A venture firm from California's Orange County has set up shop in Albuquerque with plans to support more startups in the Land of Enchantment.
CerraCap Ventures, based in Costa Mesa, California, moved into its Albuquerque satellite office last month. After considering spots Downtown and near the Journal Center, the venture firm chose a building in Albuquerque's Northeast Heights at 9400 Holly Ave. NE to house its New Mexico office.
The firm plans to move at least one of its partners to New Mexico from California within the next year, Ritesh Agarwal, a current partner at CerraCap who helped lead the firm's office search, told Albuquerque Business First. The firm recently hired Alex Greenberg, the former director of the State of New Mexico's Office of Science and Technology, to help hunt down local investment opportunities.
More hiring might be on the way, too, Agarwal said. CerraCap, which is raising a $100 million investment fund, could bring on three new people to work at the Northeast Heights office by the end of the year, he said.
CerraCap chose the 3,000-square-foot Northeast Heights office because it comes with additional space and room to expand. That expansion could include what Agarwal called an "office of innovation."
The idea, he said, is to keep everything "under one roof" — offices for CerraCap staff and dedicated space for early-stage investees.
The firm would eventually need at least 10,000 square feet to provide enough room to support three to four startups at a time. Agarwal said he wants the office to act as an incubator, where young companies could set up some of their operations before expanding into their own facilities.
Some of those startups might come out of New Mexico's national laboratories — Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories — where CerraCap sees investment potential. The labs and some of the firm's previous exposure to companies in New Mexico put the Land of Enchantment on CerraCap's radar, Agarwal said.
He said the firm was an early investor in Viome, a health and wellness startup that moved its lab to Washington state from Los Alamos in 2021. They also had investments in Robotic Skies, an unmanned aircraft system maintenance startup that was based in Albuquerque before establishing a new headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2021, and in Albuquerque-based 3D Glass Solutions, a semiconductor component manufacturing company.
CerraCap has also received investment from some entities tied to New Mexico.
The firm's first institutional investment came from Santa Fe-based investment firm Sun Mountain Capital, Agarwal said, and the New Mexico State Investment Council put $10 million behind the California firm in 2021, as well, said Harold Lavender, chair of the council's investment committee.
They had considered setting up a New Mexico office in 2020, Agarwal said, but the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing economic fallout delayed those plans. Now, the California firm finally has a physical base in the Land of Enchantment to drive more investment and help some of its early-stage investees grow.
"I see, and I'll be honest, everything in silos," Agarwal said about New Mexico. "And that's where we believe CerraCap could be the catalyst to combine and put this whole ecosystem together."
