The next round of Taqadam funding is underway! The startup accelerator, operated by KAUST's Innovation and Economic Development department, is available to students and research staff across Saudi Arabia, and has already made millions of Saudi Riyal available for cutting-edge research. One beneficiary of the last round of funding was Vythos, a company that seeks to change the way we study the bottom of the ocean. This story from last month explains how Vythos' innovation earned 375,000 SAR. Since then the project has completed a successful test of its flagship product, the seafloor monitoring observatory, in an underwater volcano off the Canary Islands.

Now it's time for Lab-on-a-Bench and the connected IT tool to prove that it can change the way students and scientists conduct field work. The new device from ANPERC students Marisol Ramirez, Wonjun Cha, Gloria Quintero, and Farizal Hakiki, would allow geocharacterization to happen anywhere, anytime. This is especially useful for anticipating the engineering properties of soils. The new technology will incorporate many individual instruments, the most advanced of which characterizes soil based on the revised soil classification developed by ANPERC students and scientists earlier this year. This work is based on over 6200 entries from peer-reviewed papers around the world, and through the integration of the IT tool and the compact sensors planned for Lab-on-a-Bench this immense body of data will allow for multi-physics soil characterization in ways that have not previously been possible.

Learn more about Taqadam Startup Accelerator here.

Learn more about EGEL, the research group that our team is part of, here.