Innosphere receives financial award from Wells Fargo/NREL incubator

FORT COLLINS — The Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2) is donating $1 million in support of eight projects and 19 organizations, including Fort Collins-based Innosphere.

The funding will go to Innosphere’s Scaleup Colorado, the incubator’s multiyear plan to address what’s holding back Colorado’s science and technology ecosystem. Scaleup Colorado focuses on three specific issues: the need to grow Colorado’s technology GDP by growing startup support capacity, improving the success-rate of early-stage startups and helping companies grow from the startup stage to mature companies with more than $50 million in revenue each year.

The Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator is co-administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory based in Golden.

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The awards granted to the recipient companies are part of the IN2  Channel Partner Awards Program, which is designed to foster the development of a robust cleantech ecosystem by funding innovative accelerators, incubators and universities.

Other recipients of the awards include:

• The California Institute of Technology, partnered with Clean Energy Trust
• Carnegie Mellon University, partnered with Northwestern University
• Cleantech Group
• Activation Energy, in support of the Cyclotron Road
• Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, partnered with ACRE, Clean Energy Trust, Greentown Learn and NextEnergy
• NextEnergy, partnered with Prospect Silicon Valley
• Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship at Rice University, Austin Technology Incubator at University of Texas – Austin, Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station Clean Energy Incubator and Texas State University

The IN2 Channel Partner Awards Program was established with $5 million to support projects over four years.

Kate Moore, a co-lead of the IN2, who operates from the NREL side of the partnership, said the $1 million will be shared among the 19 project recipients, with awards varying between $15,000 to $500,000. In addition to projects getting funding, they also will be connected with the other recipients, to see if ideas and solutions are transferable and scaleable for other projects.

Moore said Innosphere was selected because of how high it scored on the evaluation rubric, which included criteria like the ability to positively impact the cleantech ecosystem, the self-sustaining nature of the work proposed and the potential project success.

“We thought they took a great approach in its three-prong strategy to tackle the big issues they laid out,” Moore said.

Innosphere announced its Scaleup Colorado plan in November, which includes expanding its Fort Collins headquarters and building a $15 million facility in Denver.