AeroShield makes super-insulating, transparent materials to enable the next generation of energy-efficient windows. AeroShield has created the world’s most transparent silicate aerogels, literally the most thermally insulating materials ever created. And our breakthrough is making them transparent for the first time. Transparent enough to be put into a window.

Our breakthrough was spun out of MIT by our Co-Founder, Dr. Elise Strobach. Her PhD research was the foundation of that breakthrough. And now our job is to make big sheets of it at the right price and put it into a form factor that the window industry can adopt.

Aerogels are a super-insulating material that was originally developed by NASA to insulate spacecraft. This material is about 97% air. So this is a nanostructure that basically traps air. It’s super light, it’s fire resistant, it has all these amazing properties. And, as mentioned, our breakthrough was, for the first time ever, making them transparent.

Importantly, this material also prevents any sort of conduction or convection. And those are the two major modes of heat transfer for windows. Therefore, using an aerogel enables window manufacturers to improve thermal performance – without changing the thickness or the weight of the window.

This is AeroShield’s second GPD. Our first GPD was in 2023. And in the last couple of years, we’ve had some major milestones. We’ve seen breakthroughs in both the transparency and the handling of our aerogels. And we’ve also made bigger sizes compared to where we were before. For instance, AeroShield has now made entry and patio doors. And this year, we announced a partnership with a major entry and patio door company in the US. So we’ll be launching that first product next year, which is super exciting.

Along our journey, there have been a lot of surprises. For example, we didn’t realize how far reaching our initial idea of making glass more energy efficient was. We get reach-outs from window companies, but also grocery store freezer doors. We get reach-outs from companies making EVs, where turning on the air conditioning costs you a range. So there is a need to make these cars more energy efficient as well. There’s just a whole range of use cases where we’ve been asked to apply our technology.

Making a new material is going to be hard. And we always have a bit of fun time at the end of the year, reflecting on some of the things that have happened. My favorite story is about someone carrying an aerogel by an open door, and the wind blew the aerogel off their storage rack and broke the material. So all sorts of random things can happen when you’re doing a startup.

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