Sunthetics joins a select group of hardtech disruptors

Tandon-bred startup Sunthetics recently won admission to the Heritage Group Accelerator Powered by Techstars , a highly competitive program that will allow them to spend 13 weeks scaling their businesses and go to-market strategies under the guidance of experts in various hardtech industry specializations. 

The program aims to support disruptive companies focused on pioneering next-gen solutions that serve core business needs, from materials science to systems automation, and it accepts only 10 – started by “founders with hustle, market awareness, and intimate buyer knowledge,” as organizers state – each year.

Sunthetics unquestionably fits that bill. The company is developing sustainable and electrically driven chemical processes to replace traditional heat-powered ones, and it’s now pairing its reactors with a machine-learning platform to streamline the process. Soon after being founded in 2018 by Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Miguel Modestino and two of his students, Myriam Sbeiti and Daniela Blanco (now alumni), it garnered a $100,000 Technology Venture Prize at the NYU Stern $300K Entrepreneurship Challenge, the $20,000 top prize in the InnoVention Competition at Tandon, a $20,000 Stage II VentureWell grant, and top prize in the hotly contested Greentech category of the University Startup World Cup. (That’s not to mention Blanco’s 2019 Global Student Entrepreneur of the Year title and her 2020 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize.)

Of their very latest laurel, Sbeiti says, “Given how competitive the program is, to be selected is an honor and accomplishment.” But as anyone who has followed Sunthetics’ progress up until know can easily predict, it’s certain to be just the latest in a constantly growing list.