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The factory will be the first in the world building EcoMotor’s “opoc,” opposed piston, opposed cylinder engine, at a commercial scale. When it starts production in 2014, the factory will aim to produce 150,000 engines per year. There’s also an adjacent site that could expand production to 400,000 engines per year down the road.

Strategic deals with huge Chinese companies are becoming a valuable way for Valley cleantech startups to move into commercial production and actually have a chance at succeeding. In particular Khosla Ventures has been adept as of late at helping its companies navigate deals in China.

Chinese parts company Wanxiang invested $420 million into GreatPoint Energy – a company based in Cambridge, Mass. that converts coal into cleaner-burning natural gas — in order to commercialize GreatPoint’s technology in China. LanzaTech, which turns gases emitted from industrial processes into biofuels and biochemicals, is working with China’s largest steel producer, Baosteel, as well as Chinese coal producer Yankuang Group. Khosla Ventures has invested in both of these firms.

By partnering with a giant like Zhongding, EcoMotors doesn’t have to raise and spend a lot of money on infrastructure. In return, Zhongding will sell the engines domestically in China — these particular engines will be powerful ones used for generators, off-road vehicles and commercial vehicles. Chung called the strategy “cleantech done right.”

EcoMotors’ engine can be 20 to 50 percent more efficient, 20 to 25 percent lower in cost to buy, and half the size and half the weight of a traditional engine. For car manufacturers the capital savings are even greater — at 30 to 40 percent — when using EcoMotors engine to build an efficient vehicle. When placed in a passenger light weight vehicle, the engine could deliver a 100 MPG, 5-passener, car.

The Chinese car market, as well as the engine market, are the largest and fastest growing in the world. And the Chinese government has set very aggressive goals to reduce the country’s air pollution and carbon emissions.

EcoMotors is a particularly unusual investment for a venture capital firm because the internal combustion hasn’t seen much innovation in decades. But the global trends of needing this innovation are clear: more and more countries are pushing for lowered car emissions, air pollution is a massive problem throughout developing countries, and the cars that will catch on in the price conscious developing markets will be cars that use fuel efficiently and thus save their customers money. Other startups working on efficient engines include Pinnacle Engines, Achates Power, Grail Engine Technologies, and Transonic Combustion.

Updated at 3:00PM PST, April 9, with mention of the deal with Baosteel, China’s largest steel producer.

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Aquion Energy, based in Pittsburgh and founded in 2007, is using basic materials like sodium and water to build modular batteries that will be able to provide energy storage services for the power grid. The technology was developed out of Carnegie Mellon University by founder and chief technology officer Jay Whitacre.

The company’s battery pairs a carbon anode with a sodium-based cathode, and a water-based electrolyte shuttles ions between the two electrodes during charging and discharging. Many batteries have solvent-based electrolytes.

Aquion Energy employees assembling batteries at a rotary dial table

The purpose of using basic materials is to make a battery that is super low cost. That’s one reason why Aquion is focused on stationary applications, like the grid, where lower energy density can be an acceptable trade-off for lower costs and longer life. The battery can also withstand a wide range of temperatures without losing storage capacity, so could be installed alongside a solar installation without sapping a lot of energy for air conditioning to keep the batteries cool.

Aquion Energy has been planning on building a factory in Pennsylvania that could make its sodium batteries starting this year. About a year ago Aquion said it had leased a facility from the Regional Industrial Development Corporation in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, and the company hopes the factory could create 400 jobs by the end of 2015.

Such a factory could cost between $75 million and $80 million to build, so it’s likely this funding will go towards moving into production. In the summer of 2011 Aquion raised $20 million. The Department of Energy has also supported Aquion’s technology development with a $5 million stimulus grant.

Kleiner Perkins’ David Wells played a key role in helping incubate this technology. Whitacre and Wells started talking in late 2007 and a year later Kleiner sponsored an incubator at Carnegie Mellon for Whitacre to develop the tech. Following that, Whitacre spun off the venture and began to work on commercializing the battery.

Bill Gates has also invested in battery startup Ambri (formerly called Liquid Metal Battery), which like Aquion is building a grid battery and looking to begin production in the coming years. Gates has backed at least 5 battery startups, according to a talk he gave back in 2010.

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This spring marks YC’s 16th demo day, and compared to the first one I covered in August that featured more than 80 companies, today’s smaller batch of 47 looks is presenting at a slower pace that’s certainly easier for investors and the press to digest. But as YC co-founder Paul Graham noted, even if investors can focus a little more because the initial process was more selective, it won’t be that much easier for them to pick winners:

“It’s going to be just as hard to tell who’s good,” he said. “It’s not because of the format of demo day that it’s hard to tell who’s good. It’s because it’s actually hard to tell who’s good,” he said. “I mean, even we can’t tell who’s good,” he joked.

About one-third of the startups presenting on Tuesday were presented off the record, which means they’re still in stealth mode and the press agreed not to write about them. The rest of the companies are divided into two batches, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Here are my five picks from the morning batch that you should take a look at:

Airware

Airware is a building a platform for drone software that allows customers to to manage cost-effective, small aircraft. The company allows drone manufacturers to use its hardware and APIs and then focus on the software that’s specific to the industry that requires a drone. The company explains the idea on its website: “Our os-Series Autopilots integrate hardware, tailored to specific needs, with an open architecture. This combination gives our autopilots the flexibility to be used on both development and production aircraft platforms, enabling UAS manufacturers to rapidly develop diverse and innovative UAS for commercial and military applications, while creating and maintaining intellectual property.”

SimplyInsured

SimplyInsured aims to provide a Kayak-like service for small business owners who are looking to compare the cost of picking different insurance plans for employees. The company is looking to cut out the traditional insurance brokers who relied on paper, fax, and estimates, and replace that business with a digital process that would immediately provide business owners with quotes. The company is hoping to take advantage of new Obamacare regulations that limit the effect of health insurance brokers, and target businesses that are still in the under-50 employee size.

Bitnami

Bitnami describes itself as the “app store for server software,” letting IT buyers have an app store-like experience when purchasing software to run either on the desktop, on company servers, or in the cloud. The company lists employees from companies like MasterCard, General Electric, and Boeing as customers, and said the company is already bringing in “millions” in profit.

Microryza

Microryza wants to “turn everyone with a credit card into a modern day patron of science,” as co-founder Cindy Wu explained. The company has created a crowdsourcing platform that allows individuals to contribute money toward scientific research, bypassing the traditional pathways for funding tenured professors at universities, and instead opening it up to a wider audience of donors. Bill Gates wrote on his blog about the company’s efforts to support scientific research that would benefit developing countries. Wu highlighted several projects that have been funded through Microryza, including a paleontologist who will be doing an excavation and sharing his findings with backers along the way.

Watsi

Watsi is a particularly notable startup for Y Combinator because it’s the first (intentional, Graham noted) nonprofit startup to come through YC’s ranks. The company has built a platform where individuals can crowdfund medical treatment and surgeries for individuals, starting with a medical clinic in Nepal but quickly growing to other locations. So far, the site is now funding treatments for up to 17 patients per week.

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Thursday, March 7th

• Here’s what cell phone coverage looks like for SXSW
• Bill Gates: education needs much more than just 1 percent of R&D spending

Friday, March 8th

• Liftoff! Your design plus a 3-D printer could power the next rockets in space
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Saturday, March 9th

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• The internet of weird things at SXSW: smart porta potties, light books and a robot zen gardener
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• Elon Musk on his one regret from the NYT incident, spaceship scares & Russian missiles
• Dalton Caldwell on our software choices: You are what you eat
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Sunday, March 10th

• 5 things I’ve learned in 24 hours as a SXSW newbie
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• “Finding out who your real friends are”: How David Carr views paid content
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Monday, March 11th

• Why the pencil is still the most important tool for digital designers
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But, speaking to a packed auditorium of educators and technologists at the SXSWedu education technology conference in Austin, Bill Gates said that given the impact of education on all other parts of society, investment in the sector is “absolutely not” enough.

“If you had to say what is the sector of the economy you’d like the most R&D, the most risk-taking in, because any improvement you make benefits all the other areas of the economy and, more from an equity point of view, allows the country to deliver on its promise of equal opportunity, you’d think that education would be a very high R&D sector. It never has been,” according to the co-founder of Microsoft and head of the multi-billion-dollar Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  “We’re going to have to grow this.”

Advancements in computing, the growing penetration of technology (particularly mobile devices) and the rise of cloud storage have helped make this a “special time for technology in education,” Gates said.

But he also acknowledged that in the late 1990s and other periods, the industry similarly thought that technology could make a dent in improving education and the promised revolutionary advancements never happened.

“Obviously, it begs the question: is it like that time when we were kind of naïve? We can think through that those things weren’t very deep and now it’s pretty obvious that they weren’t going to do that much,” he said. “But there was this belief and so we have to check ourselves and say ‘is it really different this time?’ I think we have data from the early things that really show that it is. It’s just fundamentally very different technology.”

Digital divide still an issue

Gates also made the important point that while technology is pushing its way into the hands of more students, the uneven access of Internet access needs to be addressed.

“People talk about the hardware but, in fact, if we take any reasonable time period, even two years, you’re going to spend more on your Internet connection than you do on that hardware,” he said. “So making sure so that’s either pervasive in the home or public spaces that students have easy access to that becomes pretty important, particularly, if you’re going to expect a lot of ongoing activity outside the classroom.”

When Gates took the stage, many in the audience rose to give the Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist a standing ovation. Over the past few years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has become a major player in education (clearly evident in the number of sponsored events, banners and panels related to the foundation at SXSWedu). But as the keynote continued, some of the commentary on Twitter turned more critical, highlighting the split composition of the conference attendees and a feeling that Gates didn’t go deep enough into issues that need more attention.

One ed tech thought leader wrote:

THIS MAN HAS NO IDEA WTF HE IS TALKING ABOUT #SXSWEDU

— Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) March 7, 2013

Another audience member said:

#sxswedu #edtech Agree with twittersphere on the @billgates talk. Cheerleading tech but no deep-diving into user (teacher/parent) challenges

— Nitya Narasimhan (@nitya) March 7, 2013

I agree that while he provided important context around why education technology is growing, I was hoping for more. He didn’t provide the bold statements or visionary messages one might expect from a concluding keynote speaker, and especially one who has supported technology in education as much as Gates and his foundation have.

But, the reaction to his speech really drove home that the conference, like ed tech at large, includes many stakeholders with different interests and perspectives. While those in the audience closer to technology may have found Gates’ comments lacking, educators who spend more of their time thinking about managing classrooms than big tech trends seemed to think it was a success. The media specialist next to me, for example, said she found Gates’ keynote “very inspiring.”

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Kempin, who left Microsoft in 2002, was the exec who ran the company’s cash cow OEM business. He was the guy who cut the deals with hardware makers who bundled Microsoft Windows and Office on their machines. Those negotiations were by most accounts brutal, leaving hardware partners like Dell and HP reeling. They also led some to call Kempin Microsoft’s Dark Angel. And now he’s peddling a book on Microsoft and is penning a series of blogs for ReadWrite.

Here are the some of his suggestions for Microsoft from his first post:

1: Microsoft needs a tech guru. 

Kempin writes:

“The company needs a bold and charismatic executive with bona fide technical credentials to head all of its product divisions. This dynamic leader must not only serve as the main spokesperson for all products, but he or she must also inspire and command the respect of developers. (Unfortunate Ray Ozzie did not survive in this role, and the one who came after him, Craig Mundie, was from the beginning the wrong person.)”

No kidding. This is true, and it was also true when Bill Gates started stepping back from day-to-day duties at Microsoft. Even when he dubbed Ozzie his successor as chief software architect in 2006, many wondered why he didn’t go for a younger, new-age thinker; a response to the Google guys. No one doubted Ozzie’s tech vision, but by that time Microsoft had already “missed” the internet and had to make up for lost time. Ozzie was of the same generation as Gates and Ballmer. The feeling was Microsoft really needed an infusion of new blood. Ozzie was new to Microsoft but he was rooted in the same client-server world they came from. For what it’s worth, Microsoft is bleeding many of its long-time execs with Robbie Bach, J Allard and Steven Sinofsky all exiting over the past two years.

2: Go easy on the enterprise schtick

Kempin said Microsoft’s focus on enterprise customers was lucrative but hurt the company with consumers.

“… its reputation as an innovative tech leader deteriorated in the public eye. Once cool, today Microsoft is a well-oiled money machine, but the contagious excitement around the time when Windows 95 launched is long gone …. That torch has passed to the Apples, Googles, Twitters, and Facebooks of this world.”

My take: I’m not sure anyone ever thought of Microsoft as “cool.” The big flash-bang Windows 95 event was fun; but cool? Hardly. Jay Leno hosted and even in 1995 Leno was your father’s talk show host. Even many language and compiler geeks found Borland a much more amenable culture than Microsoft.

It’s true that Microsoft has gotten too enterprise-oriented. In fact, it appears hell-bent to replicate Oracle and IBM at a time when many question the relevance of those companies in a consumer IT focused world.  Even Microsoft Surface is painted with an “Office” paintbrush. Exceptions to this rule: Xbox and Kinect — which probably doesn’t carry the Microsoft brand on purpose. The reason companies update Windows and Office is to stay legal, not because of any compelling new features. Sad but true.

3: Microsoft needs to go back to school.

Kempin writes:

“The US school system is antiquated and needs to be brought into the 21st century. This presents an opportunity for Microsoft to engage and help teachers, parents, and children to excel.”

Assuming here that excel is not a pun, he has a point. Most students use Google Docs (and most of the students I know personally are using it on MacBooks.) And when is the last time you heard a student (or anyone) request a Dell (or HP or Acer) laptop running Windows?

Kempin thinks Microsoft (with help from its big cool philanthropic friend The Gates Foundation) should just underwrite a complete re-do of technology in the nation’s schools. It would be a bold move. But Microsoft still needs to make products that people want to buy, not products that they accept because they have to.

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Photo: OnInnovation

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, took to Reddit and chatted about scores of issues. I found this one bit particularly interesting. While he might not preside over Microsoft like he once did, Gates is an astute observer of technology trends.

Robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at “computers”. Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways.

Of his other comments, I found this one pretty telling and it resonated with me:

If the microprocessor had NOT come along I am not sure what I would have done. Maybe medicine or theoretical math but it is hard to say.

And here is what he had to say about Steve Jobs:

He and I respected each other. Our biggest joint project
was the Mac where Microsoft had more people on the project than Apple did as we wrote a lot of applications. I saw Steve regularly over the years including spending an afternoon with him a few months before he tragically passed away.

Does he still code and if so in which language?

Not as much as I would like to. I write some C, C# and some Basic. I am surprised new languages have not made more progress in simplifying programming. It would be great if most high school kids were exposed to programming…

On a more macro topic, what needs changing in the world that money cannot help?

It would be nice if all governments were as rational as the Nordic governments – reaching compromise and providing services broadly. The Economist had a nice special section on this last week. Africa governments have often been weak but you can’t write a check to change that. Fortunately the average quality is going up. Mo Ibrahim tracks this in a great way. (http://www.moibrahimfoundation.org/IIAG/)

Which world-wide health cause could be solved with just a bit more in terms of attention and resources?

Polio is the first thing to get done since we are close. Within 6 years we will have the last case. After that we will go after malaria and measles. Malaria kills over 500,000 kids every year mostly in Africa and did not get enough attention until the last decade. We also need vaccines to prevent HIV and TB which are making progress…

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The players

One of the companies that’s the farthest along is Solazyme, a South San Francisco-based company that went public in the spring of 2011. Solazyme was one of the first firms to focus on the alternative chemicals and personal care markets, developing a small but steady revenue stream as it braced itself for the difficulty of churning out its algae oil at a scale and cost that can compete with oil for transportation.

But Solazyme is now at the brink of ramping up its algae oil for fuel, too. This week the company said that its Brazilian joint venture with food processing giant Bunge — called Solazyme Bunge Produtos Renováveis — has received approval for a $120 million loan from the Brazilian Development Bank to build out its first commercial-scale algae fuel factory in Brazil. The factory is already under construction (it started in the summer of 2012) next to Bunge’s sugarcane mill in São Paulo (it uses sugar for a feedstock). Solazyme hopes it will be ready to go by the fourth quarter of 2013. Initially it will produce 100,000 metric tons per year, but eventually by 2016 it’s supposed to make 300,000 metric tons annually.

Solazyme also plans to reach commercial scale of its algae fuel in the U.S. soon, using a factory in Clinton, Iowa owned by agriculture giant ADM. That plant is supposed to make 20,000 metric tons of algae oil per year in early 2014, and eventually 100,000 metric tons per year. It also has its own smaller scale development factory in Peoria, Illinois.

Sapphire Energy is another company that is looking to cross through the so-called Valley of Death from low volume production to commercial scale that can one day compete with oil. The company has a 2,200-acre algae growing farm in Columbus, New Mexico, which has 70 ponds, each the size of a football field, as well as a refinery on site. The New Mexico refinery reportedly started producing oil in low volumes last summer and by 2014 is supposed to be able to make 1.5 million gallons of algae crude per year, and 10,000 barrels a day by 2018.

Sapphire and Solazyme are attacking the algae oil industry with different approaches. Solazyme grows its algae in closed fermentation tanks, while Sapphire is growing it in the open air on large plots of land. Open air ponds could theoretically be cheaper, but they face the problem of making sure they don’t get contaminated and disturbed by outside elements.

Another company working on algae fuel is Synthetic Genomics, which is the brainchild of genomics guru Craig Venter. Venter beat the U.S. government at being the first to sequence the human genome, and also led his team in recent years to be the first to make the world’s first synthetic bacterial cell, called the first artificial life form by many. The researchers built a synthetic chromosome and inserted it into a living bacterial cell, where it took over the cell and became an entirely new life form.

Synthetic Genomics was able to score a massive, potentially $600 million, development deal with Exxon. Last spring, Synthetic Genomics bought a 81 acre site in the Imperial Valley, near the Salton Sea, and it plans to scale up and test its algae strains there with 42 open ponds.

The costs

Scaling up all these new factories and farms take a colossal amount of money. But they’re needed because the algae oil needs to be produced at a huge scale to get it cheap enough to compete with oil.

The costs no doubt take a toll on these pioneers. Solazyme’s net losses are growing, and the company lost $58.52 million for the nine months ended September 2012, up from a $38.32 million net loss for the same time the year prior. The company will not likely be profitable for years, and it’s helping fund its production deal with ADM with equity. This week Solazyme said that it intends to sell $100 million worth of notes to help it build its projects.

Sapphire Energy raised at least $300 million from venture capitalists and investors like Cascade Investment, which is owned by Bill Gates. Good thing Sapphire got that money in the bank, because few venture capitalists these days are willing to put in hundreds of millions of dollars into such infrastructure for clean power projects. Sapphire also got $50 million in stimulus funding and a $54.4 million federal loan guarantee.

Synthetic Genomics has its potentially $600 million development deal with Exxon, though I’m not sure the status of that currently. Venter has said that biofuels made from algae that will be able to scale, and compete with oil, will have to be synthesized and will not come from nature. The Exxon deal was originally to research naturally occurring algae cells only (not synthetic ones), but Venter hopes Exxon will come around to funding the research based on synthetic algae cells.

Who knows if algae fuel will ever get there — if Venter is right, it’ll have to be a completey new type of synthetic super microbe that delivers algae oil as efficiently as possible. But 2013 is a year in which these three algae fuel players look to scale, and will spend a lot of money to get there.

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That’s why we wanted to take the opportunity to highlight some of the rare next-generation battery startups out there that are using nanotechnology, new printing technologies, high-powered computing, and other innovations to produce the future’s batteries. With a little luck, strong leadership, and maybe some government support, these battery startups could change the way the world stores energy. Also make sure to check out an advanced battery report (subscription required) recently published by our research service GigaOM Pro.

1). Ambri: Ambri is one of the most well known battery startups out there. Formerly called Liquid Metal Battery, the company was founded by MIT Professor Don Sadoway, who is probably the only battery startup founder ever to score an interview on The Colbert Report. It’s also got investors Bill Gates, Vinod Khosla, and oil giant Total. Ambri is developing a battery for the power grid using molten salt sandwiched between two layers of liquid metal. The battery is still at least a year and a half from commercialization.

2). Imprint Energy: Using zinc, instead of lithium, and screen printing technology, Imprint Energy has developed a battery that is ultra-thin, energy-dense, flexible, and low cost. Because the battery can be made thin and pliable, the company hopes to target companies making wearables. Imprint Energy is already making small volumes of its batteries for pilot customers, and plans to ramp up to commercial scale manufacturing in a couple years.

3). Alveo Energy: Half-year-old startup Alveo Energy is looking to develop and commercialize a battery made out of water, Prussian blue dye — which is used to color things like blue jeans, crayons and paint — iron and copper. The battery is meant to be ultra low cost and long lasting, and if successful, could help deliver breakthrough energy storage technology for the power grid. The research behind the battery was done by Stanford PhD student turned entrepreneur Colin Wessells, and Stanford Professor Professor Robert Huggins, and the company managed to snag a $4 million grant from the Department of Energy’s high risk early stage program called ARPA-E.

4). Pellion: Pellion went about finding the perfect battery chemistry in a totally disruptive way: the researchers created advanced algorithms and computer models that enabled them to test out 10,000 potential cathode materials to fit with its magnesium anode for its battery. Pellion co-founder, MIT Professor Gerbrand Ceder, also helped develop The Materials Genome Project at MIT, which is a program based on using computer modelling and virtual simulations to deliver innovation in materials. Pellion says its magnesium batteries could have very high energy density — higher than current lithium ion batteries. The startup is backed by the ARPA-E program as well as Khosla Ventures.

5). QuantumScape: QuantumScape is an early stage stealth battery startup that is truly a product of Silicon Valley. The company is commercializing technology from Stanford University, it was founded by Infinera co-founder and CEO Jagdeep Singh, and it’s backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Khosla Ventures. The company is trying to create a battery — called the all-electron battery — that has the density of fossil fuels. The technology being used is a new method for stacking trace amounts of materials together.

6). Envia: A year ago battery startup Envia unveiled that its lithium ion battery technology could deliver an electric car with a 300-mile range for a cost of around $25,000 to $30,000. Founded in 2007, Envia developed a low-cost cathode and then paired that with a silicon carbon anode, and a high-voltage electroloyte. The company is backed by General Motors, Japanese giant Asahi Kasei, Pangaea Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and the DOE’s ARPA-E program.

7). GELI: Startup GELI isn’t making new types of batteries, but it’s developing an operating system and software for grid batteries. Companies, building owners and utilities can buy GELI-enabled batteries and use the batteries for services like providing energy storage for solar systems, or for storing and discharging energy when the demand for energy becomes out of balance with supply.

8). Sila Nanotechnologies: Sila Nanotechnologies was founded in 2011 by Valley entrepreneurs working with the Georgia Institute of Technology. The company is building a lighter lithium ion battery that has double the capacity of current lithium ion batteries. The company received a $1.73 million grant from the DOE.

9). Boulder Ionics: Boulder Ionics is working on breakthroughs for the electrolyte part of the battery, which is the guts of the battery, where the ions flow across between the anode and the cathode. The company is developing an electrolyte made of ionic liquids that can function at high temperatures and voltages and is lower cost to make than the more standard way to make ionic liquids.

10). Prieto Battery: The brainchild of Colorado State chemistry professor Amy Prieto, Prieto Battery is making a lithium ion battery that it says can charge in five minutes and last for five times longer than the standard lithium ion batteries. The company is leveraging nanotechnology to develop tiny copper nanowires that make up the anode of the battery, and the electrolyte is made of a solid polymer.

11). Sakti3: Sakti3 is a startup in Michigan that is building a lithium ion battery that is entirely solid state, and has a high energy density. Making it from solid polymers means it won’t have those flammable liquids and could be a lot safer for electric cars. The company is backed by Khosla Ventures, GM Ventures and Itochu.

12). Xilectric: Xilectric is re-making the “Edison Battery,” which traditionally has been a rechargeable nickel iron battery. But Xilectric is making it out of aluminum and magnesium, which it says will make it more low cost and with higher performance. The company was awarded a $1.73 million grant from the DOE.

13). Amprius: Based on research from Stanford’s Yi Cui, Amprius is working on lithium ion batteries that use a nanostructured silicon material for the anode. The nanostructured material could shrink the anode fourfold and allow a fourfold increase in energy density. The company has raised at least $25 million from Trident Capital, VantagePoint Venture Partners, IPV Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Eric Schmidt.

Updated: This article was updated on January 14th at 10:30AM to correct the name of the show that Ambri’s founder did an interview on, from The Daily Show to The Colbert Report.

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