The Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2) announced it’s latest cohort this morning. Those companies are:
- Atlas Sensor Technologies – El Paso, TX – Real-time water monitoring and softening technology.
- GrowFlux – Philadelphia, PA – Intelligent horticulture lighting.
- Motorleaf – Montreal, Quebec – Automated AI yield predictions for indoor agriculture.
- New West Genetics – Fort Collins, CO – Genomics-assisted breeding for the hemp industry.
- SunPath – Louisville, CO – Fiber optic indoor lighting.
None of the five biotech startups are from our region, but they’ll be sending scientists to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis as part of their $250,000 cash and research award. Even though none of today’s winners are from here, this incubator feeds our local ecosystem – and at least one past winner moved here as a direct result of IN2. Aker, part of the 2019 IN2 cohort, moved to St. Louis from it’s initial headquarters in Chicago and Minnesota after participating in the program and landing local funding.
“Anytime a group of leaders in the plant and life sciences field come to St. Louis as as part of an investment cohort… whether they stay here long term or they become exposed to this market… it’s a plus,” Community Development Ventures CEO Dick Fleming told the 4thEst8. ” And what the Danforth Center has done in terms of putting St. Louis on the map… I don’t think you can put a number on it.”
IN2 targets companies with very early-stage technologies, and part of the award fuels collaborative research with scientists at the Danforth Center aimed at validating their technology. This incubation project is a partnership between the philanthropic Wells Fargo Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The six year old program took on agriculture as a focus and pulled in the Danforth Center as a program partner.
It has also thrown some money at a couple St. Louis organizations that feed tiny startups to the IN2 program: BioSTL and the Yield Lab Institute, which offer mentorship and entrepreneur support.
Links:
On the 4thEst8:
