November 1, 2016

Tufts Magazine: Brilliant! Jumbo entrepreneurs and their big ideas

by BETH HORNING

Orange Photonics – DYLAN WILKS, G15, FOUNDER

BIG IDEA: Products for the legal marijuana industry. First up will be LightLab, a “portable, lab-grade cannabis potency analyzer” that the company says will give growers, dispensaries, regulators, and manufacturers of marijuana-infused products a fast, reliable, and affordable way to maintain quality control. Instead of waiting several days for a lab to perform potency tests, they could get results in less than ten minutes.

STATUS: Wilks, whose background includes leading optics projects for NASA’s Mars Rover, founded Boston-based Orange Photonics in the spring of 2015 and won the Tufts $100K Business Plan Competition for it that same year. In April, he announced that Digipath Labs of Las Vegas, an independent cannabis testing firm, will evaluate LightLab. He told PRNewswire, “Third-party validation is essential for us to ensure that LightLab provides the level of performance the industry wants.” orangephotonics.com

See more at: http://emerald.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2016/act/brilliant.html#sthash.xQXP76Nm.dpuf