Curby

Our long-term outcome is to transform our current unsustainable economy model at the local level in the fastest way possible. This requires changing consumer behavior which changes demand which in turn forces change on the supply side of the current capitalistic system. If we are successful at the local level, we would expect to see a more rapid shift or movement from the customer and ultimately from the private sector. The current rate of change for sustainability is moving way too slowly and most well-educated consumers recognize that something new is needed and it will not happen through our current political process. If you ultimately want to bring about economic change, it must happen at the consumer level and the only way to make it happen at the consumer level is through a whole new set of incentives.

What if achieving Net Zero Emissions in 2040 is made possible with something as simple as prices? A price — as in smart prices on products. Globally 7B people will begin to be directly affected by climate change by 2040. We have to speed this up! And we must empower consumers to do their part. 

Consumer emissions account for at least 23% of CO2 (PNAS). Technology Adoption can take decades for new products (OurWorldInData). 

Its cause is partly cost, which is dependent on the interests of capital investment and terms that favor investors (AEPP, 2020). Barriers also include costs of marketing, brand awareness, and changing consumer behavior. 

Our solution tips the scale to the demand side and pulls products into the market that reduce emissions. Consumers could more rapidly shift consumption to greentech products — the US has 120M households (US Census). Greentech products use new materials and processes to produce less emissions. Beachhead products are meat substitutes, packaging, and home energy efficiencies.

Incentives are powerful ways for shaping consumer spending patterns – 72% of US consumers find price incentives the most effective way to stimulate purchases (Statista, 2018). However, the market lacks a robust way to proactively focus consumer spending (DSIRE).

Curby a consumer incentive system: 1) routes incentives to consumers to shift consumer patterns towards greentech and 2) produces its own financial value to reward consumers for greener purchases. Incentivizing demand with smart prices could provide powerful new ways to overcome key barriers of greentech adoption. We were recently notified that our first patent will be awarded.

Go-to Market Strategy

A customer pays $1 for a voucher with a value of $3 targeted for plant-based meat, like Impossible Burger. Price-points incentivize greentech food demand (McKinsey; WSJ). 

We source a $1 subsidy from a philanthropic organization plus $1 from the USDA, which wants to incentivize domestic value-added soy products. That 12oz package that costs $8.99 – the smart parent can now purchase for $5.99. We first scale vouchers for this target product and then scale incentives for other greentech products.

Curby™️ produces financial incentives to accelerate the adoption of greentech products and services by consumers to curb carbon emissions. Our technology taps into the power of consumer spending, which was $12.7 trillion in 2016 and grew by 13.7% to $14.5 trillion in 2020 (BEA). By contrast, the US government spent $14.9 billion on R&D tax credits in 2016 (OEDC). Consumer spending was 852X – eight-hundred-and-fifty-two-times – greater than federal R&D tax credits!

• Total Available Market (TAM), US Consumer Spending is $14.5 trillion. (BEA)

• Serviceable Available Market (SAM), 2021 Projected Sales Value of greentech products in the US is $140-150 billion. (Statista). We impact 100M Americans in 5 years.

• Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM), first year projection is $450 million in food product value. We aim to impact 500k Americans in 1 year.

Our technology provides powerful new ways to produce tracking data about consumer spending patterns. The consumer ecosystem spans from activity data to specific types of materials that are used in products, carbon reductions, and metrics for sustainable food production / manufacturing. 

Curby's incentive system produces a better "mousetrap" to generate these types of datasets. Our customer discovery has shown that this type of real-time data is lacking in consumer verticals. This approach produces actionable data that incentivizes and gamifies activity that verifiably curbs carbon emissions. Its scalability is powered by the core technology that drives a high growth revenue model.

Curby is completing the Prototype Stage and starting the Pilot Stage. We will soon confirm the pilot community. 

Here is a summary of developments,

• Patents filed in 2016-2018 — first allowance coming in 2021.
• Shawn self-funded the startup with investment and business income, with $250k including patent and software development costs.
• Savitha and Shawn built the prototype pricing system in 2017-2018. 
• Gregory and Shawn completed the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program in 2019.
• Customer discovery with hundreds of interviews focused on examining and validating a core business model in 2019-2020.
• The National Science Foundation invited our grant application, 2020.
• Shawn brought the team through the Bethesda Green Accelerator in 2020-2021.
• We started partnering potentially with the thesolutionsproject.org, to Pilot Curby and connect with philanthropic donors.
• We started working with the University of Maryland Industrial Partnerships program for commercialization assistance.
• Curby's technology is scouted by Accelerators on F6S. 

Curby™️ technology generates and deploys price credits to elicit beneficial choices, such as with nutrition and purchasing locally. It provides a multiplier effect for businesses, consumers, and stakeholders. For subsidizers, methods such as tax credits, incentives, and supplements are inefficient. We will develop technology to smartly deploy financial incentives that properly enable beneficial outcomes. Additionally, since food price volatility is a major detriment to overcoming poverty, Curby's SmartPrices can be deployed in ways to stabilize food prices as a new tool to address persistent issues of food insecurity and food deserts by generating value for stakeholders, incentives for businesses, and direct price credits for consumers.

Curby will eventually produce a financial technology infrastructure platform to bring together consumers, small business retailers, manufacturers, and subsidizers. SmartPrices will be distributed across businesses and eventually across eCommerce platforms. Our project introduces a new way of producing pricing markets, where the price a consumer pays for a product can be customized by applying subsidies or incentives. The conventional mechanism to implement a distributed ledger, blockchain, is problematic for this application due to its immutability, the need for data privacy, editable data, addressability, and time-based sequencing of blocks. Our innovations will enable and accelerate the use of other block-type structures in financial scenarios, which is desirable because of the potential to improve trust and security while also reducing the costs of transaction settlements.

We are in a pre-Pilot stage, so our solution is not actively serving any customers. We have worked with 20 mentors at different stages of development, according to their specialties.

• Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM), first year projection is $450 million in food product value. We aim to impact 500k Americans in 1 year.

• Serviceable Available Market (SAM), 2021 Projected Sales Value of greentech products in the US is $140-150 billion (Statista). We impact 100M Americans in 5 years.

• Total Available Market (TAM), US Consumer Spending is $14.5 trillion (BEA).

• Patents awarded
• Number and diversity of job applicants 
• Adoption rate of greentech products
• Local purchases and travel patterns
• Competitor product offerings

• Full-time staff, 3
• Part-time staff, 7
• Contractors, 4
• Mentors, 15, cumulatively
• Advisors, 2

Shawn is a Federal Registered Survivor of September 11, lgbtqia+, from a working class family, grew up in the US Appalachian region, and worked tirelessly since 9/11 to make this opportunity possible. He has deep technical backgrounds in Computer Science and Intellectual Property and an entrepreneurial spirit since a child. He is the primary founder.

He was offered a National Defense Science Graduate Research Fellowship in 2006. The idea for the technology came from years of academic research in the humanities and ministry. 

Our leadership team includes people from 5 countries with diversity that includes gender, ethnicities, civil status, disability, military, veteran, science, and ministry.

We do all that we can with the time and money we have available to bring people into leadership positions who have diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. We work with many types of businesses and customers. We want our business to chart a new course for using technology for solving some of the world's most pressing problems.

We're applying to MIT Solve to gain access to the network of experts, mentors, and partnerships.

• Business model, walking with us through product-market fit iterations
• Financial, working with us to tailor a pitch that includes the distributed ledger core thesis
• Legal or Regulatory Matters Public Relations, helping us shape a brand narrative that matters and responsibly leads this process
• Monitoring & Evaluation, challenging and supporting our efforts to introduce new measures for monitoring and tracking emissions curbing

We will greatly benefit from the expertise and experience of the MIT Solve members, MIT faculty, and your partnerships to help consumers do their part to get to Net Zero goals.