NC State Startups and Innovations Highlighted at CES 2024

The NC State Office of Research Commercialization (ORC) attended CES 2024 in Las Vegas in January to showcase NC State University innovations and startup companies with applications in the tech space. The international trade show features the latest cutting-edge technologies and products each year and provides opportunities for companies both large and small to showcase groundbreaking technological advances to potential customers, partners, and investors from across the globe.

ORC continued its partnership with the local firm The Trade Show Manager to host a North Carolina Startup Pavilion on the trade show floor at Eureka Park, an expo space at CES exclusively for early-stage, high tech startups from around the world. 

Three NC State startup companies and one research team were featured in the pavilion booth along with an NC State Engineering Research Center.

Companies Featured

Two companies with ties to NC State attended CES for the second straight year.

NC State startup TSV Analytics returned to the show to promote its predictive analytics tool for social media brand building. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning natural language processing techniques to analyze social media conversations relevant to an organization’s brand, their solution enables brands to better understand social media audiences and create more relevant content to increase web engagement and return on advertising. “With the support from NC State, we’ve been able to have a prime spot in the startup space to show off our revolutionary tech alongside other great companies,” said TSV Analytics co-founder and CEO Trevor Ferree, who emphasized the quality of connections made with other tech companies from across the globe as the reason he returned this year.

Ferree also highlighted the opportunity to view state-of-the-art technology from diverse industry players. “From checking out the amazing innovations that are being created by startups to massive enterprises showing off the new technology they’ve implemented into their products,” Ferree said. “It’s fascinating to see the evolution in just a year.” TSV Analytics  – which was launched in 2020 by Ferree and co-founder Aidan McCarthy when they were both students at NC State – secured investment in 2023 from NC-based firms Primordial, the Triangle Tweener Fund, and Charlotte Angel Fund.

ClearSens – an NC State startup engineering the future of ultrasound technology through commercialization of its glass-based ultrasonic transducer technology – was also featured in the pavilion for the second year in a row. The company was launched out of NC State’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2019 by researchers Omer Oralkan and Feysel Yalcin Yammaner to develop unique ultrasound transducers that are low-cost, low-profile, have high acoustic pressure, and are optically transparent. With a variety of applications for its transducers, ClearSens has received over $2 million in federal SBIR/STTR funding since 2021 to develop a wearable system for divers to reduce the risk of decompression sickness.

The Pavilion also featured two first time CES attendees.

Startup SonoVoice was founded in 2022 based on technology jointly developed by researchers at NC State and Duke University. Its voice evaluation and training platform utilizes a portable device and smartphone application to improve the accessibility and accuracy of evidence-based voice evaluation and training for singers and other professionals with high voice demands. SonoVoice founder and CEO Sandeep Bhatt commented that he attended the show as a guest of the Startup Pavilion to “share our vocal health innovations with investors and commercialization partners”, adding that “[SonoVoice] also attended the two-day Digital Health Summit where we met other companies – both established and startup – developing technologies to lower healthcare costs, improve health equity and empower individuals to take control of their care and wellbeing.” The company is a graduate of NC State’s Andrews Launch Accelerator and was the recipient of an NC IDEA Micro Grant in 2023. It is currently pursuing prototype development and completing user studies. 

David Roberts and Alper Bozkurt also attended CES to showcase their wearable EKG for dogs. Their specific software innovation enables real-time measurement of canine cardiac activity with existing low-cost, generic hardware. “Not only have we been able to showcase our novel technologies to a wide audience and make some great new connections, but we’ve also been able to see a number of high-level trends in technologies related to ours that have helped us better understand the market landscape and customer interests,” Roberts said when asked about his experience. “The comprehensive perspective we’ve been able to get at CES is unparalleled. The scope and scale of this event is staggering, but the value in attendance if you’re targeted and proactive is extremely high.” The team received funding from NC State’s Chancellor’s Innovation Fund (CIF) and 2ndF Research Commercialization Fund in 2023, and is currently expanding its prototype device for testing on other commercially available collars.

Bozkurt is the co-director of NC State’s Center for Advanced Self-Powered Systems of Integrated Sensors and Technologies (ASSIST), which was also represented at CES for a second straight year. An NSF-funded engineering research center founded in 2012 that is developing flexible, self-powering and wearable devices to improve health monitoring across multiple fields, ASSIST is creating self-powered sensing, computing, and communication systems to enable data-driven insights for a smart and healthy world.

ORC is planning to attend CES 2025 next January and is currently seeking early-stage startups to showcase at the pavilion, as well as organizations interested in partnering and sponsorship opportunities.

Please contact Zach Williams (zdwillia@ncsu.edu) or Amy Parker (amy_parker@ncsu.edu) if you would like to learn more about how you can get involved.