March 26 was a busy day at Roadrunner Venture Studios.
In a glass-enclosed office inside Roadrunner's 10,000-square-foot Albuquerque headquarters, Katherine Binney, product manager for venture studio, worked with Luis Chavez, the founder and CEO of Hydrosonics Inc., one of the studio's portfolio companies, the two drawing together on a whiteboard.
Across the hall in a large conference room, Mike Chieco, Roadrunner's head of business development who was in town from San Francisco, met with several people. The company's community and operations manager, Maggie Newman, walked throughout the studio, chatting with other folks at work inside the Innovation District space.
And on the other side of the big, open-plan workplace sat Adam Hammer, Roadrunner Venture Studios' CEO, inside his small office facing the larger area.
It's been almost four months since Roadrunner unveiled its completed Albuquerque headquarters and named its first three portfolio companies. It's been about nine months since the venture studio first introduced itself to the broader New Mexico startup and tech community at a showcase event just down the street from its spot at 701 Spur St. NE in Albuquerque's Innovation District.
Hammer, a co-founder of the venture studio, told New Mexico Inno he's been busy over those months — first with finishing the company's headquarters and vetting hundreds of technologies to select its first set of portfolio companies, and now with helping those first three startups grow and finding others to help build.
"It's been very clear that there's a tremendous hunger for what we're building here," Hammer said. "There's a lot of interest in collaborating.
"I've been really pleasantly surprised," he continued. "This was an idea. It was a bold idea to say, 'Look, the world is awash with [research and development], but research is not enough. We need products and companies to really change the world.'"
What was only a "thesis statement" that Roadrunner raised some capital behind has now become a "reality," Hammer said.
Roadrunner Venture Studios was the first investment by America's Frontier Fund, a national deep technology-focused investment firm that, in November 2022, received a $100 million commitment from the New Mexico State Investment Council. Roadrunner landed $10 million from the Frontier Fund to launch and establish its Albuquerque headquarters, the venture studio's first. It's since announced plans for a second studio in New Jersey through a partnership with Nokia Bell Labs.
The company works to identify promising technologies in challenging technical areas like advanced manufacturing or hydrogen, for example, and build successful startups around those technologies. To do that, it works with national laboratories and prominent research universities, including those in New Mexico.
For instance, one of Roadrunner's first three portfolio companies, Hydrosonics, spun out of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Chavez, Hydrosonics' founder and CEO, was a post-doc at the Northern New Mexico lab when folks at the lab's Feynman Center for Innovation contacted the venture studio about the technology Chavez was researching.
"We started to dig in with him and said, 'You know, there's something really potentially disruptive here,'" Hammer said.
Hydrosonics' tech integrates with alkaline electrolyzers, which are pieces of technology required to produce hydrogen using electrolysis, or a method of splitting water molecules to isolate the hydrogen within. The startup's tech could make those electrolyzers operate more efficiently by reducing costs and footprint.
Roadrunner's two other portfolio companies are Fab.AI, which has an artificial intelligence-based advanced manufacturing technology, and Inaedis, which has a technology to quickly convert liquid biologics into room-temperature stable powder.
The studio's goal is to find four startups like those, per year, to help build. That means Roadrunner wants to identify a fourth portfolio company by June, Hammer said; he added the studio is currently vetting several potential candidates.
But it's not just about the technological potential.
"At the end of the day it's about people," Hammer said. "That's both people internally and externally."
Roadrunner employs seven people full-time, not including a few advisors and consultants. It's also building what Hammer called a flagship "entrepreneur-in-residence" program, which would bring entrepreneurs to New Mexico to work with the studio and build companies in partnership. It has three entrepreneurs in residence right now, including Chavez, Darren Hau and Michael Howard.
The goal, Hammer added, is to have it be the "preeminent" deep-tech entrepreneur-in-residence program, based in New Mexico out of Roadrunner's Albuquerque headquarters.
"This is a big deal," he said. "One of our big insights is fundamentally you're betting on people, not just ideas."
It's a model Hammer hopes can be repeatable for many different technologies in many different places. There are previous examples he pointed to, such as Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that launched in California's Bay Area in 2005 to help build primarily software-focused companies.
Part of Roadrunner's model is also investing small amounts in portfolio companies. Hammer said the studio has invested between $150,000 to $500,000 in each of its three current portfolio firms.
"The magic of Roadrunner — our big-if-true for ourselves — is if we're successful, we can build a playbook of how to build deep-tech companies anywhere in the world," Hammer said. "We want to build a playbook for developing deep-tech companies at scale in America, for America, starting here in Albuquerque."
