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Summer is in session, and the start of July marks the halfway point of 2024. It is with great pride to announce that this week we’re launching the early access version of Phlo to the ValleyDAO community! Last year we spun up a product group to investigate new opportunities to improve the ValleyDAO platform and maximise our impact on the research ecosystem. Since then, we’ve been hard at work researching, analysing and building a platform that we’re thrilled to unveil. This newsletter will tell you all you need to know including what to expect from this soft-launch, what is to come and how you can get involved in the future of collaborative innovation.
But if you want to skip all that and get straight to it… here’s the link to sign up and create your profile on Phlo.
Who is it for?
Phlo is for researchers, entrepreneurs or changemakers who want to make a difference in the world using synthetic biology. If you’ve got an idea or data that you believe can positively impact the environment or you’re passionate about supporting those that do then Phlo is for you!
Why are we building Phlo?
“Phlo”, pronounced ‘Flow’ is short for ‘Phloem’ - The phloem in a plant is like a network of highways that transports essential nutrients from the leaves to various parts of the plant, ensuring interconnectedness and overall health.
Since ValleyDAO’s inception, we’ve grown to a community of about 2000 people who are passionate about leveraging synthetic biology to protect the future of our planet. A small subset of the community has been actively involved in sourcing and evaluating innovative research projects for the DAO to fund, building community and spreading awareness of synbio and DeSci. The other 90% are currently an untapped resource with huge potential to accelerate translational research in this promising field. Building on lessons learned from growing the ValleyDAO community and 1-on-1 conversations with hundreds of researchers and bio entrepreneurs who joined the Discord, Phlo is a step to turn ValleyDAO’s mission into a scalable digital platform for accelerating discoveries and aligning incentives in the field.
ValleyDAO’s Discord essentially acts as a prototype of Phlo, where we’ve manually engaged with stakeholders, connected them, and incubated research projects and startups. We have been successful thus far in onboarding high-quality projects from leading synbio universities like Imperial College London and Denmark’s Technical University, and moving them towards successful outcomes, with a tonne of innovative projects applying through our website. In an ideal world, ValleyDAO would fund every synbio research project that applied to us. However, in the early stages of the DAO, it is crucial to focus on projects with significant market potential to generate sustainable returns to the DAO treasury. This does not mean that the unselected projects lack value or the potential to mitigate or reverse environmental damages due to climate change. Our goal is therefore to build a platform that empowers the community to leverage all available resources, ultimately maximising their global impact.
Goals
By onboarding our diverse stakeholders to a more systematic pipeline, Phlo will empower changemakers to harness the full power of the community to accelerate their work. Phlo will leverage large databases and AI-assistants to quickly find the information, people or opportunities a researcher and entrepreneur needs to move forward. The core objective of Phlo is to reduce the time and cognitive load in moving from idea to impact.
What to expect from this launch?
In this initial pre-launch, Phlo enables users to create profiles and connect with their peers. Researchers can begin building their networks, setting the stage for future collaborations. Additionally, users can communicate to each other beyond the information shared in their profiles. Phlo suggests the most relevant networks based on shared interests and expertise. Once you create a profile you’ll have a direct window into the ValleyDAO community and all of their wonderful skills and interests!
In addition, we’ll also be giving users early access to our research funding database. All you’ll need to do is fill out a quick survey to be granted access.
What is to come?
We’re building features under three primary objectives - Discover, Fund and Collaborate with the goal to develop a suite of tools for each. Each suite of tools is aimed to be comprehensive and means that you won’t need to go anywhere else, you can go from idea to impact without opening a new tab!
Discover
Creating transformative change in the world starts with a discovery. No, we don’t mean a scientific one but, rather, discovering an opportunity. Discovering opportunities often happens by chance, feeling like some divine intervention. But we don’t believe in leaving things to fate. We want to make discovering opportunities easy and repeatable so that it can happen at scale. Whether it’s finding the perfect academic collaborator, cofounder, a job opening or competition for you to partake in, Phlo will bring the opportunities to you so you can seize them!
How will it work - you ask?
We believe this is a perfect use-case for AI assistants who can understand your individual needs but also have access to a huge library of information/opportunities. Phlo will incorporate AI assistants that will help you navigate the vast landscape and find where you can maximise your personal impact.
Fund
We’ve conducted hundreds of interviews and if we had a penny for every time we heard the word ‘funding’, we’d be the richest organization in synbio. Money makes the research-world go round and not only is there not enough of it, but navigating the landscape of funding opportunities can be a daunting task for many researchers. We’re going to use Phlo to collaboratively build the largest fundraising database in the synbio and biotech and make it available to researchers at the click of a button. No more trawling through LinkedIn or the clunky interfaces of EU Horizon and NSF, Phlo will help identify and curate the most relevant funding opportunities for your project.
But it doesn’t stop there…
We’re also building tools to help you secure and manage that funding once it’s been identified. Track and manage all of your applications in one place, use AI assistants to help perfect your pitch and get alerted to new funding calls or upcoming deadlines.
Collaborate
We’re also really excited about the collaborative features that we’re building. We’re on a mission to break down the barriers to collaborative R&D and make it easier, faster and safer than ever. With the community’s collective skills and expertise at your fingertips, there’s no reason why you can’t pursue your craziest ideas.
Phlo will help you find collaborators, build teams, manage work and compensation and advance your project through the technology readiness level (TRL) escalator. Building passionate communities around your work and interests will be streamlined to ensure you have the support you need to continuously take your project to the next level.
So how can you get involved?
We’re giving you early access to Phlo because we believe you can help us make it matter. If you haven’t done so already, register and create your profile in the platform and drop us a couple of points of feedback/feature suggestions.
Look for this button on the bottom right of any Phlo page.
We really value your ideas and feedback - after all, Phlo is yours as much as it is ours.
Expect to hear from us again very soon!
Yours faithfully,
ValleyDAO.
