From AI to green energy, Delaware founders can’t wait for this tech

Last week, Technical.ly hosted a stakeholders meeting with some of Delaware’s 2023 RealLIST Startup founders. Besides the pros and cons of starting a business in the First State, we also talked about the future of the tech industry, and what innovations the founders were looking forward to the most.

It was an easy question for Cora Castle, cofounder of OmniPotential Energy Partners, a residential electric vehicle charging station company: “We’re really excited about standardization of the vehicle-to-grid electric vehicle charging.”

“The biggest problem today with green energy is storage,” she said. “The sun doesn’t shine at night, the wind doesn’t always blow, so you need to make sure that you take advantage of surpluses of energy when you have them. Some enterprising people from a number of universities, including University of Delaware, are working on standards to use electric vehicles as batteries, so that during peak demand time, the plugged in vehicles can push energy out to the grid as opposed to pulling energy in, and then after peak times the cars can be charged. We can shave our peak demands and at the same time encourage people to switch to electric.”

As talk of ChatGPT dominates your bizdev meetings and social media feeds, artificial intelligence is also on the minds of the founders.

“I think a pretty obvious one that’s been developing at a quick, rapid rate recently is advancements in AI,” said Dan Goodman, cofounder of Tangia, a startup that helps gamers monetize streaming. “I think what’s going to be interesting is seeing all the ways that AI can replace unscalable work — tedious, manual labor — and seeing where now we can allocate human hours to things that the AI is not good at and see how much velocity we can get in innovation and forward progress in those spaces.”

Gianna Witver, cofounder of the Cybersecurity Marketers Society, is excited for AI advancements, too.

“Being from marketing, I think AI will have massive reverberating effects across our entire industry, good and bad,” she said. “And I also really love the advancements that are being made with robotics in agriculture. I think there’s a lot of cool stuff that’s happening there.”

For Eric Smith, cofounder of the startup studio Launch Point Labs, it isn’t any specific technology, but, rather, greater access to tech in general.

“What I’m always most excited about is the affordability of new technology coming out and how it lowers the barrier of entry for new ideas to be able to be spun out as a whole,” he said. “The cost of web infrastructure or cloud services or anything else is getting lower and lower, which allows good ideas from good people to be able to flourish in the ecosystem at large. New entrepreneurs can break into different industries and bring a new idea to the forefront that can start shaping the future for everyone.”