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TerraNexum

Accelerating the energy and carbon transition by using quantum optimization, systems engineering, and open hardware to overcome logistical hurdles preventing solutions from getting where they are needed the most.

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Projects

Support the following initiatives from TerraNexum.

Project
Plans for renewable energy technologies and co-location possibilities to increase the expansion o...

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Low-cost, low-energy, room-temp quantum computing, made open and accessible. The ultimate in open...

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Carbon management technologies and plans to help advance research and innovation in direct air ca...

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A generalized, open-source version of our Quantum Global Optimizer platform to solve the problem ...

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Financial Contributions

Goal
Sponsor Our Team for 2023

There are 4 of us as founders. We thank you in advance for your support of our work.

$0.00 USD of $20,000 USD / month raised (0%)

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$10 USD / month

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Goal
Sponsor a College Intern

We've had several high school interns who have gone on to college and we would like to help them find paid experiences helping us with our work to ... Read more

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$100 USD / month

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Top financial contributors

1
Dahl Winters

$70 USD since May 2023

TerraNexum is all of us

Our contributors 5

Thank you for supporting TerraNexum.

Dahl Winters

Admin

$70 USD

Shrila Esturi

Core Contributor

Matt Parker

Core Contributor

Alexander Ose

Core Contributor

About


Where to Find Us


Website: https://terranexum.com
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/Vd2eafb2 
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/terranexum
GitHub: https://github.com/terranexum 
Direct number to get in touch (voicemail only): 303-800-5707

Background


In 2022, Dahl Winters, our CEO, was awarded an Open Hardware Trailblazer Fellowship, supported by OSHWA through the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In the process of her academic work at Colorado State University, which involved using systems engineering to scale sustainability technologies and to accelerate the development and adoption of open hardware for research and teaching, she learned there were more significant hurdles in place through which a systems engineering and optimization approach could be applied. This was the same approach that was being developed for use at TN to solve sustainability problems through technology adoption on funded projects meeting today's needs.

Slides from Dahl's talk at the 2023 Open Hardware Summit in NYC, April 28-29, titled OSHW + MBSE for Academic Leadership in Sustainability can be found here: 

TerraNexum's Setup


We are organized as a Delaware C Corporation, a for-profit business entity, so we could be better positioned to seek pre-seed funding which we have been doing since August 2022. We have earned a small amount of revenue from consulting, but not from our primary product or objective of deploying technologies on projects to accelerate our energy and carbon transition. Our company has otherwise been bootstrapped by our founders since August 2022.

We are registered with sam.gov (not publicly listed, for federal users only) to bid on and serve on all federal grants and contracts. 

Our Open Hardware and Software Background


Dahl's open hardware carbon removal project, Cyan, was the first OSHWA-certified carbon removal device and has been actively supported by the OpenAir Collective. where she has been a member, mentor, Cyan project lead, and co-lead with Chris Neidl since November 2020.

All of TerraNexum's open source software is available at https://github.com/terranexum, with more to come.

We believe that an open business model can have many benefits to any corporation, particularly those that would have been able to find funding much more quickly in previous funding cycles. You can read more about how we are utilizing such a model on the #open-business-model channel on our Discord server.

Huge Interest, Tiny Team - It Needs to Take a Village


Our Quantum Modules work for remote sensing applications from last year was featured online: Startup Showcase: TerraNexum – Accelerating Image Analytics Workflows with Quantum Modules for Sustainability, Security, and Resilience - April 26, 2023, published in Venture - by Unstructured Media. We received much interest after that publication for that line of work, but we have no funds for staff who can help with testing, building, and deploying the containerized quantum applications at the heart of each QM. Our CEO currently serves this role.

The QM work descended from our earlier quantum optimization work, QGO. This is still online as a demo, consisting of a geospatial user interface backed by a cloud-based quantum optimization algorithm which was designed to determine which technologies should be deployed where and when to result in the greatest emissions reduction in the least amount of time at the least cost. To try to satisfy investor feedback, we ultimately settled on connecting funding sources (green) with technology providers (solar PV only represented below, in blue) serving emissions sources (in red).

Below: Our latest interface, not yet published, with nearly 40 geospatial data layers to locate the highest-value, highest-impact commercial and industrial properties in Denver, CO for what renewable energy and energy storage technologies could be located and where.



Our Overall Goal


TerraNexum means "earth network."

Our focus is to drive progress in sustainability and resilience by using systems engineering and network optimization approaches to get technologies where they need to go. We're imagining being able to create a global circulatory system (an "earth network" in a real sense) that can serve every individual with the five physical essentials they need. By doing this, all of us can focus on the work we have each been doing to solve important problems, using the same open hardware and open business approach to expedite getting those problems solved.

Our work here is to get paid project opportunities identified on which all of us here can have a significant impact through open hardware and an open business approach. We would like to do this through our QGO tool, modified as a general optimization engine that can receive:

a) any data with latitude, longitude, and time coordinates,
b) how those data are used in specifying flows of energy, matter, and/or information over time and space (EMiTS, from https://github.com/terranexum/EMiTS),
c) the metric you wish to optimize over (if it's not already the six currencies)

and then output the result on a viewer much like that at qgo-dev. Ultimately, we would like to build an open source viewer that we will host, but anyone else will also be welcome to host. 

Our Ask

 
Sufficient personnel is the #1 block to our progress since that requires funding, but funding requires customers, and customer development requires time which we are unable to spend simultaneously on updating our software. We had an $800k ask in August 2022, much of which would go to salaries for at least four people to work full time plus software and cloud expenses, but we realize funding is difficult to come by for the problems we've identified (insufficient resources getting where they need to go in most every industry).

These funds would enable us to develop a general QGO engine done that could be applied to multiple use cases, not just sustainability but also to connect open hardware projects to high-impact research in labs where the use of OSHW could be of mutual benefit. This general QGO engine could get done faster if we had time to train individuals in the latest quantum optimization, geospatial, and AI methods, enhanced by OpenAI Codex so that even the most unskilled software developer can learn how to contribute significantly to different modules that can be integrated by skilled staff into an open-source QGO offering. This could be extended for other commercial uses under appropriate license agreements.

Our team

Shrila Esturi

Core Contributor

Matt Parker

Core Contributor

Alexander Ose

Core Contributor

Budget


Transparent and open finances.

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+$10.00USD
Completed
Contribution #656223
+$10.00USD
Completed
Contribution #656223
+$10.00USD
Completed
Contribution #656223
$
Today’s balance

$70.59 USD

Total income

$70.59 USD

Total disbursed

--.-- USD

Estimated annual budget

$65.59 USD

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Let’s get the ball rolling!

News from TerraNexum

Updates on our activities and progress.

TerraNexum's Work on Quantum Modules Featured in Venture

We would love to get these properly tested and rolled out more widely, when we have enoug...
Read more
Published on May 3, 2023 by Dahl Winters

Conversations

Let’s get the discussion going! This is a space for the community to converse, ask questions, say thank you, and get things done together.

Want to discuss more? Join us on Discord.

Published on May 3, 2023 by Dahl Winters

Our server name is TerraNexum: https://discord.gg/A45HsktDJg