E14 Fund invited ThruWave founder, Matt Reynolds to speak and give an introduction to the innovative technology being developed by the company. 

Below is a transcript of the video content and you can learn more about E14 Fund here.

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Hi everyone. My name is Matt Reynolds, I'm founder and CEO of ThruWave. I'm a Media Lab Alum PhD in 2003, and we're based in Seattle, Washington.

ThruWave's mission is to make the invisible visible with human-safe millimeter waves. And I mean two things when I say make the invisible visible. First, we use human-safe millimeter waves to give you a view, somewhat like x-rays, but without the health hazard inside packaged goods. So seeing the items that are inside a box or a tote. We use that 3D view of obscured objects, to derive process information for e-commerce, for manufacturing, and fulfillment.

Here's an example of the types of images that we make. You see on the left-hand side of the screen, a camera view of a package, some packaged goods in a box. It happens to be shampoo. We have a cutaway view in the middle and then on the right-hand side, you see the 3D view that the ThruWave sensor produces.  Again, we're producing that 3D view of the contents of the packaged item without opening the package. We do that with this sensor. It has an array of transmitting and receiving antennas that send millimeter waves into the package, we collect the reflections on the receiving antenna, and then we reconstruct that into an image.

This 3D visibility gives you the opportunity to see inside your operations. So if you take a warehouse or a fulfillment center, that's made up of a series of stages that together form the operational profile of that organization, that includes things like depalletizing, where we can detect missing or damaged items without opening the package. Decanting which means taking items out of a package. We can do that, enabling cutting without damaging the goods inside. We enable stowing and picking operations in fulfillment by detecting empty or available totes or bins and verifying that the correct items are inside.

Finally, in packing, we can do something important, which is detect whether an outgoing package as efficiently used. If you've ever received a package from an e-commerce company that contains a small item in a large empty box, we can solve that problem by verifying that the box is inefficiently used.

ThruWave technology consists of the image sensor, along with a stack that is interpreting those images. So, it's an analytic stack that derives those process variables. We feed that through a manufacturing execution system or warehouse management system, that in turn feeds an enterprise resource planning system like SAP or so forth.