Between New Mexico State University and the University of Texas at El Paso, there's a plethora of budding entrepreneurs spread between Las Cruces in Southern New Mexico and El Paso in far Western Texas. The Arrowhead Center, a sprawling organization under New Mexico State University, helps those entrepreneurs — and other founders all throughout the state — grow their startups.
There are around a dozen programs run through the Arrowhead Center, which is housed primarily at the Genesis Center, a four-building complex at the southern end of the New Mexico State University (NMSU) campus. Those include a blend of technology-focused "sprints" that accelerate startups in specific sectors like agriculture and business, workshops and government contract assistance programs.
It boasted some significant economic impact figures from fiscal year 2022, including $26.4 million in funding secured for clients and 1,121 jobs created through programs run by the center. The center saw 1,587 total clients during that fiscal year across its range of programs and initiatives, according to its fiscal year 2022 economic impact report.
Kathryn Hansen, the director and CEO of the Arrowhead Center, said the goal of those various programs is expanding economic opportunity for the center's clients. It's also able to tailor those programs' offerings to meet specific clients' needs, she added.
"What I encounter is just that people, they've heard of Arrowhead Center but they don't really know what it's about," Hansen said. "I don't know that there's a misunderstanding so much as just not an awareness.
"And part of that does come from the fact that our services and programs cover such a broad range," she added. "I think it's just continuing to get the word out to those that we can partner with in communities, not just potential clients or participants in our programs, but those that we can partner with in different communities and help to tailor whatever it is that we have to meet their needs."
While some of the center's work is regionally focused — that area between Las Cruces and El Paso — it reaches all corners of the state, Hansen said. Its focus is primarily on rural and underserved communities, where access to resources or entrepreneurship skills training may be harder to come by.
"It's really about ultimately instilling the entrepreneurial mindset and creating opportunities for New Mexicans," Hansen said.
The center gets funding from a range of sources. Those include grants from federal agencies like the U.S. Economic Development Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy, as well as gifts from private donors and state and university funding, Hansen said. Its scope of funding is about as wide as its scope of program offerings — and that's intentional, she added.
"That's something that was important to us, to work towards having diverse sources of funding so that you don't wind up, 'Oh, that source went away and now we're dead in the water,'" Hansen said.
Click through the gallery at the top of the page to see NMSU's Arrowhead Center up close.
Paul Szauter, the chief scientific officer for the startup EquiSeq, completed TechSprint 2023, an accelerator run by the Scale Up New Mexico program — one of the programs housed at the Arrowhead Center. His startup, founded in 2015, wants to enhance horse breeding through improvedgenetic testing technology.
Szauter said he came into the TechSpring accelerator with limited ability to put together complex financial models required by investors to land funding. He said the program immediately set him up with somebody who had a financial template he could use to start building a financial model for EquiSeq.
And, he said, the accelerator gave him and the roughly half-dozen other founders that were part of the program access to Crunchbase — a startup and venture capital website — that helped Szauter research larger companies that he'd one day look at for selling his startup to. Access to those resources, plus "merciless" editing of his investment pitch deck — a presentation used by startups when communicating with potential investors — meant Szauter "got what he asked for" through the program.
"The program is very demanding, but the resources and advisers that are part of this are incomparable," he said in a statement. "You will get out of the TechSprint what you put into it. If you put in the work, you will be richly rewarded."
Aside from assisting clients on an individual basis or through its range of programs, the Arrowhead Center also has a number of tenants that lease office and lab space from the center. One of those is Palladium Diagnostics, a rapid diagnostic testing development company that moved from San Diego to a lab at the Arrowhead Center about seven months ago, its Chief Technology Officer Kevin Jones, Ph.D., told Albuquerque Business First.
"Really that was for access to highly skilled staff and better quality of life," Jones said. "I mean San Diego's a nice place, but it's incredibly expensive. There are all kinds of other things going on. And for a number of reasons we felt that Las Cruces would be a better location.
"It would still give us access to technology, to the highly skilled staff, to everything we need as a company, but in a much more livable, much more friendly area," he added.
The company, founded about two years ago, has seven full-time staff in Las Cruces and plans to hire more there before the end of the year.
