biomineralization
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Loren Burnett Is Teaching Concrete to Borrow a Trick From the Sea
After five exits, the Colorado founder chose a harder material problem: turning microalgae, mineral chemistry and patient commercialization into concrete with a smaller carbon bill.
Ronn Friedlander
Ronn Friedlander is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Aeronaut Brewing Company in Somerville, Massachusetts. A New Jersey native who came to Boston in 2009 for a PhD in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, he traded a career in medical engineering and biomaterials research for a brewery built on microbiology. He cultivates wild and custom yeast strains in an in-house lab, scaling them in a bioreactor from pilot pours to 500-gallon batches, and helped grow Aeronaut from a living-room homebrew operation into a regional craft beer brand with a second 'Cannery' facility in Everett and a 2023 strategic merger with Dorchester Brewing under the Tasty Liquid Alliance.
Mark Ranalli
Mark Ranalli is the founder, president and CEO of BioSqueeze Inc., a Butte, Montana company that uses biomineralization - natural soil bacteria that grow limestone - to seal microscopic leaks in oil and gas wells and stop fugitive methane. A serial entrepreneur who previously built and led companies in publishing and telecommunications with workforces topping 700, he holds an electrical engineering and computer science degree from Stanford and an MBA from Dartmouth's Tuck School, and has served as a business-school dean. After scaling consumer-internet ventures, he turned to the unglamorous, high-stakes problem of leaky wellbores, backing a decade of Department of Energy and Montana State University research with a $7.4 million Series A.