INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
round of funding reflects as much.To wit, Kinnos, which makes additives that cause disinfectants to turn blue long enough to ensure a
surface has actually been covered, just closed on $6 million in funding, a major chunk of which came from Prolog Ventures, though it was
joined by Allston Venture Fund, Partnership Fund for New York City, Golden Seeds, MEDA Angels and numerous individual investors.We talked
this morning with co-founder and CEO Jason Kang, who started the company while still a biomedical engineering student at Columbia University
We wanted to understand the impact of the coronavirus on his business, possible competition from the likes of Clorox and whether Kinnos,
which currently works mostly with hospital systems, is thinking about a consumer offering, too
Our chat has been edited lightly for length.TC: Why start this company?JK: My co-founders, Katherine and Kevin, and myself, were all
undergrads at Columbia University in our junior year, and this was October 2014 during the height of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa
Columbia had this design challenge to help the healthcare workers there and they actually brought nurses and doctors in from the field
And one of the biggest problems they mentioned, over and over again, was that ineffective decontamination and human errors were literally
A lot of the disinfectants also have a contact time, which is the time it needs to sit on the surface to inactivate the pathogens
spread.TC: How many products are you selling?JK: Two
products with them so that they can be used more effectively
Highlight is a powder that you dissolve into bulk liquid solutions of bleach and is colorized blue, so when you apply it to a surface you
and Uganda, and we recently had a couple shipments go to China for the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.Our second product, Highlight wipes, is
really designed more for hospitals here in the United States , the reason being that a lot of hospitals tend to use wipes and not sprays
healthcare setting?JK: With any product being used in a medical or healthcare setting, you do a very rigorous battery of tests to make sure
correlation [to dollars], but studies have shown that about 50% of surfaces and healthcare settings are missed or not cleaned properly, and
that if you are able to improve thoroughness of cleaning and cleaning techniques, you can reduce infections by up to 80%
Are you thinking about creating a consumer-facing product, as well?JK: Definitely
considering that, you know, you go to hospital to get care and treatment, not to become more sick
Once we have established a foothold in the hospital market, the next most obvious use case would be consumer
Especially with the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, prevention and effective hygiene is kind of top of mind for everyone.TC: This seems like a
fade on the surface at point of use, especially within a certain amount of time.The way that we got around that is by creating a
point-of-use additive, so, for example for our wipes device, only as the wipe goes through our lid, right before you use it, does it get
impregnated with the chemistry
That way we have much more control over how the color is dispensed, the intensity of the color and the color fading time.TC: What about with
Getting that separation of time was actually really, really hard.
