New USTAR direction to benefit emerging companies

A new direction for the Utah Science Technology and Research (USTAR) Initiative has benefited 12 early-stage companies with a combined $639,000 in grant funds. USTAR said the grants are part of applying its resources in a more-targeted way to support the success of startups and early-stage companies and new technologies within the state and to incentivize new connections and commercialization pathways among universities, companies and government labs.

A new direction for the Utah Science Technology and Research (USTAR) Initiative has benefited 12 early-stage companies with a combined $639,000 in grant funds.

USTAR said the grants are part of applying its resources in a more-targeted way to support the success of startups and early-stage companies and new technologies within the state and to incentivize new connections and commercialization pathways among universities, companies and government labs.

USTAR said its Technology Acceleration Program (TAP)’s pilot round — part of the initiative’s new direction to help build a robust innovation ecosystem in the state — included funding for Applied Biosensors, Farhand Wireless, G3 Engineering, T3S Technologies and Veritas Medical, all of Salt Lake City; Knudra Transgenic, Murray; KP Biosciences and Turner Innovations, both of Orem; Helidyne and Metashield, both St. George; Pollen Sense, Castle Dale; and Inertial Sense, Salem.

“At USTAR, we support the governor’s vision that Utah will lead the nation as the best-performing economy and be a premier global destination in technological innovation,” said Ivy Estabrooke, USTAR’s executive director.

“Our TAP initiative is one of the clear, effective ways that we are able to achieve this vision. TAP’s competitive grant model has already been incredibly successful in supporting private-sector technology development for early-stage companies and new products within our state.”

USTAR addresses risk capital gaps through a number of initiatives, including its competitive pre-seed TAP fund. Through TAP, USTAR funds Utah-based science and technology startups and early-stage companies to accelerate their technical progress, while also giving established companies the opportunity to mature newly developing technologies. In just six months, TAP’s pilot seed round companies have received $733,000 in additional funding from federal grants and other sources to propel their missions.

TAP’s funding has also sparked personnel growth in these 12 micro-companies, bringing about the creation of 12.5 new jobs, USTAR said.

Legislative actions during the 2016 session resulted to changes to the USTAR program in response to an independent assessment of the USTAR program that indicated the need to realign programs to meet shorter-term goals. The assessment indicated USTAR’s emphasis on research capacity-building at universities was incongruous with its shorter-term goals and metrics of revenue generation and job creation in Utah-based technology companies.

USTAR has made changes in governing practices, policies, organizational structure and staff, and has worked to align practices and procedures to industry best practices. These changes are designed to make technology development for commercialization in Utah more possible.

USTAR said certain elements of its original model still remain, including support for universities, academic researchers and incubator programs. “But even these initiatives have expanded to offer more robust capabilities and ensure the progression of significant technological innovation and product development projects,” it said in a news release.

The initiative supports tech entrepreneurs through training, funding, incubator and accelerator programs. The programs include the University Technology Acceleration Grants (UTAG), which was recently launched to provide competitive funding to nonprofit Utah college or university researchers for commercially oriented technology development programs; the Science and Technology Initiation Grants (STIG), which funds researchers conducting precursor research activities to prepare for federal or industry grants; and the Industry Partnerships Program (IPP), which connects industry stakeholders to university researchers to address a specific industry technical gap or challenge.

“USTAR is a powerful platform for new companies to achieve self-sufficiency,” said Christopher Hopkins, chief science officer and founder of Knudra Transgenics, a genome engineering company that recently received a $1.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. “Our recent grant was made possible by preliminary data, which was empowered by USTAR’s TAP funding and SBIR-STTR Assistance Center.”

Hopkins said the TAP funding and SBIR grant is preparing Knudra “for an expanded foothold in academia and will allow us to quickly dominate emerging commercial markets in genome engineering of livestock, plants and humanized disease models. We simply couldn’t have leveraged these opportunities without the financial and mentoring aid of USTAR.”