The 100+ year old disinfection industry is broken and because of that we’ve seen little in the way of infection prevention from the billions we spend yearly on chemical interventions and HEPA filters. As a result, thus far, nearly 50M Americans have become infected with Covid-19 and each year: up to 40M Americans come down with influenza, 20M Americans get the norovirus and MRSA kills more people than AIDS, emphysema, Parkinson’s and homicide combined.
But the last 18 months taught us that it doesn’t need to be this way. Due to measures taken to prevent the spread of Covid-19, we saw dramatic declines in the incidence of these common infections. As much as individuals desire a return to their pre-Covid lives, they don’t want to go back to catching common infections. And they shouldn’t have to be locked down to prevent them.
At R-Zero, we saw this as an opportunity to bring about a new normal. This is why our mission is to eliminate sick days from all preventable communicable diseases (not just Covid-19) and our latest progress underscores this potential new reality.
Today we launched two new hardware products — Beam and Vive, that will forever change the concept of risk when bringing people together in a physical environment. We’ve accomplished this by developing devices that offer continuous, autonomous disinfection of both air and surfaces in occupied indoor spaces. Rather than rely on potentially toxic chemicals or expensive and far less effective HVAC upgrades or enhancements, R-Zero’s solutions work in tandem to redefine the biosafety risk of any built environment.
Beam is the world’s first LED-based upper room UVGI device. By creating a zone of germicidal UV-C across the top of a room where people are present, Beam eliminates airborne pathogens every five minutes, creating constantly disinfected air. Like all of our products, Beam is IoT-enabled which allows for remote management and audit-trail capabilities.
Vive is the world’s first safe and efficacious real-time disinfection technology. Our system leverages filtered far-UV light to continually disinfect air and surfaces, actively eliminating pathogens in seconds in rooms where people are present. Filtered far-UV is the only UV-C light safe for human exposure and our IoT-enabled fixture produces the highest levels of filtered far-UV on the market. We believe filtered far-UV represents the single most important innovation in the history of disinfection/infection prevention.
Complementing these two new products is a first of its kind AI-based dynamic risk model that allows us to score any space by its physical attributes (ceiling height, ACH, MERV rating, density, etc.) and biosafety policies (social distancing, masks, etc) for any pathogen. We can calculate the baseline risk of infection spread for a hospital, office or school and then use the data to determine where to precisely install our fixtures to achieve the greatest reduction in pathogen load.
With Beam, Vive and our risk model, our customers can now achieve dramatically improved indoor air quality (IAQ) and sustainable, hospital-grade disinfection at a fraction of the cost of alternative solutions. When you add these new product launches to our latest collaborations with Mayo Clinic, it’s clear why we’re on pace to book north of $35M in our first full year of sales.
What Amazon did to retail, SpaceX did to aerospace, Uber did to taxis, Spotify did to music and Tesla did to automotive is what we’re going to do to disinfection.
We’re hiring.