TerraNexum

Website: https://terranexum.com
Discord: https://discord.gg/rGe5NNfFA9
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/terranexum 
Direct number to get in touch (voicemail only): 303-800-5707

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: 

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. 

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.

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.

We all know about money, but not so much the five physical currencies that we use money to buy:

1) clean energy (production and storage),
2) essential resources (food and water, and their recycling),
3) information (access to knowledge),
4) time (personal time helping someone with something), and
5) space (available land or building space).

The five physical currencies (which play a role in our open-source EMiTS framework) all represent real needs that we all have. Unfortunately, money hasn't been very good at reaching people who need it, to ensure they can get their basic needs met. 

Things will likely change for the better very quickly as more of us realize how much of what we currently do for work is unnecessary, and are actually delaying us from getting our more important needs met. 

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. 

 
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.