February 2023 Ravata Newsletter
Introduction
Thank you for reading Ravata’s monthly newsletter where we aim to keep our friends, customers, and collaborators informed of Ravata’s news. In this issue, we will cover how Ravata’s transitioned from a Prototype to a Product and how Ravata will reach the final Technological Readiness Level for its Cell Selection Platform.
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Purpose Behind The Product
Ravata’s mission is to create an autonomous hardware solution to embryo production. A means by which we can preserve our natural world, develop new medications, feed our populations, and grow our families. Ravata’s vision is to become the assembly line to the miracle of life; bringing to in vitro fertilization what Ford brought to automobile production and Ginko brought to synthetic biology. Our impact will be making in vitro fertilization affordable, accessible, and effective. To this end our product development goals have revolved around building a device that will be versatile, intelligent, and simple.
From Prototype to Product
A prototype is a technology readiness level 6 that demonstrates the functionality of a concept or sub-system however has not yet been tested outside of a controlled test environment. By this stage the technology would have advanced past its analytical feasibility assessment phase and the basic “breadboarded” components demonstration. Ravata completed both of these milestones in 2019 and 2020 respectively encouraging our team, our enterprise partners, and shareholders the approach was sound.
En route to Technology Level Readiness 9 Ravata organized product development into 9 projects progressing in parallel. Each was responsible for a sub-system that would integrate with the other subsystems and team members were assigned tasks in multiple projects depending on their skills. These subsystems included our digital/analog electronics, pneumatics, power, enclosure, real time operating system, decision making software, world to chip interface, back end servers, and artificial intelligence models.
At the beginning none of these systems were ready, posing a challenge for testing the subsystems that required inputs from other subsystems. To overcome this multiple test environments were created which would allow sub-system prototypes to be tested in a controlled manner, and by controlled manner we mean artificially creating a perfect implementation of another subsystem the subsystem under construction needed to interact with. In this way multiple subsystem prototypes for each project were developed, tested, and improved. The integration of all the subsystems into our MVP generated our initial bovine application note data from last summer. Although we had achieved the assessments we desired, this integration exposed deficiencies in the performance of sub-systems that deviated from the ideal nature of the test environments.
While the process of creating the MVP was straightforward, the next hurdle Ravata faced was creating a dozen of these systems that would perform the same regardless of where and what they were measuring.
Final Technology Readiness Level
For automation and any sensor based device, quality control and calibration is a crucial step which has a steep learning curve. The primary challenge with being able to embark on the quality control process for a system of systems is that each sub-system needs to pass its own performance requirements before the entire system receives its final calibration and certificate of conformance. The image below demonstrates sensors that have not passed their final calibration (left) vs a sensor that has passed calibration (right).
Ravata has spent approximately 9 months in this quality control loop. Stress testing, breaking a subsystem, resolving the issue, and resuming stress tests. With our most recent run of stress testing with no mission critical bugs, the integration of all subsystems into a product has reached a Technology Readiness Level of 8. This indicates the product has been proven to work under expected environmental conditions.
The final step in our Technology Readiness Path is to perform these tests in the field which is slated to begin this month with our esteemed Pilot partners.
Shipping Pilots!
For field applications, data is required using cells at the facility of use. We are now offering Pilots to install and tailor the system for customers and collaborators. Contact us here to receive more information on the Pilot and check out our website for more information on the benefits.
Regards,
Ravata Team