With a spate of promising technologies but a relative lack of entrepreneurial support, the New Mexico Start-Up Factory sees big nuggets of opportunity in Alaska.
The New Mexico Start-Up Factory (NMSUF), an Albuquerque-based organization aimed at bringing laboratory or university technologies to market, plans to expand its work to the Land of the Midnight Sun. It'll be the first time the Start-Up Factory takes its tech commercialization model outside of New Mexico.
John Chavez, NMSUF's managing director, said the organization has secured $250,000 to establish an office at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Innovation Center in Fairbanks, Alaska. That office location would staff two "scouts" who would help identify promising technologies out of the Fairbanks university and at other labs and universities in Alaska, which NMSUF would help spin into successful companies.
NMSUF has done that in New Mexico by working with institutions like the University of New Mexico to identify promising technologies with strong intellectual properties, coaching the creators of those technologies through early commercial validation and then forming a company around those technologies with new executive leadership.
Some examples of companies NMSUF has helped build in New Mexico include Osazda Energy, which recently landed a $1.15 million U.S. Department of Energy grant, and MNT SmartSolutions, which just named a pair of new executives.
The Factory wants to help build companies in Alaska using the same model.
Part of NMSUF's inspiration for launching the Alaska Start-Up Factory (AKSUF), Chavez said, came from research conducted under a $3.2 million National Institutes of Health grant awarded to NMSUF, the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management and UNM's Health Science Center in August 2022 to conduct what he called "gap analysis" surrounding university technology transfer. Research under the grant included talking with different higher education institutions about their respective tech transfer efforts.
"As we've gone out to some of these institutions, a big part is mentoring or the lack of someone who wants to do a startup from their technology," Chavez said. "Not that they don't have good technology. It's just difficult to find an entrepreneur to review [technology] in Alaska and then say, 'Hey, I want to stand something up in Alaska.'"
A connection with Mark Billingsley, director of the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Center for Innovation, Commercialization and Entrepreneurship, helped move NMSUF's Alaska expansion from concept to reality.
Billingsley, who's worked at the Alaska university for eight years, echoed Chavez, telling New Mexico Inno that "we don't have many tech entrepreneurs in Alaska." He said he and NMSUF have been formalizing the Alaska Start-Up Factory for the past five months.
"We will benefit from the infusion of the entrepreneurial spirit that the New Mexico Start-Up Factory has had in building successful startups in New Mexico," Billingsley said. "We'd love to see that kind of spirit and success in Alaska, as well."
The tech connection between New Mexico and Alaska isn't totally new. A startup studio program called the Boost Platform between Sandia National Laboratories and Virginia-based deep tech venture firm FedTech aimed to take energy-focused technologies out of labs and universities in New Mexico and Alaska and foster successful companies — a similar process to NMSUF's own model.
FedTech and Sandia National Labs held a pitch event for the first iteration of the Boost program in Albuquerque in December, which Billingsley attended as one of three judges. While the new Alaska Start-Up Factory may be located in Fairbanks, he said its impact will "benefit the entire state."
Mary Monson, the senior manager for technology partnerships and business development at Sandia, said in a statement "only a sliver" of venture capital goes to women and minority startup founders, a disparity that "hits diverse states like New Mexico and Alaska especially hard, making it exceptionally difficult for many local innovators to get a foothold in the marketplace," her statement continued.
Chavez, the Start-Up Factory's managing partner, said there are a few technologies in Alaska the organization has identified as potentially promising for commercialization. Those include a novel genetic research method, a rabies vaccine and a technology surrounding antibacterial detection.
While the Start-Up Factory has identified those three and some other technologies in Alaska, Chavez said the next step is "down selecting" which have meaningful commercial potential through intellectual property study and more thorough evaluation alongside the scientists behind the tech, for instance.
Setting up the Alaska Start-Up Factory won't have an impact on the New Mexico Start-Up Factory's ongoing work in the Land of Enchantment, Chavez said; he added AKSUF is looking for an additional $250,000 in funding to accelerate operations in the far northern U.S. state, alongside the $250,000 in private monies it's already secured.
