Belmar portable hardness tester startup (frictional-sliding yield-strength field instrument)

Belmar's own NSF-supported startup, used as the live case material for his portion of the course. Revenue grew from $200K (2016) to $500K (2017) to projected $1-2M (2018).

Simone Belmar: So what I'm going to do this semester live — and I hope for some participation with you — is that I am going through a process of starting a company from the ground up. It's not all done, but I've been talking to a lot of people about it, and that's probably a good time for me to have this as a lecturer, because let's say two years from now, it's either going to be really good or really bad, and I won't remember what has been needed for me over the past three years. So I started three years ago, I have a team, and we're developing essentially a new kind of hardness tester. It's very different — it works by frictional sliding, to some extent it's an extension of my thesis. It's a portable device to go out, test bridges, test pipelines for the yield strength, very precise. For the market it's something new because right now they have to do cut-outs. So it's a big change for the users not to have data, now they can have that data. We just went from last year — our sales, the revenue of making this test, we went from $200,000 in 2016, last year was $500,000, and we're definitely going between $1 and $2 million this year. So we're really taking this up, and we're supported by the National Science Foundation.