The following interview is a conversation we had with Matt Theurer, CEO & Co-Founder of HyperSpectral, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $8.5M Raised to Power the Future of AI-Powered Spectral Intelligence
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Matt Thur, CEO and Co-Founder of Hyperspectral, an AI powered spectral intelligence solution that’s raised 8.5 million in funding. Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Theurer
Thank you so much. I really appreciate your giving me a chance to be on it.
Brett
No problem. I’m super excited as well. And let’s go ahead and jump right in. So talk to us about what you’re building today and over there at Hyperspectral.
Matt Theurer
Sure. So we are combining artificial intelligence along with spectroscopy to basically rapidly identify the presence of unwanted, when we use the word things inside of substances. Right? So, to be a little more specific, we’re starting off by looking for the presence of pathogens inside of the food system. So I’m sure everybody here is probably read or seen or perhaps even affected by some of the food recalls, which seem to be accelerating due to listeria contamination or E. Coli or salmonella. What we’re trying to do is make that a rapid, cost effective screening solution so that these contaminated foods actually never leave the factory, as opposed to making out into the real world. Current methodologies are slow and expensive, and we’re trying to make them inexpensive and fast.
Brett
It seems like a very niche problem. What were you doing in your life that you were able to observe? This was a problem that you needed to go out and solve using technology.
Matt Theurer
Well, what really inspired it was the pandemic, quite honestly. You know, I’m sure everybody remembers, you know, waiting for hours to get a swab shoved up their nose to find out three days later that, hey, you were fine three days ago, but it told you nothing about how you were at that point in time. That did not strike me as the most efficient and effective way to find a pathogen. And honestly, food uses pretty much the same techniques that are used to detect the presence of a bacterial infection or a viral infection as that of a human being. Big eats PCR, there’s some swabbing going on, there’s growth, and then, you know, they find the bacteria. And since it’s very closely related to human health, these bacteria that affect food are actually a problem quite often in human health, especially in wounds. So E.
Matt Theurer
Coli is a problem in human health, in fact. And staph aureus, you know, is another one that actually people think about as a human health problem. But actually, staph aureus is a problem in the food system as well. It causes gastrointestinal problems as its food poisoning. So theres so much crossover and were trying to find, again, pathogens. Right. Food is the initial use case. But as I said, it applies to human beings, applies to water systems. Theres a lot of uses for this technology beyond this initial use case, just food. The food use case as a beachhead market is very viable because of lighter regulatory, as opposed to going in and saying, here’s a test for staph aureus, or something inside of human health. That said, we’ve done a lot of work with, like, human use cases.
Matt Theurer
In fact, we can tell the difference between antibiotic resistant staph, antibiotic susceptible staff purely based off of its interaction with light.
Brett
Can you go ahead and take us back to the early days? You know, when you have this idea, you observe this problem during the pandemic. Where do you even begin?
Matt Theurer
So we really began with, you know, we’re thinking about the problem, right? And we’re like, okay, this doesn’t work, doesn’t get people back into the office, kids back into school. Is there a way to solve this using non traditional methods? Right. So we started looking around for, you know, what are techniques people have used to find bacteria or viruses? I actually found a paper from the 1890s, yes, the 1890s, on using spectroscopy to identify bacteria. So the thought is not new. What has changed in the 130 years since somebody found, you know, came up with this idea back then is the cost of data acquisition, the sensors, basically the capabilities of the hardware. But more importantly, artificial intelligence has come along. Spectroscopy has traditionally been limited to the lab, where you get very pure samples.
Matt Theurer
I’m sure you can imagine samples in the real world are not so clean. I’m sure you can imagine there’s a lot of other stuff in the nasal swab than COVID virus. There’s a lot of other stuff if you’re looking at the food prep zones in a food processing. So there’s a lot of other stuff there, and viruses or bacteria, I should say, obviously very small. They have very faint signatures. And artificial intelligence allows us to process the data and find these very faint signals within the data. And that’s what’s really changed and made this possible for us to do it. So it was really us, honestly, a bunch of not doctors, not microbiologists, but physicists and technology, you know, computer folks, computer scientists, thinking maybe we can try to solve this problem, right?
Matt Theurer
So were not burdened, shall we say, with an abundance of preconceived notions.
Brett
A book I really like is called the outsiders. And I think Bill Ackman had talked about it in an interview at one point. And it goes through, I think it’s eight CEO’s who, you know, came into a company. They had never worked in that industry before, and they just, you know, dominated as leaders. And I think the whole point of it was, you know, being an outsider is sometimes a major advantage. So it sounds like that could be the case here with you as well.
Matt Theurer
Yeah, it absolutely is. And I was just sitting in a actually in a product review process yesterday, actually, in fact, which I love to do, where I basically have people take us from step one of the process all the way through. And you ask questions that people who worked in the field may not ask because they’ve been told that’s the way it’s done. This is the way you do it. And you start asking questions of, well, why, when our goal is XDev and we’re adapting a technology that maybe has goal, why are we taking this step here? Because it’s not necessary. Right, exactly.
Matt Theurer
Being the outsider allows you to ask questions that people perhaps in the field would be afraid to ask because they may think it’s dumb or it’s going to be looked down upon, or that’s just the way it’s always done and it’s actually become a competitive advantage for us.
Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and that tracks very well what a lot of other founders have told me as well, who are in similar positions, obviously in different industries. Lets talk about the market category. So id introduced you as an AI powered spectral intelligence solution. Is spectral intelligence the market category or what is the market category?
Matt Theurer
So thats the category. Were trying to be a category creator here, to be perfectly honest. And yes. So the whole idea here is to leverage spectral data the way everything in the world, all matter, interacts with the electromagnetic spectrum and use it to extract information and intelligence that can be to solve these real world problems. Hey, I can find a pathogen inside of food or inside of a human being very quickly, or I can use spectroscopy to do materials providence, I can ensure that this substance is what it’s supposed to be and it’s coming from where it’s supposed to be. So when you have this ground truth that you cannot deny the physics leaves are green because of chlorophyll. You can’t deny that the spectroscopy is true.
Matt Theurer
It’s a fundamental fact when you apply AI to that, and then you tie that into other data sources. So, for instance, if you’re looking in the food world, the problem is not just, hey, do I have listeria in my ice cream? It’s why am I getting listeria in my ice cream? So you start to tie this scientific data into other data sources around, well, hey, generally speaking, we start to have this problem when we get a shipment from this dairy or when Joe Smith is working, we seem to have these problems start to show up, right? So you start to not only identify the what, but you start to figure out the why and how things are happening. And that’s what we’re referring to with spectral intelligence, right?
Matt Theurer
It’s combining the scientific data with other sources of data to, again, not just understand what’s happening, but the how and the why.
Brett
Can you paint a picture for us of who the typical customers are and who’s buying the solution?
Matt Theurer
Sure. So, in the world of food, a typical customer would be either a food safety lab or, say, a medium to large size food processor producer who basically has to ensure that their product is safe and ready to ship. Right? So we would typically talk to the safety manager within a company that produces food in the world of medical. And again, we’re getting ready to start some clinical trials in our ability to detect MRSA and MSSA. There we’re typically talking to right now, it would be the head of innovation within a healthcare system, but you’re really talking about hospitals, clinics, any place where a patient needs to go in and be rapidly screened for the presence of a pathogen.
Matt Theurer
We do have contracts right now with DARPA intensive, its research project agency, where were applying our technology and our artificial intelligence layer to the problem of materials providence, which is a secure supply chain. A problem where, again, is this substance that were looking at, is it really what it says it is? Right. And is it coming from where it’s supposed to be coming from? Because you can actually detect in a lot of substances, you can actually pick up trace responses that say, hey, everything that comes from, you know, Arizona or Wyoming tends to show these signatures. So we can say, hey, it really is coming from Arizona, not from someplace else.
Matt Theurer
So there’s so many use cases for the technology, because the skill, the value here is in the artificial intelligence layer, the building of the AI engines which know how to analyze this data and solve the problems. The hardware we’re actually agnostic to, we work with, or can work with almost any spectrophotometer or source of spectral data out there, and all of its many types of spectroscopy that exist for us, the value is in that software, back end software platform.
Brett
One thing that I’ve seen from the founders that I work with is when you have a technology that has many different use cases, it can be almost overwhelming because its hard to know where to focus and where to prioritize efforts in terms of sales, marketing, go to market. How have you thought about how to prioritize use cases when there are so many different use cases for whats possible?
Matt Theurer
Jeff, I will tell you this. I think about this every single day, multiple times a day. And it is quite honestly, one of the things that keeps me up at night is how do we maintain the focus as a company to ensure that we allocate and use our resources wisely to grow the company. So we look at a bunch of things, I mean, obviously theres the traditional, you look at the tam, you look at the sam, you look at the cost of customer acquisition, you look at all the potential barriers to entry, as well as the accelerants to entry. I talked a little bit in the beginning about food versus testing humans. Again, the bacteria quite often are the same thing right now, listeria, E. Coli, salmonella, staph aureus, tuberculosis, right? Tuberculosis doesn’t really affect food, but you have these bacteria that cross over.
Matt Theurer
But you’ve got a massive regulatory hurdle in human health, right, in terms of, you’ve got to get FDA approval, not required in the world of food safety testing. So you basically just have to sit down and do the analysis, right? And from a food perspective, the rate and increase of recalls is incredible. It’s accelerating, honestly. You do a bunch of customer outreach, right, you go out, you talk to people. We spent a lot of time talking to growers, food producers, you know, everywhere, literally from the farmer to the restaurants and the grocery stores and every single point in that supply chain, were told, this is a big problem. We need a solution. So it became abundantly obvious to us that was the right way to go.
Matt Theurer
It’s a lot of footwork, quite honestly, a lot of talking to people and asking them what they need and is there a problem to solve? You know, one of my mantras, having spent 30 years in technology, is, I love tech. Tech is great. It’s wonderful. But if it doesn’t solve a problem, then it’s useless. And technology, for technology’s sake, will never be successful. It’s got to solve a problem somebody has, right? So we found that problem, and then we’re moving on to the next place where we’ve said, hey, what if we could? Instead of it taking three days to actually figure out what bacteria is infecting a wound and whether it’s antibiotic resistant or not, what if we could tell you that in an hour or 2 hours, and the doctors and the hospitals and the clinics are, yes, please.
Matt Theurer
That’s a problem for us. So it’s really all about doing the grunt work to find the problem you solve and seeing if your technology can address it.
Brett
That’s the answer everyone knows is the case, but no one wants that to be the answer. Right? Just the product work.
Matt Theurer
Yes. Yeah, exactly. Right. I mean, this is the fifth company that I have been involved in from a startup perspective. And for every moment of glory, there’s 40 hours of grunt work, of just. But putting in the labor and the sweat to get there. But those moments of glory are pretty sweet, right? They make those 40 hours of grunt work worth it.
Brett
Jeff, I don’t know if you’ve seen that meme, but it’s like, you know what? My mom thinks I do. And it’s you on stage at TechCrunch disrupt, or, you know, being on me and, like, you know what? I actually do. And it’s like, the grunt work that’s ugly, and, you know, no one wants to talk about it, but it’s exactly.
Matt Theurer
You know, I get from my brothers and sisters, oh, hey, saw you run a podcast, or you’re mentioning an article, and wow. And I’m like, that’s great. You know, you’re lucky. I’m like, yes, I’m very lucky. But you’re ignoring the 80 hours a week I’ve been doing for 30 years.
Brett
Yeah, that’s what gets missed, I think, a lot of times.
Matt Theurer
Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, I’m not complaining about it at all.
Brett
Yeah, anyone who signs up to be a Founder, they know what they’re getting into, I think. And if they don’t, then they typically don’t last. They’re not prepared for the grind, the pain, the grunt work. That’s just, that’s part of the job.
Matt Theurer
It is. And just on a quick side note, what I related to that, when I started my first company, I had no idea what I was doing. Just not a clue and not in any way, shape or form prepared for it. But I love what I see coming out of universities now where they have these ecosystems they build, teaching students what it takes to really be an entrepreneur. The entrepreneurship programs that I’ve seen at MIT, at Stanford, and I actually just spoke at one down at Virginia Tech a couple of weeks ago. It’s fantastic, right? Because it really prepares kids coming out of college and in some cases while they’re still in college to really do this work. And man, I wish that had been available for me back in the stone age when I was still in school. It’s great.
Brett
I think about that a lot. Yeah, I started my first company in 2008, so I’m a little bit younger than you, I think, but I also have that same reflection. I think yours probably goes a bit deeper, but I think the same thing now. I see all the resources, like, even if you just look on, like, podcasts like this, if you look at YouTube, like, all of the resources out there about company building that exist, I feel like practically nothing existed when I was starting. And if I feel that way, then I’m sure you really feel that way, Jeff.
Matt Theurer
Oh, absolutely. And yeah, I’m glad you brought up podcasts and YouTube. You know, these podcasts like we’re on now and again, all the videos that just a wealth of information and mentorship and guidance is really refreshing.
Brett
Yeah, I watched it years ago. I think it would have been like 2015, but still. Stanford did a course on blitz scaling. It was taught by Reid Hoffman. It had Marissa Meyer, Sam Altman, you know, all the big names came in and gave lectures. I remember just watching that on YouTube and just thinking like, how awesome is this? You know, I didn’t go to Stanford, but I’m sitting here doing like, you know, an amazing course from some of the most amazing people in tech.
Brett
It’s amazing that it’s just out there for everyone to consume if they want to consume it.
Matt Theurer
It is, it is absolutely mind boggling. And then, yes, the fact that we can get access to those kinds of resources which historically were inside their somewhat insulated communities and hard to get a hold of. So, yeah, its refreshing.
Brett
Yeah, totally agree there. Lets go back a little bit. I want to ask about DARPA and winning government contracts. So a lot of founders I talk to, they’re open to that idea now more than they were five years ago. Theres a lot of defense companies now that im speaking to. So it seems like Silicon Valley or just tech as a whole is becoming more open to really partnering with the government and supporting the government. Can you tell us a little bit about your process of winning contracts or securing these grants? Talk us through what you’ve learned.
Matt Theurer
Yeah, sure. I’ll say this. I’d still learn more about that every single day. It’s really interesting programs within the federal government, whether you’re talking about DARPA, there’s another one called BaRDA, which is the Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority. There’s ARPA H, which is the advanced research Project Agency, Dash H for health. There’s all these massive programs and they all have what seem initially would seem to be kind of like overlapping mandates. But, you know, when you really dive into it, there’s some difference. So there’s some what can be subtle but pretty significant differences, you know, in the end when you get to it. So you look at like an ARPA and those are like they’re looking for moonshot ideas, right. And, you know, again, I wish I could say there’s the magic staples easy button. There’s not. It’s a lot of grunt work.
Matt Theurer
It’s finding the program managers doing the research to see what the individual program managers are interested in, what, you know, their efforts are. In a lot of ways, it’s like pitching to a vc. Here’s my idea. You know, give me 60 seconds or five minutes or if you’re really lucky, you’ll get half an hour meeting. You really pitch them on the idea of what it is that you’re trying to solve and how it can address their problem. Barda, something like Barda, which is not the moonshot ideas. They actually put out announcements, right, what they call baas. So anybody’s interested in this, you want to subscribe to the baas. You can get automatic feeds that’ll tell you exactly what it is they’re looking for.
Matt Theurer
And well read these 300 pages of things Bardo wants to solve and well find one or two where we think our technology can apply again, then you start looking into doing the market research. Hey, its great, Bardo wants this. But is there a commercially viable solution out of it or is it the government wants something to be able to detect anthrax? Not saying finding anthrax is not important. Im saying its not necessarily a commercially viable outside of the government. So you have to go through all of that again. And then inside of something like a DARPA, which is kind of somewhere in the middle between ARPA and Barda, again, it’s talking to the program managers and again, this is all publicly available information. They publish the things that they’re interested in and you basically pitch them.
Matt Theurer
It’s like you pitch a customer, you pitch a VC.
Brett
Quite honestly, what’s been your most painful or maybe difficult learning when it comes to landing government contracts?
Matt Theurer
I’d say the most difficult thing in glamoring contract, I’m going to say it’s the speed at which they move. And until you get that signed piece of paperwork, you are extremely subject to the political winds on Capitol Hill. So what’s important to say one administration, it’s not important to another administration. And, you know, for better or worse, you have to play the political game a little bit. Right. You know, and if you something, you know, your congressman’s interested in or your senator’s interested in, you know, and you’re in their state, that’s going to help you a little bit. Right. But that’s the most frustrating part, I’d say, of getting government contracts is, you know, trying to get it done while the budget’s been approved. Right.
Brett
Yeah.
Matt Theurer
And, you know, hopefully you’re not on a continuing resolution or something like that. That’s the frustrating part of it. I mean, you know, the people we work with could not be any nicer or more qualified for their jobs. They’re absolutely rock stars. I think a lot of them get just as frustrated. Right. And trying to get their missions done. So, yeah, that’s really probably the frustration.
Brett
If company building isn’t hard enough, then you also have to navigate the political world as well.
Matt Theurer
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Brett
It was like pain as we talked about it. It seems like you like this stuff. You like the hard stuff.
Matt Theurer
I do. I started off, for me, my philosophies in wanting to do with my career is I look for technologies that I think are going to fundamentally shake up the areas in which they’re applied. And that sounds like an awful lot of hubris, and I don’t mean it to be, but I started off, I was very early adopter of Microsoft technology back in the early nineties, back when Microsoft operating systems were not considered suitable, generally speaking, for the Internet. And I looked at, I said, I think they can dig a lot of work to do, but yeah, they’re going to fundamentally change things, right? PCs are going to knock out mainframes, and Microsoft’s got the right approach to getting PCs to spread. Luckily, I was right.
Matt Theurer
And then I moved into virtualization when I found a little company called VMware, back when they were really little. And the company I started at that point was like their first authorized consulting company and partner. We built an entire practice around working with VMware, which many people probably, unless they’re inside of the computer world, may not have heard of them, but they are. The technology they developed is the reason cloud computing exists, right? And I kind of moved into the world of cloud computing, and then I looked at company I started, exited the EMC. EMC got bought by Dell. We were part of Della. I was burned out. Been like 25 years of nonstop. And I decided to look around again and say, hey, what’s going to change things? I’m like, hey, it’s artificial intelligence. It’s not that AI was new.
Matt Theurer
AI has been around theoretically since the 1950s, 1960s, but you’ve got a bunch of things coming together. Massive amounts of compute available on all these cloud platforms. I’ve been with low latency connectivities, move massive amounts of data around from the edge back to the central computing and back to the edge again, which is really necessary to affect things in the field. I’m like, all right, AI is going to have it stay. And again, luckily, knock on wood, I was right. So for me, it’s all about looking for something that’s going to really change the world, if you will. Again, that sounds really grandiose, and I don’t need it to be. That’s what I try to look for.
Brett
Final question for you before we wrap up here. What’s the three to five year vision look like?
Matt Theurer
So the three to five year vision is to expand not only in the food market and the human health market. There’s a lot of use cases moving into adjacent markets, such as quality assurance, quality control again, materials provenance. Again. We’re trying to make this concept of spectral intelligence very broad and ubiquitous. So what we’re looking for are not only hardware partners, but people out there who said, hey, ive got a problem, okay, I need to solve for whatever it is. Hey maybe its contaminants in heavy machinery, right? Oil and coolants and fuel, I don’t know. But we want to give them a platform that they can basically take advantage of all of the heavy lifting that we’ve done to build these artificial intelligence engines to solve their problem, right?
Matt Theurer
They may say I need to use absorption spectroscopy in this particular range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Great, fine leverage. Our AI will help you build the solutions for it, right? We want to be the platform which drives spectral intelligence. Right. That’s what we’re really looking to do. And allowing companies to really take advantage of the capabilities of correlation of all these different disparate types of data to understand not necessarily just the what but the how or the why. That’s really where we’re aiming to get to, right? It’s not to be a food testing company per se, or a medical device company per se, but back end special intelligence platform.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. That’s a perfect place to wrap up the conversation here. Before we do wrap, if there’s any founders that are listening in, that want to follow along with you and your journey, where should we send them? Where should they go?
Matt Theurer
Oh, they can go to hyperspectral.ai. I and they can find us there. They can also find us on LinkedIn. We do a lot of information disseminated on that platform as well. X
Brett
Amazing. Matt, thanks so much.
Matt Theurer
Thank you very much, Brett. You have a great day.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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