Founded in 2019, TruSpin Nanomaterial Innovation is developing materials that have applications in everything from lab-grown meats to wound care.
It currently has five employees.
Here's a Q&A with Robert Agnew, TruSpin CEO.
What is the most important thing your company accomplished in 2022?
We raised a total of around $900,000. Most of that came from an investment round that we closed in the middle of a funding drought. The rest was in the form of grants from the National Science Foundation and the Innovate Alabama Supplemental Grant Program.
What is a short-term and long-term goal for the company in 2023?
We're going to finish Phase I of our project with the National Science Foundation and submit a really strong report in Q1. Application to Phase II is in Q2. If awarded, we'll be positioned to attract some amazing talent to Birmingham and likely construct our first industrial pilot line. Aside from that, we've partnered with some amazing companies with cool technologies of their own, and we'll be expanding the team to service those relationships. These are all potential routes on the roadmap to the long-term goal: building an industrial pilot line.
What can Alabama do to better support startups?
Alabama should create absurdly attractive incentives for major corporations to locate R&D facilities in our state. R&D facilities don’t create as many jobs as manufacturing facilities, but this will re-establish a national base of knowledge capital that’s been slowly eroded by M&A to the point that American industry is itself vulnerable — Japan and China are eating our lunch in every technology expected to sculpt the future.
Whenever we meet with an R&D team from a Japanese firm, they always ask us the same question: “How are you not already locked down by (insert name of their U.S. competitor here)?” It's simple — most of them have scrapped the centralized base of knowledge capital to interpret our technical information or validate our tech. If Alabama makes rebuilding American R&D financially attractive to industrial titans, our state will become the center of the greatest technological renaissance since the post-war golden age of corporate research. The proximity would be startup rocket fuel.
