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This annual competition offers participants from across the CU system the chance to compete for $125,000.

Kian Lopez first became interested in water purification while doing an internship as an undergraduate in Amann, Jordan.

“That’s where I learned about wastewater reuse and using gray or reclaimed water to grow agriculture in a very water scarce region,” said Lopez, a NASA graduate research fellow in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. “It’s what got me on this path.”

It was that path that eventually brought him to the University of Colorado Boulder where he’s been developing a new membrane-separation process (a method for blocking some substances while allowing others through) for water treatment. This new approach, he says, is “more energy efficient and selective for certain contaminants than the existing state-of-the-art water treatment membrane-based processes currently used today.”

While the hope of this new technology is to one day help alleviate global water scarcity, he’s currently researching other uses for it to prove its effectiveness—from water reuse on short space flights to semiconductor manufacturing.

Kian Lopez is a NASA graduate research fellow and one of the creators of OsmoPure.

The latter of which spurred Lopez’s new company, , to be born.

And this past year, OsmoPure Technologies was recognized by the Lab Venture Challenge for its innovative distillation-driven process, which produces high-purity product water with ten times higher energy efficiency.

As one of only four graduate students funded, he’s thankful for the opportunity—and encourages other students to also pursue the opportunity.

“I feel like the first year, when you graduate, is a very tumultuous time for start-ups, especially spinouts of the university,” said Lopez. “There’s a lot that can go wrong, and (the Lab Venture Challenge) helps to mitigate that risk.”

The Lab Venture Challenge

The Lab Venture Challenge offers researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder, Denver and Colorado Springs the chance to compete for grants up to $125,000. This competition, a partnership of Venture Partners at CU Boulder and the, supports projects that “address a commercial need, have a clear path to a compelling market and have strong scientific support.”

Since its inception, the Lab Venture Challenge has funded more than 117 projects through 64 new companies that provide technology solutions to scientific or engineering challenges, or deep-tech start-ups. In turn, these companies have raised over $349 million to date in follow-on financing. Previous recipients include TorDan, a company that’s developing an improved technique for femoral surgery, and Mana Battery, a company that’s creating sodium-ion batteries that are cheaper and safer than standard lithium-ion ones.

Applications open in July each year and the Lab Venture Challenge hosts Shark-Tank-style pitches across two nights in October where finalists deliver pitches to a panel of business leaders, entrepreneurs and investors. Afterwards, the winners continue to work and collaborate with Venture Partners on their path to commercialization, which is the process of bringing something to market.

The Lab Venture Challenge is part of a broader push by the university toward promoting an innovative culture. And that push has yielded real results.

Commercialization from CU Boulder has had an $8 billion-dollar economic impact nationally, and $5.2 billion in Colorado between 2018 and 2022. In 2024 alone, the university launched 35 new start-ups—a record. The CU system also ranked fifth nationally for start-up creation and 14th globally for patents issued.

“A lot of us (researchers) don’t really have an understanding of how commercialization works,” said Qizhong Liang, another of this year’s graduate student recipients for his project Flari Tech. “I think (the Lab Venture Challenge) is like the bridge that’s helping entrepreneurs, who have a lot of experience in marketing and turning something into a market, connect with us, creating a double-win situation for both parties.”

Lopez echoed that sentiment.

“(Your technology) can work in the lab, but you also need to talk to potential customers and people in the industry to get relevant feedback,” said Lopez. “It’s really important for bridging the gap between research and actually creating a product that people will buy.”

Detecting Disease Using Breath

Flari Tech’s story began long before Liang came to CU Boulder as a physics PhD student.

Qizhong Liang, a PhD candidate in JILA and the Department of Physics, poses in the lab. He's demonstrating (for the purpose of illustration on his lab equipment) how the laser-based breathalyzer works, in the Ye lab at JILA. (Photo by Patrick Campbell/University of Colorado)

For more than a decade, it’s been known that molecules exhaled from breath could potentially be used for noninvasive, low-cost, and rapid medical diagnostics for multiple medical conditions. However, measuring these molecules at their low concentrations proved difficult largely due to the lack of sensitivity of the instruments.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck at the end of 2019, though, this research, which had been dormant for over a decade, reared its head once more. There were two motivations, Liang says, for the return: “First, our laser technology is much more powerful than that back in 2008 when our research group demonstrated the first breath measurements; second, there’s a COVID outbreak. We wanted to see whether or not we could do something to help society.”

The lab worked together with researchers from the BioFrontiers Institute and CU Anschutz Medical Campus to test CU Boulder students and employees’ breath. They wanted to see if exhaled breath could be used as a noninvasive alternative to standard tests like the nasal swabs that were used to detect COVID-19. What they found is that they could, and with an 85% rate of accuracy validated over a cohort of 170 participants, which is considered excellent.

They then decided to continue this research to see what other medical conditions can also be detected from breath, and Flari Tech was born.

Flari Tech’s mission is to build a laser-based breathalyzer to detect lung cancer noninvasively and rapidly with high sensitivity. The research is powered by CU's Nobel Prize-winning optical frequency comb, which is a specialized laser tool that allows them to sense gas molecules in complex breath samples.

Their desire is to eventually see the laser breathalyzer in hospitals and with healthcare providers and patients to prevent, diagnose and monitor lung cancer.

“I think the patents that we have filed are going to be vital to commercialization and can facilitate our technique’s wide-spread utilization,” said Liang, adding, “Commercialization will help advance the science behind breath diagnostics.”

This year’s LVC was additionally made possible by Berg Hill Greenleaf Ruscitti LLP, Wilson Sonsini, Cooley and Cozen O'Connor. Information about how to get involved in next year’s competition is available on the Venture Partners at CU Boulder website.