Pitt’s Tevis Jacobs Wins the $100K Forge AI Prize

On September 12, University of Pittsburgh’s Tevis Jacobs pitched the startup he co-founded, Surface Design Solutions, at the AI Horizons global AI summit in Pittsburgh. The company beat out six other finalists, out of 80 contestants, to receive the inaugural $100,000 Forge AI Prize.

Surface Design Solutions, which launched in 2023, uses a novel physics-informed AI platform to improve surface design and evaluation across a range of industries, from medical devices to flooring to metal working. The company helps manufacturers create optimal surfaces to make better products at lower cost.

For Jacobs, who took an entrepreneurial leave this past summer from the Swanson School of Engineering, the recognition was an honor—and a reflection of his commitment to the science of surfaces.

The pure science

“I didn’t plan to be an entrepreneur,” said Jacobs, the William Kepler Whiteford Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. “I thought my colleagues and I would do the science, and companies would read the journals and implement it themselves.”

Before earning his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and coming to Pitt, Jacobs was an engineer at a medical device company where he had many tools to test the shape and dimensions of parts.

“That wasn’t the case when it came to defining and characterizing surfaces,” Jacobs remembered. “Yet surface roughness is essential to performance of so many tools and devices.”

The challenge to accurately characterize surface roughness inspired Jacobs. “I’ve spent the last decade devoted to the pure science of surfaces.”

In 2022, he launched the international Surface-Topography Challenge with his long-time collaborator and a co-founder of the startup, Lars Pastewka, as well as Martin Müser and Arushi Pradhan. The research produced the most comprehensive statistical description of a surface yet.

While proud of the work he and other researchers were doing, Jacobs “didn't feel like the science of surface performance was breaking through to manufacturing.”

A reluctant entrepreneur

In 2016, Jacobs and Pastewka launched contact.engineering, a free website that helps companies implement the science of surface performance. While some manufacturers used the valuable resource, Jacobs was steadfast in his desire to make the science more accessible.

He began to engage directly with companies, asking how they measured surfaces and characterized roughness. His research team worked with manufacturers directly, but, as he said, “It was a slow process.”

His eureka moment came in 2021. “We realized that we could combine the scientific advancements made by our group and other great groups in the field with the concept of physics-informed machine learning to solve the problem,” Jacobs said.

Unlike many traditional AI systems, which are trained on vast amounts of data, the model that Jacobs and his team developed is based on physics, which predicts how surfaces will function. With their new technology, they can model and evaluate surface performance in hours instead of years.

“I wanted the technology to get out into the world,” he said, “but I had this view that someone else would just run with it.”

Paul Petrovich from Pitt’s Innovation Institute, where Jacobs submitted an invention disclosure, helped him embrace the new role of entrepreneur. As Jacobs said, “He reminded me that it was our team that knew the technology the best and that cared about it the most.”

The goal remains the same

This past summer, Jacobs took an entrepreneurial leave of absence from Pitt, while still supervising graduate students and his lab. He also remains engaged with the Surface-Topography Challenge. “I am staying actively involved in the community of scientists and researchers that are advancing the science of what is possible to control and predict.”

Jacobs sees his life’s work as advancing the science of surface performance. Having the time to scale up his company and see how far it can go is “just an extension of that.”

“I'm becoming a better scientist by learning what manufacturers are doing in the real world and what they're struggling with and how to help them. I’m becoming a better entrepreneur by keeping up with the bleeding-edge science of surface performance,” Jacobs said. “The goal, my goal, is the same.”