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LAUNCH.org Chemistry Innovation Notes


LAUNCH Chemistry Innovation Challenge, a global call for innovators, entrepreneurs, and organizations to enable predictive design in chemistry, selected ViridisChem as one of the challenge winners.
March 30, 2019

United We Stand, Divided We Fall

Change, especially on a global scale, is brought about by the collaboration of the brightest minds sharing a single vision. There global issues we face today in our world are multi-dimensional, and therefore too overwhelming for a single person, or organization, to handle on their own. However, our world is in no shortage of brilliant innovators and inventors with unique ideas and methods to tackle global problems.

The LAUNCH Chemistry Innovation Challenge 2016 is a global call for innovators, entrepreneurs, companies, and organizations to enable predictive design through innovative applications of data in chemistry. It provides a platform that unifies the innovators into a multi-disciplinary network and then facilitates the discovery and execution of viable solutions against complex problems, mostly focusing on sustainability. LAUNCH was founded in 2009 by NASA, Nike, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and the US Department of State. While it originally focused on research related to water sustainability, the program has expanded to target pressing global issues including energy, health, and waste solutions. Since its conception, LAUNCH has assembled a team consisting of 77 innovators from across the world leading unique sustainability projects which have raised over $94,000,000 in funding to date. In the summer of 2016, LAUNCH announced the LAUNCH Chemistry Innovation Challenge 2016 to seek out data-oriented prototypes which would advance the field of chemistry, specifically predictive chemical design.

We at ViridisChem Inc. would like to thank the LAUNCH organization for selecting us as one of their innovators for the LAUNCH Chemistry Innovation Challenge 2016. We are honored to join LAUNCH and to share our project with ‘disruptive’ thinkers that strive to promote systemic change over incremental change. The award for being selected as an innovator is our attendance at the LAUNCH forum in March 2017. This forum provides the selected innovators with a chance to consult with a hand-picked curated board of advisors to discuss future growth development, known as the Market Forum. Additionally, we will become integrated as an innovator with LAUNCH, utilizing their resources to help develop our efforts on our growth strategy and gain additional public exposure through the LAUNCH platform.

So how exactly does ViridisChem provide in terms of sustainable chemistry for the future?

ViridisChem is a software company that offers solutions to a variety of industries to redefine their product development processes with minimum toxicity, cost, and waste footprint. The first product, Green Pocketbook, offers comprehensive chemical and toxicological properties of most chemicals, identifies US and International regulatory concerns, and visually shows the toxicity impact of chemicals to help scientists make environmentally-friendly decisions without needing any training to decipher the information. During early research, it offers toxicity estimation of new molecules, providing early warning about possible toxicity problems. During process development, it allows scientists to select better alternatives based on the chemical’s functional group, properties threshold, and GHS classification. Green Pocketbook was released in 2016 and has already garnered attention from top universities like Stanford and pharma companies like Pfizer.

In the near future, our product repertoire will expand to target “process analysis” as a whole. This tool will offer in-depth, per-step quantitative analysis (via cost, throughput, toxicity and waste scores) of development and manufacturing processes, and identify where the improvements can be made. By offering comparison among processes and scale-up projections, it will project the implications of process changes before they are implemented so that scientists can avoid costly mistakes.

The mission of ViridisChem is to develop software products that quantify the implications of chemical toxicity which will raise awareness and decrease global toxic chemical usage. Once again, we would like to thank LAUNCH for their recognition of our mission as well as for providing us with an opportunity to consult with the brightest and most disruptive of minds in order to make a substantial impact on the current industry.


ViridisChem is a software company offering essential toxicity data and tools for companies to move towards sustainable product development.

We have the world’s most comprehensive toxicity database with over 90 million chemicals, and utilizing this data, our software tools provide toxicity analysis of chemicals, mixtures and formulations, and product development processes.