This CT nonprofit is getting startups through the ‘valley of death’
When a winter storm slammed 34 states with a destructive mix of ice, heavy snow and freezing rain late last month, David Dellal stood ready with a product that could help.
In 2017, Dellal, then a mechanical engineering student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helped create a sustainable, cost-effective system for deicing roofs and gutters as part of a class capstone project. The system uses sensors and real-time weather data to monitor for ice and, when it detects it, releases a water-based, non-toxic fluid, melting the ice before it can become a hazard.
Early on, the students knew that the system could help fill a new space in the deicing market, launching a startup called Floe to continue the effort.
But they needed to find a way to turn their concept from a prototype to an actual product.
“We’re engineers by training — mechanical engineers, electrical engineers — we obviously know how to do some form of engineering,” Dellal, who serves as a co-founder and CEO of Floe, said in an interview. “But when it’s about quality control and making sure these things live up in the field and also thinking about a full product lifecycle, we’d never really had hands-on experience with that before.”
It didn’t take too long for Floe to find a group that could help. The team was connected with FORGE, a Somerville, Mass.-based nonprofit that helps startups and innovation-oriented companies navigate the tricky path from prototype to full-scale production.
FORGE, Dellal says, was crucial to providing early developmental advice. The organization also provided funding, giving Floe some financial support after the startup won an audience choice award at a manufacturing and innovation showcase in 2020.
So when Dellal and another Floe executive moved to Connecticut to start their engineering Ph.D.s at Yale, the startup CEO was worried that leaving Massachusetts and FORGE would become a setback for the business.
Fate, however, had different plans. FORGE announced a move into Connecticut in 2023, spreading its work helping startups and other companies further into New England. In the years since, the organization has partnered with the state’s Office of Manufacturing to support startups in an effort to fix a trio of connected issues: boosting Connecticut’s manufacturing industry among young workers, helping provide advice and support to innovators working with emerging technologies, and providing funding to early stage CT-based startups that often struggle to access capital and make the leap into local manufacturing and, ideally, full-scale production.