Aetherworks
Company description
Aetherworks is developing a direct air capture (DAC) system, built on NASA-licensed technology, that captures carbon dioxide straight from ambient air and releases it on demand into indoor farms — greenhouses and vertical farms typically add CO2 to their grow rooms to boost crop yields by 20–40%, but current methods (burning fossil fuels, liquid CO2 tanks, dry ice, or fermentation) are expensive, hazardous, and hard to scale. Aetherworks' modular, on-site approach is meant to eliminate the transportation costs and safety risks of those alternatives while giving growers a renewable, on-demand CO2 source. The company has since expanded its ambitions to also improve indoor air quality and reduce carbon footprint in commercial buildings via a DAC/HVAC system. Aetherworks won the top $40,000 prize at the 2023 Startup Texas SBIR/STTR Innovation Competition, a program run by the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation (BCIC) in partnership with UTRGV's Entrepreneurship and Commercialization Center (ECC) and the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES).
CEO Hector Valdez brings over a decade of business administration experience (he holds an MBA), while CTO Brandan Neece has an academic background in advanced physics and mathematics and personally designed, built, and tested the company's benchtop DAC prototype. The two co-founders had been working together for about a year and a half by the time of their 2023 Startup Texas application, having founded the company in Brownsville in January 2022. Before Startup Texas, Aetherworks also went through the Expanding Frontiers Accelerator Program, a South Texas nonprofit focused on building the commercial space ecosystem in the region.
Founders: Hector Valdez (CEO, MBA) and Brandan Neece (CTO)
Program: 2023 Startup Texas SBIR/STTR Innovation Competition
Website: aetherworks.us