Today we have Sassan Teymouri, who is the CEO of Omniscent, who's joining us for a conversation on some exciting technologies that they have implemented using sensors that we've been talking about in the class. Sassan, first welcome to the course. Thank you. Hello to everyone. Sassan, you certainly of course, are an alumni of the University of Michigan and the story of Omniscent as a company started here in all of the research labs, correct? Correct. Tell us, first of all, of course, go blue and welcome back virtually to Ann Arbor. Tell us about the journey of Omniscent, how it started, what it is, about the company. Sure. Back in 2016, I was designing the storage for supercomputers and building the fastest storage in the world for many Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies. I wanted to do something different that I could see impact the world, the health, the world and so forth. In one of the meetings that University of Michigan had, the Webinars or conferences, University of Michigan had, in Silicon Valley, I met Professor Yogesh Gianchandani, the director of the WIMS lab at the University of Michigan. I asked him, "What is the most mature technology that you are excited about it and you think there's a chance for commercialization?" He mentioned that these Micro GC, Micro gas chromatograph chip that they have developed for the last 10 years. It is a very ripe technology and it could be used. That was the start of the company. I was very excited to see that the smallest footprint, what they can do and I took on myself to go and spend six months talking to different customers, regulatories, other customers, commercial customers and to see what their response is. The response was very positive. I talked to CARB, which is the California Air Resource Board. It regulates the gas industries and pollutant and so forth. In California, they're very prominent part of the government. I talked to one of the executives and I showed them what we have and he said, "Where have you guys been? This technology is so advanced that we could use it like yesterday." Those were the very encouragement from the industrial, and we decided to go raise some money and build the technology and commercialize it. That's what the journey started. We raised some fund, we started hiring some talents, and we had a tie with the University of Michigan, which was very helpful and we started the whole company. Great. So this is of course, the WIMS Center headed by Professor Yogesh Gianchandani, is very well known in the University of Michigan. In fact, the university is very famous for that center and that work. It's so exciting to hear the technology actually came out of the university's work. You'd mentioned about GC sensors, primarily a sensor technology, can you explain what that GC maintaining constraint for our learners? What exactly does it mean? Sure. Gas chromatography is a technology that has been around for last now 30, 40 years. That technology is used to detect different type of gases and is still very used in industry today. Starting from food industry to health care to oil and gas, you name it. When you want to analyze a compound in gaseous format or liquid format to see what corner compounds exist in that particular sample, you use gas chromatography. Then what it is, is that basically you collect the sample, you inject the sheet or excite the samples in a gaseous format. The compounds start moving in the columns, these are the U-shape structures that the sample moves. Based on the molecular weight of the sample, some of the compounds fall behind, some of them come earlier from the time that you inject the heat or you excite the sample, to the time that you detect at the end of the columns. That's what we call retention time. Based on retention time, you can tell what compounds you have. Now, the thing exciting about the University of Michigan development was that they shrunk this huge machine, that's the table size machine into a little chip that's not more than five centimeters on the side. That by itself is an IoT. They also integrated pre-concentrate where you collect the sample, all in one chip. That was quite exciting and very advanced. I felt that this is the really leading edge of the technology, should be commercialized and I was right, the type of customers we have certifies that point. If I understand correctly, this chip that is being developed at the University of Michigan, we can understand this is a very sophisticated sensor which is complex and actually basically analyzes the gases through gas chromatography and then identifies the component that are there in the gas. Fantastic. This is exciting. Just the sensor technology that is an invention at the University of Michigan, then you use upon this company Omniscient. Now, tell us about Omniscient as a company, as a business, what do you do? What services do you offer? The heart of this sensor technology is what we got from University of Michigan. But what we did, we built autonomous feature around this sensor where basically, if you look at our analyzer it has no buttons, no switches, no levers, nothing, it just wakes up, connects to the portal through Internet and basically from your laptop or your phone, you could control and start the experiment or the measurements, and then you get the results right away. We merged this sensor with the cloud technology in a broader picture, and there's lot of advancements we made during the way where information gets transferred to the portal, it gets backed up there. If for any reason Internet gets disconnected, we store the data, continue collecting data, store it, and then transfer it. On top of it, we build some warning systems because where this device goes, the people using this device, they want to know if there are pollutants in the air. There is emission that they didn't know about it, unwanted emission. They want to know that, so we have lot of warnings that the portals generate, they send text, they send email to command centers and they warn them that, "Hey we're detecting benzene," for example, which is very carcinogenic material regulated by EPA and mostly detect at the, command center needs to come out and take actions to contain that emission. That's the the company in a nutshell, we brought IoT technology. We took the sensor for University of Michigan, combined it, reapplied it to different fields of the industry. That's the product and journey. Great. You have these products that are actually sensing the gases in your customer premises, they're all connected back to your cloud platform where they can have a common place where you can analyze, monitor the data and also you can raise some warning signals and things like that based on the impact. Wonderful. This is exciting. What kind of customers? For example, can you give us some examples of your customers in the manufacturing industries or other industries? Sure. One of the things that comes to my mind which we're engaged right now is that oil and gas refineries. EPA has passed a ruling back in 2015 that regulated the benzene at the refineries boundary. You're supposed to read three parts per billion or less. If you're reading benzene at the refineries boundary above three part per billion that means you're violating this rule. Lot of these refineries started monitoring the benzene at their perimeters and reported to EPA, they're supposed to report to EPA during that thing. One of our customers has a refinery in Corpus Christi that has a two-way refineries next to each other and there is emission of benzene. They don't know who is responsible for it, and there's a big fine. They get pointed to, yes, if proven that they are violating, they're going to have to pay fine. What they do, they use our product as a production to put it under their facility. The product works 24/7. As the level of the benzene rises or we record report that there's a violation, they look at the direction of the wind. We have a wind sensor that tells the speed of the wind and the direction. Based on that, they figure out where the emission is coming from. In some cases, lately, that showed that benzene coming from the adjacent refinery, not from them. That was one instance. The other instance was that there's a truck came in but was leaking and it parked there and they were doing some work and immediately the benzene level went up. They got warning, they went out there and detected and they told the truck to move it out because it's causing trouble. This is the production example or one of our big customers the Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan. They use this one at there are many areas that they have applications, like one of them is on the shipping and receiving dock. There could be lots of spillage of a toluene, which is another VOCs. They use this device to detect that and take steps to remedy. Yeah, I can understand. I mean, I can see the Dow Chemicals is one of the largest chemicals manufacturer and they will immediately find this very useful. In fact, even for general manufacturers, I think this can be a great safety device, there is any leak, or any place then they can actually put this as- Anybody that has a VOC in their premises, well, VOC stands for volatile organic compound like benzene, toluene, xylene, styrene, metadata, and so forth. These compounds use abundantly in large quantities in different manufacturing around the world. People want to take actions to make sure that they don't escape, they don't have emissions, they don't have a leak. Our device can go there and autonomously report the situation. This is pretty exciting and relevant to what we've been talking about in the class about the applications of sensor technologies. Sassan, one last question before we end up. Where do you see the future of these technologies in terms of the, what are the potential applications and where do you see the market? Which industries? Well, no, especially the next two, three years? The immediate use right now is the oil and gas industry, wastewater management, industrial wastewater management, and that's a big field. Dow Chemical is obviously involved in that. Any manufacturing facility does that deals with these VOCs, they could use this technology. The next one that we've seen coming up pretty hot is that health care, medical. There's lot of work has been done in England and in Europe and some in US that they monitor patient's breath they call breath biopsy. They look at the VOC content of the breath. Based on that, they decide this is the onset of tuberculosis, this is onset of lung cancer, breast cancer, GI problems, and many other diseases. These are proven records and technology that been published. What we have not done any work on that area, but our device can be used in that front. Lately, we are part of a proposal to NIH for $4 million where they're looking for a skin wearable in real say analyzer, where they could read the patient's or the person's VOCs a getting emitted from their skin. Based on that, they could decide this is a certain diseases that a person could have. That's where the grant. So healthcare and medical is definitely heading that way of the VOCs and they're using VOC detection as a means to decide what kind of a health condition is happening with the person. Great. Thank you very much, Sassan. I mean, this is very useful and really thank you for your time. Thank you.
