Latest / Diagnosing Dx / Could Genomic Testing Be as Accessible as a Smartphone? Ana Cornell, CEO & Founder of Acorn Genetics

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Could Genomic Testing Be as Accessible as a Smartphone? Ana Cornell, CEO & Founder of Acorn Genetics · Diagnosing Dx

• David Filby: Welcome to the show this week, Anna. How are you? Ana Cornell: I'm doing well. How are you? David Filby: I'm good, thank you. Where in the world are you? Ana Cornell: Calling from Boston, Cambridge more specifically, but Boston USA. David Filby: You're not from Boston originally, no, right? You've also got offices in the Midwest. So where did you grow up and where did you settle? Ana Cornell: So family and everything originally from Bucharest, Romania, but spent most of my, childhood and upbringing in Chicago. I went to school there too. So I went to Northwestern for about two and a half years before I dropped out and started the company. So we were based in Chicago since 2021 all the way to now we still have an office. But I think this is the year we're actually gonna be closing down the office and then moving everything mostly to Boston and then a little bit to SF. David Filby: Interesting. Okay, so we're gravitating towards the major hubs. Ana Cornell: Bicoastal. David Filby: Bicoastal. I like that, that's great. Well we've got quite a really exciting story actually. I think when you and I connected, it was incredible to hear about what you've achieved and there's a massive word around revenue, profitability and cash flow positive these things are, it's unheard of. So let's get into it. But before we do that, why don't you introduce yourself, your background and career and then we'll get into Acorn. Ana Cornell: Yeah, I got into the wild world of genomics probably about a little bit over 10 years ago. shortly after my family, I kept having various family members get diagnosed with the same genetically linked condition. So I kinda set up to see if I also had it. It was somewhat critical for life planning to know if I did. And it links to a number of things, including fertility, longevity, various health problems. So obviously the sooner I could know about it the better. And found it very, very difficult to actually get any sort of assessment done. So talked to my doctor. She told me it was gonna be like 10k out of pocket for a whole genome sequence. Didn't have that kind of money lying around, couldn't afford that kind of testing. So I ended up going and looking at DTC options at 23andMe's the Ancestry, if you will, those had lots of privacy concerns around them, so I wasn't willing to move forward with them. And ultimately started working in various genomics labs, trying to attend everything to do with genetics, trying to understand this condition, how it's impacting my family, what was causing it, and even attempted to like discreetly test myself one day on the devices that were looking in those labs. And that's kind of what drew me to the central problem, which is that these tools are built for like a very specific kind of testing, which is like research-oriented, right? You want to have hundreds of samples you can run at a given time for one specific mutation site. This is commonly referred to as next generation sequencing or second-gen or massively parallel sequencing. If you have 100 mice, you want to test them all for one mutation spots, you got the all react to a drug, great. If you're trying to run a whole genome test, it can be very costly, very time consuming, very labor intensive. That's ultimately why I think we haven't seen a lot of everyone getting their whole genome sequence, that becoming like a thing that every single person has access to. That never quite happened despite the technology seemingly promising it was heading that direction. So that's where I picked up the research and then went off on my own. I was working at the Gianneschi Lab at the time. This was while I was at Northwestern, studying biomedical engineering. Nathan Gianneschi, I have nothing but wonderful things to say about him. He basically let me do everything I wanted under his name. So he signed all of our NUFAB forms. So I was able to, as in an undergrad, use Northwestern Fabrication Facility, which is again unheard of, and I was running my own team, my own project. And it was thanks to him being willing to just be the name that I did everything under. And we started to investigate can we make a lower cost way of doing genomic analysis? And this manifested in a few different ways. We saw that the central problem was that the devices remained expensive and built for centralized facilities. So until you solve the centralization problem, you couldn't actually create a ubiquitous solution or significantly lower the cost. And that was the approach we took, is like, how do we make genomics and genomic analysis decentralizable? And it took us in a couple paths, one of which is our first product we have out on the market right now. Which is a low-cost qPCR-based device. So we did a little bit of work on improving the optical detection system that existed within qPCR machines, particularly in terms of miniaturizing those detection systems. And then we started working on what is still in development, but is our long-term vision: the sequencing chip. So very high level. In the world of sequencing most forms of genomic analysis use like most forms of sequencing, use some sort of biochemical changing or denaturation of the DNA. This typically also destroys the epigenome layer, which we're increasingly interested in and want to know more about. So that was obviously like not something that we we wanted our technology to do. We wanted to retain that epigenome level of information. And we didn't want to have all that high cost and very like labor intensive processes required with running these biological processes. So we pursued something that we called we use a 2D material called graphene, and we use it as our primary material for our sequencing chip. Long story short, it's a solid-based system. It does electrical-based sequencing by which we detect the nucleotide differentiation and the nucleotide sequence by just monitoring how each nucleotide, like the shape of each nucleotide, changes the electrical currents running across our chip as it travels through our nanopore. Because we're doing it electrically, we also are sequencing natively. We don't have any motor proteins that are attaching it or slowing it down, we're not doing anything that in that regard. We're just using the fact that sensors have gone in a hell of a lot faster to go ahead and capture the signal in real time. So that's where the company is. And that's why we also came to Boston, is because Boston has MIT Nano. We got into the MIT Star Nano program, and MIT has the best nano fabrication in the country. So, you know, you go where the best instruments are to make your chips. David Filby: At what point did you look at the research and go this is good enough or significant enough this is a company, this is a product that we now need to dive in and produce? because you're doing research in a lab whilst you're studying, right? So there's probably a fearlessness in the naivety of where you were in your life at that point. What happens and what advice and perspectives are you getting around you just go, Okay, this is a company. Let's go out and take on the big sequencing companies and democratize sequencing. Ana Cornell: There was a series of factors that went into my decision. So one of which was what environment we were in. It was COVID. We had just reached a couple of critical milestones also in our research where we had completed 10,000-base-pair translocation, we had clear signals. We had achieved very, very high chip yields, which historically had been the barrier for solid state sequencing technology is the production of the chips was impossible. The manufacturing was really, really difficult. The historic yields were about 0.5% and we managed to improve it to 50%. So we hit a number of key markers where we had a fairly clear signal coming through when we were doing a 10,000 base pair translocation. We were able to produce these chips for about $13.72 per chip. We could do it in our bench top in under 30 minutes. And it was the pandemic and we were being kicked out of a bunch of research labs anyway. So we were wrestling with the fact that so much of it closed off. We weren't allowed to collaborate at this part of the university. The university was still very slow to get things going. And I was also wrestling with the fact that I was very fed up with my engineering classes all being online when I'm such an in-person, practical, hands-on individual. So I don't know if you ever had to do a shop class on Zoom, it's like a waste of time. So I was like, what am I doing here? and I applied to the Thiel Fellowship on a whim. I had no idea what the Thiel Fellowship was. I had no idea how competitive it was. I had no idea that in my year there were I don't think I'm allowed to give the exact figure, but I'll say that I believe the acceptance rate was roughly about 0.03%. It was extremely low. It was something insane. And I got it. I got into the Thiel Fellowship. I did like the seven interview rounds, etc. You I went through their process and I was like, Okay, I might have stumbled into a a crazy opportunity and a crazy network. This is my time to jump. I'm not getting value from the university. Our research had hit a key point where we are getting these excellent translocation signals. We have these high yields. And even though we didn't have full sequencing or anything of that of sort, I had that opportunity, with the Thiel fellowship that also would pay for me to live while I attempted this for two years. So I was like, hey, in two years, the Thiel Fellowship, it will be an incredible experience no matter what. If this doesn't pan out, I can go back to school. If this does pan out, then this will be the best decision I ever made. And I did not go back to school. So I'll let you infer what that means. David Filby: So when you enter the Thiel Foundation, do they have an active interest in biology, biotech, life sciences, and or even, to be more granular in NGS and how that industry is developing. How much about it was that they truly believed in the product you were building was exciting and something that they wanted to back? Ana Cornell: The way they select people is off of a pattern matching that they noticed, they're like hey there's certain traits and attributes that we know lead people to become exceptional founders and exceptional entrepreneurs and that's why during the interview process not that much of it was was spent actually talking about my company and so much more of it was spent talking about myself and what my journey was to that point and what kind of what kind of kid I was a lot of the questions were more like out of the box one of them was if I handed you a $100 million right now what do you do with it and that's very clear you assess okay what does this person do when they do have funding how do they plan and allocate that? And then some of them were more strange okay what do you want written on your gravestone? very broad questions or hey what kind of kid were you? and it seemed like I checked the boxes in terms of the type of founder that they were looking for the pattern match. When I joined the fellowship I realized how well they were doing that because when I started talking with other Thiel fellows, it was as though we could immediately go to the deepest level of conversation because we'd already agreed on 90% of the assumptions. So it was bizarre because I was like, wow, these are people who have all read the same books I've read, watched the same videos, seen the same trains of thought, they'd already again, when you first start stalking with someone or debating someone, you have to go through and build yes, we agree in this. No, we don't agree this. Let's debate on this level. And then you go deeper and deeper and deeper Immediately to the deepest level of the Thiel fellows. You can some weird fact, it's like almost every single Thiel fellow I talk to wants to have 7+ kids, which is weird. Not that many people want to have 7+ kids, but it was like almost every single person, there's just there was something about something that was cohesive across it. Peter Thiel also David Filby: Wow. Ana Cornell: does have a strong interest in longevity. Which is in the realm of the universe that I was working in. Many of the other Thiel Fellow Thiel Fellow companies or founders fund backed companies are people who have put in pre-orders for the Acorn Lab, like for example. many of them are software or their services, whether they're embryo selection or IVF or whole genome like analysis, like software. We were that kind of hardware level that I saw was missing amongst the fellows. So I think from my ecosystem there was also that value that we brought. David Filby: Interesting. At the end of the two years, is there a handoff in terms of everything they've given you for two years? Are they investing in the company? Have they helped you, go on and develop the company beyond the two years? Ana Cornell: Yes, but the most of the value comes from the other fellows. the value is less from I would say the leadership of the fellowship and more from the fellows themselves. The people who have helped me like the most, especially in the last year or two since I've exited the fellowship program, have been the other fellows I met on the way. Many of which have become investors in my company, many of which have become customers. David Filby: Interesting. So let's get back to Acorn then. So the company is now almost five years old. Is that fair? Four and a half years old? So what's that four and a half years looked like and what's the milestones and development and even commercialization, how's that progressed over the four and a half years? Ana Cornell: Yeah, so on the the first couple years were the messy start, as I like to call it. It was the COVID years, we were getting kicked out of labs, everything. And that was more we were, I would say, developing the thoughts and the philosophy of the company, but less so developing the actual I would say that was definitely more of a slow start. Starting in 2021 when I dropped out, we got our own lab space in Chicago. That was the proper Acorn is taking off. We spent the next two years developing the core IP out. So that was developing the sequencing chip further. That was getting a lot of our initial data complete, as well as the first run of the SENTRI. So the SENTRI is the commercially available product right now. It is the low cost portable qPCR device. In 2024, we pretty much had a ready to go for early pilots. We were actually initially gonna launch clinically. We had over 80 clinics had signed on to purchase the first unit, first device. but ended up not being able to pursue that path because of changes in FDA regulation. There was a turning point of the company where we had 500k in the bank. We were gonna launch, we had our customers, and the FDA approval process would have cost us 250k and taking us six months when we only had, or I think it would take us three months if we had six months of runway. So it was a total non starter, eaten all of our runway, would not have been able to do it. And we had to get creative. And that's where we landed into the world of agriculture and the world of fermentation and brewing and places where, bacterial overgrowths and viral infections are so critical to monitor. And there was a total, no pun intended, green pasture, lack of tools, lack of things in that space, and like any startup, we pivoted, we took the opportunity that was in front of us. I actually remember when we first stumbled into brewing was because of a a brewery owner, friend of ours, acquaintance. It was the brewery down the street from where my co founder and I used to live just after we left Northwestern, that we had gone to all the time and he was on good terms with us, he knew us, and he was the one who told us, Hey, we have problems with overgrowths like Optobacilica and Petecoccus and wild yeast contaminants and we have no way of testing them on site unless we do culturing, which is a super tedious long process. it's seven days. It's a lot of peach additions, very annoying. Or we send it up to a lab where it's $200 per sample. I'm like, $200 per sample. We could beat that easily. So we set him up with a device, we monitored it for six months. We prevented two barrels of spoiled beer from going out the door. We saved them easily $40k in recall costs or preventing canning waste and he liked it so much he was the one who made introductions to other folks in the space where we developed our key partnerships with the Beverage Federation and Independent Brewers Alliance so we started to get tons of tractions in brewing and that also led to other deal flow coming in from agricultural groups from water testing groups we actually sold a unit to Fractile and that unit is now going to Madagascar and Uganda to do well water testing for contamination prevention. And I was actually just talking to Ryan Parks. He told me that a number of other UN backed agencies were also incredibly interested in getting these devices because the number one killer in Africa is diarrheal diseases that I believe 76% of them are caused by water contamination. And there's no way of doing current, comprehensive testing of well water. What his team was doing before was taking samples and then sending them back to Duke University in order to fully process. And he was like, Yeah, best case scenario, we can maybe do that five times a year if we had maximum funding. He's like, But we don't have maximum funding. And if you find out your well water was safe two months ago, that doesn't doesn't do you any good. So now we're gonna enable them to be able to test real time. And this is so critical for the US as well. right now, the US is continuing to have problems with cyclospora outbreaks. There was another recall because salmonella were in a bunch of jalapeños. And this is exactly what our technology was built for to test is real-time continual monitoring of water supplies, of agricultural products, any sort of beverage or liquid, any sort of plant matter we could test today for these contaminants. And yeah, that's where we found our revenue, our initial revenues coming from. That's where we found product market fit. And yeah, that part of the business is going very well. David Filby: Is there a world that direction that you've come across which I think is fantastic by the way, and obviously you wouldn't be the first Omics or genetics company to to start off in agriculture, right? And and I think the interesting thing is that you've done it so well and it seems to have just compounded and compounded. Is there a world where that is the core focus of the business forever, or is this a stepping stone and you simply must go into humans? Ana Cornell: I think that the way we're building Acorn is to kind of be that continual monitoring sensor for like any sort of water, any sort of testing. One of the things I've been talking with other founders about is for the folks who are building smart bathrooms, for example, is using our chips or our optical detection systems to be able to monitor bacterial content in sink water in real time. So whenever you brush your teeth, you can quickly assess if you like strep throat. One of the cool things about our chip is because we have that electrical based sequencing, because we retain that epigenome information, we can also get into potential longevity markers, also tumor suppressant markers as well because that's what Epchinex typically codes for. And that's the space I do want to move in. Whether or not we stay in ag forever, to me, yes, can we build a billion dollar business in ag? Absolutely. But the $10 billion, $100 billion business is to expand to every single kind of sample. And we're already setting up partnerships with municipal water testing. We already have a lot of these things in the pipeline that are expanding us beyond ag because the platform is fundamentally very scalable. The platform does not change from use case to use case to use case. It's the same device, the same hardware, same technology. The assays can be custom modified or changed, but also we're increasingly having interest from other people to build assays on top of our hardware. I like to think about Acorn as hey, we're the app store. People can build their apps on tops of us. We don't have to build every single app and every single application, every single software use case for Acorn. We're just the the bedrock for it. Like I said, we can build the billion dollar business in ag, totally possible. But it would be artificially limiting because we don't even have to make a lot of the innovative push to expand to the other markets. The big innovation hurdles are behind us. David Filby: Okay, so with the existing product it's obviously it's going really well, but you've still got much bigger goals that you want to achieve. And the future sequencing device, are you still driven by the original goal of finding and democratizing access to genetic information, especially around genetic disease, which is ultimately, the original why, what you got into? Is that still your North Star? Or now that you're because you're actually quite far along as a company, much further along than anybody would have assumed, I think. you're achieving so much. Are now are you at this point, you're like, this is our opportunity and we've gotta go grab it and you're looking at things more as a business and commercial like do you see what I mean? where do the goals now lie? Ana Cornell: No, the the The way I think about it is hey, there's a lot of ways to climb the mountain, but the summit remains the same. So David Filby: Right. Okay. Ana Cornell: this is the way we're climbing because we have traction here, we have customers, we have revenue. And revenue's like the lifeblood of the company I see a lot of startups that spend forever in fundraising and always diluting themselves excessively just to get more to get to the next research goal and get to next research goal or continually filing SBIRs or STTRs. And that's one model. And I do think that for some types of technology, that's the only model. if you're in space tech, you're not gonna be able to launch anything without $100 million under your belt. And for sequencing technologies, that was the case for a very long time, was it took $100 million dollars to get a device out. We wanted to do something different, we want to get to revenue much sooner and use that to fuel the company because when you have revenue coming and when you have customers, you also stay closer to the problem. I see a lot of people who over-engineer or spend way too much time engineering and perfecting their product when something that was three iterations ago could have worked. And what I saw with Acorn is the SENTRI cannot do all the genomic analysis that I want it to. But it can do enough for this first problem set. It can get us from, off the mountain to base camp one. So this is like step one. Base camp two is expanding to all ag, but the summit is like Acorn for people's plants and pathogens. that has always been the vision. It is for any sort of organic material. To be able to understand it, to sequence it, to analyze it epigenetically, and to use that information. Because once we truly decentralize the modality of testing for all organic material, I think we're gonna see an explosion of innovation in medicine, in science, in I think food as well. right now, a lot of these industries I feel like are artificially lagging compared to spaces like communications or transportation. Those I think are more in the future right now. And that's because of the improvements we saw in decentralization. It's because of the movements that happened in the 19th and 20th century. When we went from having, everyone had to send messages via the telegram office. That was super slow. We've had almost no innovation in communications. We put a phone in every home, we put a phone in every pocket. Now we saw an explosion in communications from social media is entirely built off of the communication explosion that happened. Like all the FaceTime, Snapchats, texting, everything, that's all built off the fact that we decentralized the means of communication. There's entire jobs now that are just like content creators that exist because of the communication explosion. Similarly, in computing, we had the same thing. Most recently, it was like NVIDIA released a new chip, that chip had powerful enough processing that you had the AI explosion. We see what we're building at Acorn, that chip level, that infrastructure level, to be that bedrock for the explosion to happen on the medicinal, on the biological processing front, on the longevity front. if we had sensors that were able to track, sensors in every single person's home, and again, privately built, data stays, in the control of the user, but people could opt in to studies, people can submit their data and you have that continual monitoring, you will see an explosion of innovation there. And that is still the vision for Acorn. the vision for Acorn is to decentralize that analysis at every level. David Filby: If decentralization works, talk to me about capital costs. Because we talked at the top of the show of how much it costs to ultimately put a large sequencer inside a central lab, which is why it's restricted to central labs. How does the capital costs differ with an Acorn product? Let's say you're putting it into far and wide places And also per test, 'cause you said, $10,000 dollars for a whole genome sequencing, but what does that look like eventually? Ana Cornell: Yeah. so we currently sell our tests for $25 on the SENTRI, which again is comparing a little bit of apples to oranges. But I do want to note that compared to traditional lab services that are usually about $200 per sample, that's already a tenth of the cost. Similarly, the chips that we produce are easily a one thousandth if not like a one hundredth, maybe one hundredth worst case scenario of the previous cost. I think that we're going to see full genomic analysis cost probably dollars by the end of this. And whether that's and potentially even pennies if we can really just get so it's just the electrical sensor just running all the time and you're just literally paying for the electricity you're using to run that. That's the more futuristic, full, probably ten years out vision. What that means is that it's almost you could be running genomic analysis passively. It can just be a thing that's happening in the background all the time forever, costing about as much as it takes for you to run an Alexa in your home. Alexa draws a little bit of electricity, a little bit of power, and then that's what's used to operate it. And there is a first-time cost of getting the system set up with your house, which would probably remain probably in the hundreds range, maybe the low thousands, because that's currently what our technology looks like it's gonna cost initially. But the upkeep, the maintenance, the continual use of it, should remain in that kind of low cents to dollars range moving forward. So that's what I'm perceiving to be the cost when we go to full decentralization. But in terms of getting something like the SENTRI setup, right now the cost is very straightforward. It's $25 per test. If you are ordering in bulk, it drops down to as low as $10 to $12. Because we also get discounts from our manufacturers like when we, order in bulk as well. For the device itself, currently we're still in the $5-10K range price point. So $10k sticker price and then discounts depending on how you qualify. I do think we're gonna drop the price in the future, probably closer to $5k. The way I see it is like I would like it to be the cost of a laptop. And if laptops are typically in that low thousands range, typically the higher end laptops can be a bit more pricey. But that's usually affordable for the average individual. most people have a laptop. Most people have a phone. If we can keep this device in that range and provide that same sort of value, I think we're very well set commercially. David Filby: So let's talk commercially. So you've mentioned revenue a number of times. What capital have you raised and how much insight can you give us on revenue generation and where you are as a company? Because you and I spoke offline about this drive Ana Cornell: Yeah. David Filby: to profitability, which is incredibly exciting already. But give us a bit of insight into that side of things. Ana Cornell: Yeah. So we raised roughly I think just a tad over $3 million to date. Might be closer to $3.5 million actually we just closed a fundraising round. And we're opening our StartEngine crowdfunding campaign to really launch the product fully and get past that profitability point. So I'll drop a link too if people are interested in checking it out. But yes we raised about $3.5 million. That was split over a few different safe notes, with the most recent valuation being around like $18 million capped. And I think our StartEngine price point is around $25 million because of the the revenue generation. We are on track to reach profitability if we keep our current sales trajectory by November 30th. That's the date I have penciled in. We actually just sold another unit last week. We're currently averaging about a unit per week that we're selling. So my short-term goals are like can I first double that? And then can I get to the point where I'm selling a unit every day? Because if we're selling a unit every day, we're getting to three hundred plus units, we're easily gonna be making excess of $5-10 million per year. And that's the current sales plan. Which not very sophisticated basically we're selling one per week, let's sell more. So that's business. David Filby: It's more sophisticated than many companies I've talked to at your stage. Don't worry about it. Ana Cornell: We have our current sales rate. If you can think of that little meme, stonks up, that's a little bit how we're operating. We're like, hey, we're selling one per week, let's sell two per week, let's sell one per day. And that's how we're pushing David Filby: Yeah. I love it. I love it. Ana Cornell: it. We're finding different channels, different ways to get in front of people. We're doing webinars, we're doing conferences, we're doing trade shows, we're three engineers driving around in a car hitting up 10 breweries at a time. this is classic, all hands on deck. let's get the device out there. And what's really nice is now that we have some devices out there, we're all starting to get referrals. So we don't even have to do all the sales anymore. We're already people like it so much and it's so intuitive that I said, Ryan Parks told me he's showed a bunch of UN agencies like this device. now I'm now in front of a few of them. some of them want to order 10 devices. I got in front of this other guy. He said he runs this municipal water testing like plant, series of plants. He wants 25 units. So now I'm like, okay, we're starting to accelerate the level of orders coming in, which also means our manufacturing has to catch up because we're starting to develop a bit of a backlog, which is a very nice problem to have, but also very stressful because you really want to get the orders out in time. And that classic, startup scrappy, people are working around the clock, everyone's slightly burning out, sometimes you have to send someone on vacation because they've worked too many 16-hour days in a row. And that's the environment, the stage we're in is like, hey, we have a product, our customers love it. It's so accurate and it's so intuitive. We currently are more accurate than any of the competing devices in the market, including the $60,000 instruments. We actually did a test of the top assay in the top device. They had out of 500 tests, they had I think 3 false positives or false negatives. We had 1. So we were like we beat out the existing incumbents in terms of accuracy while being truly a fraction of the cost and be way more user intuitive. We took 30 people off the street, we had them try the device, 100% of them were able to use it. 88% said it was easier to use than an at-home COVID test. So we nailed this product of having that user friendliness, that low cost, that portable. it is going to Madagascar, it is going to Uganda, it is going through these crazy random roads, on all these bumpy roads, and it is surviving. It's not, we have that high level of durability. Do we occasionally have the software bug and we have to release a software update? yes, we have the classic company startup problems with that. That happened once and was a few months ago. But overall, the initial launch has been going very well. And we're starting to see the the outcomes from that and then new sales. So yeah, it's a very exciting time. It's like and it's crazy. And I think, we're on track for November 30th is like in my calendar. I'm like trying to stick to it. I'm like just gotta get one device out a day. But I also know if I close any of these orders, they're 25 units, we're there. We have it. David Filby: Yeah. Let me ask you two final questions. One is you keep saying we who is we in terms of how big is the company? Who's supporting you? You know what does we actually look like? Ana Cornell: Yeah, the top two people come to mind are my co-founders, came out of Northwestern with me. So be Max and Ryan. Max, this is like his third startup venture. I guess the first one was technically not profit, so second, proper startup. And his first startup was in brewing. And he did pretty well. Unfortunately, the pandemic hit, so he ended up just selling at that point and then joined Acorn. And it was great to have him because he has that very sales persona type. He is definitely like the guy in the car going with the SENTRI, getting the deals. And he has like he's extremely creative, Acorn, I think, has a very, very nice brand and is very aesthetically pleasing. If you ever gone to our website or see, I find it to be generally if I not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but I believe it's much nicer looking than most scientific brands. And that's in large part because Max was the kind of creative and branding genius behind Acorn. And then there's Ryan. Ryan Abbott, master's in electrical engineering, met him at Northwestern, working out of the Rogers Lab initially, then joined me at the Gianneschi lab. He was the kind of genius behind the sequencing chip. And he was the one that ultimately got the SENTRI to work, lower the cost of it substantially, figure out the optical sensors. Whenever there's an engineering challenge that we can't figure out, or one SENTRI's acting up, he's the one that can take it apart, find the exact bug, and solve it, resolve it. And he is our CTO. So Max's my COO, Ryan is my CTO. And I think between the three of us make a pretty, pretty solid team. We have Dr. Kevin Travers as well. He's our chief scientific officer. He joined a little bit later. The three of us have been, at Acorn for the last five, ten, five, six years. Kevin joined us about two, two and a half years ago. The assay we perfected, we developed is again the one that beats out the other ones. Is somewhat Kevin's brainchild. He has done this over and over and over again for large sequencing companies. He worked at PacBio, he worked at Roche Nanopore he has over a dozen patents in specifically this space. So no surprise that he also helped come up with a really, really successful assay, Acorn. This is his bread and butter, is making the consumables for these platforms. He works with Aakaanksha Director of Engineering. We also have Jake, or Aakaanksha is our director research, Jake is our director of engineering. We have Nicole Lawrence as well. And then we have also Nicole, she's from - we have two Nicole's one from Harvard who's a student. She's developing our Compsite platform. And then one also on our research team. And that's the team pretty much, yeah. It's a small David Filby: It's a small team. It's a small team. Ana Cornell: team. We're small but mighty. David Filby: Small but mighty, yeah. The achievements are incredible. Ana Cornell: I promised them I would hire two more people, which I'm like can we hold out until we hit profitability and then we can use that money to hire someone? And they're like, please, we need one more lab tech. So we are gonna hire one more lab tech, but the sales have been going a little bit better than I'm trying to keep the November 30th date. But we also have runway right now until all the way through next year. So I'm also like maybe don't need to stress out the team that much. David Filby: Final question then. What are the future milestones that you're aiming for over the the next 6-12 months that we should keep an eye out for? Ana Cornell: Yeah. We have our brewing assays currently commercially available right now with the SENTRI. We have our pathogen assay that's gonna be commercially available starting Q4 of this year. Unfortunately it's looking more like December than October, but sell into the world of research. So that's gonna be coming up. That opens up a number of new revenue streams for us. We do have our StartEngine campaign that's happening this Q3 of this year. So pretty much should be wrapping up. Maybe goes a little bit to Q4, should be wrapping up in October. And then we also have our sequencing chip that we're continuing to develop. And we're bringing on the right people to help with the software side of things. Right now, the current signal that's being outputted is very strong. It's pretty strong and clear. Now it's a matter of signal interpretation. So we are bringing on a couple of comp site people next year to to solve that. And the goal is to get that to market by end of next year. So that's the the short term milestone. So you should be, yeah, seeing some new assays, some new sequencing tech coming out of Acorn very soon. David Filby: Awesome. This is super exciting. I love the route that you've taken. I think actually I'll tell you the things I like. I love that the end goal is still in place and that's still the big desire. But I love that you guys have done what all great founders should do, especially when it comes to life sciences, and to pivot along that development route to generate data to get case studies proof of concept, but also to generate revenue early and allow that revenue to not come from the perfect end product but to test product market fit, iterate the product, then try and do something else with it, and so forth, with that end goal still in place. I think that's a massive success story in its in itself, but I also think that this is a very small step in what you'll go on to achieve and what Acorn will end up being, which is super exciting. So I'm just really excited about it. I think it's a fantastic story. It's a great founder story. And yet it's just the start. There's so much more for you guys to achieve. I think it's fantastic. Ana Cornell: Hey, it's a great journey to be on and I'm excited. David Filby: Well, thank you for coming on and sharing that journey and we'll look out for the milestones. Thank you so much. Ana Cornell: Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it.