Prof. Nasser Abukhdeir with their idea, who supported them from the start and encouraged them to form the company. Other professors have also been quite helpful to them, in addition to the people at the Velocity Garage and Communitech Hub, two big incubation centres in Kitchener-Waterloo. The team also spent their last co-op term doing an Enterprise Co-op, or E Co-op. During this time they received the Norman Esch Enterprise Co-op Award, as well as the Velocity Fund Finals $5K award.
Regarding their next steps, the team plans to get a patent for their product and receive funding for expansion; simultaneously carrying out product development and enhancement. Their ultimate goal is to become an established tech company specializing in materials. However, they stated that if an offer of acquisition came along from a bigger company, they might not be able to refuse. With an idea as simple and appealing as theirs, these dreams might not be too far from being realized.
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