Tech Garden fuels nine firms with Grants for Growth awards

SYRACUSE — The Tech Garden, an affiliate of CenterState CEO, on Aug. 18 provided nine area firms with a financial boost with funding awards through its Grants for Growth program.

The Tech Garden awarded nearly $475,000 in the program’s 11th round, the organization said in a news release. The investments will leverage more than $919,000 in matching funds to support “emerging” regional companies.

This program has now been operating for nine years, Robert Simpson, president and CEO of CenterState CEO, said in his remarks to open the event. 

“It has been a really important piece of the ecosystem of support for startup companies who are looking to grow and expand [their] products, develop new technologies, and get those technologies to market,” Simpson said.

CenterState CEO is the region’s primary economic-development organization. 

In this latest round, the Tech Garden selected seven recipients for a $25,000 “Proof of Concept” grant and two firms for a $150,000 “Concept to Marketplace” investment.

Companies apply for awards in one of the two categories based on their growth stage. 

“Concept to Marketplace”
The Tech Garden awarded “Concept to Marketplace” investments to Ephesus Lighting, Inc., which is based at the Tech Garden and is partnering with Syracuse University (SU).

Ephesus Lighting designs and manufactures light-emitting diode (LED) lighting products for the industrial and sports markets.

The Tech Garden awarded another $150,000 grant to NexID Biometrics of Potsdam, which is collaborating with Clarkson University. 

The firm is commercializing “liveness detection biometric-security software to enable faster and more secure fingerprint scanning in electronic devices,” according to the news release.

The firm specializes in detecting fake fingerprints, Mark Cornett, COO of NexID Biometrics, said in his remarks during the event.

“Fingerprint sensors are very vulnerable to fakes as well as severed fingers, unfortunately … and what’s worse is that these things are easily produced with everyday household materials,” said Cornett.

NexID Biometrics wrote and commercialized software that Clarkson University had developed, he said.

The company plans to use its investment to “compress” a strategy that it had expected to unfold over the next few years into a matter of months with the introduction of touch ID technology opening up the consumer market, he added.

“We’re doing a lot of marketing and we’re also doing a lot of product development for the mobile market space and embedded market space with these funds,” said Cornett.

“Proof of Concept”
The “Proof of Concept” grant recipients include Avatar, a biochemisty firm that partnered with the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry. 

Avatar uses solid waste from the pulp and paper industry and converts it to value-added chemistries like fermentable sugar for the fuel, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries.

The recipients also include Tuzag, which partnered with SU as it develops an “anonymous tailored ad system,” a software platform that can deliver “highly customized” digital advertisements.

People using Internet-connected devices will see only the ads that are relevant to them, and their user data will be “completely private and secure,” as described in the news release.

The recipients also included three companies that collaborated with Cornell   University, — Euphony, Infinivation Biomedical, and ZYMtronix.

Euphony is creating software that reproduces human speech, which has uses for speech therapy, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other natural language-processing applications.

Infinivation Biomedical has designed a “wearable” medical appliance that can regulate fluid pressures on the brain. At the same time, it is “highly portable” and attaches to an intravenous (IV) pole, allowing the patient to move about freely, without requiring qualified staff to monitor and calibrate the device.

ZYMtronix is supercharging enzymes to create a variety of new chemistries that harness and recycle renewable materials and energy sources for use in pharmaceutical productions and other chemical applications.

The list of grant winners also included MacKintock, an industrial software firm that partnered with SUNY Cortland; and Quansor, a firm that focuses on water-quality testing, and partnered with SUNY Binghamton.

MacKintock is developing hardware and software for machine integration that allow manufacturing equipment and machinery “to be intelligent” and enable machinery to handle tasks such as communicating maintenance concerns, facilitating remote-operation capabilities, and reporting on output in real-time.

Quansor is developing a sensing technology that continuously tests drinkable water systems for the presence of toxins.

To date, the Grants for Growth program has awarded 50 grants and investments totaling more than $2.7 million.

Grants for Growth is made possible with $5 million in funding that New York State Senator John DeFrancisco (R–Syracuse) helped secure for the program, the Tech Garden said.

“It’s not … a lot of money but sometimes the dollars that are given just to get that seed money to get going will generate interest and it’ll generate others to get involved in the business, the financing of the business, and it could be the difference between success and failure,” DeFrancisco said in his remarks during the event.     

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com