Innovative companies credit collaboration with success

LOVELAND — Companies represented at today’s BizWest CEO Roundtable on Cutting-Edge Tech are not only riding the wave of innovation in Northern Colorado, but they’re helping to create it.

They credit collaboration as among the attributes of the region, with one company leaning on another to create opportunity.

“It’s becoming an everyday thing at the Forge Campus,” said Jay Dokter, CEO of Vergent Products Inc. and one of the partners in creating the Forge technology campus in the former Hewlett-Packard facility in Loveland. “It’s a big thing in Colorado, people wanting to help others be successful.”

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He related how he and Ryan Billson, business director for Avid Product Development, were able to put their heads together to fulfill the need of a manufacturer elsewhere that needed a specific part designed and produced quickly. 

Ed VanDyne, now in his sixth startup company with plastics recycler Plastics 2 Green, is leveraging other companies at the Warehouse Innovation Hub to develop materials that he needs to create a process to reduce discarded plastic into hydrogen, ammonia, carbon black and carbon nanotubes. A $1 billion U.S. Department of Energy hydrogen program loan awaits qualification of the technology. 

Richard Magid, vice president/technology transfer at Colorado State University’s STRATA organization, said three CSU life sciences companies are entering the Innosphere Ventures lab facility in north Fort Collins. Innosphere, like the Warehouse, serves as an incubator for innovative companies.

CSU is also involved with Innosphere in the Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine project that will harness private and academic resources in the two states to create clean technology, clean-energy production and environmental-science developments.

“A lot of momentum is coming from the research dollars” that are being pumped into projects, Magid said. The federal government is funding more applied and “translational” research — research that can translate into private sector companies. 

“If you increase funding for translational work, that’s what you’re going to get more of,” he said.

Tim Jones, chief operating officer at Innosphere, said the federal CHIPS Act has helped drive innovation in the technology sector. With regard to the CO-WY engine project, Jones said that Colorado has a more mature environment for climate technology than Wyoming but that the project brings the two states and tribal nations together in a significant way. 

The federal funding for the engines project will go to three areas: “Use-inspired” research, commercialization of technology, and workforce development to help develop skills that don’t exist in the marketplace and to help energy extraction workers retool for the future, Jones said.

Matching investment from the private sector is required, which creates a broad spectrum of participation, he said.

Allison Seabeck, executive director of the Warehouse, said companies that have planted their flags there tend to be “enabling capabilities around advanced manufacturing,” with manufacturing automation — robotics for example — among the services that are under development. Technologies that apply to biosciences also are under development. Optics and lasers that can separate particles into nanoparticles enable other technology companies, she said.

VanDyne said his new company grew out of a lifetime of experiences in environmental technology, particularly auto and plasma tech. 

“I was looking at making hydrogen. Typically, that’s done by splitting water, which can’t be done across the globe because of water availability,” he said. Hydrogen is seen as a fuel of the future, but “it burns too fast and too hot.” He decided instead to split hydrogen molecules out of plastic, add nitrogen and create ammonia, which is easier to transport and can itself be used as a fuel as well as a fertilizer.

“There were no patents to create ammonia directly from plastic,” he said, so he devised one.

Pete Temple, CEO of E.I. Medical Imaging, said his 40-year-old company is a manufacturer of diagnostic ultrasound equipment and is “embracing the machine learning wave.”

Becky Rivoire, CEO and founder of Biotech Services, a medical technology company that is a contract research organization, said her startup faces multiple challenges, among them knowing what clients need before they might ask for it and be ready when they do. 

“It takes a long time to develop the designs to the validated stage so we can be confident of results,” she said. As a former Colorado State employee, she taps into expertise and equipment there when needed and in return gives CSU a connection with industry that it might not otherwise have.

For companies with the cash-enabled ability to take advantage of conditions in the marketplace, 2024 is shaping up to be a big year for mergers and acquisitions. Michael Handley, CEO of Statera Biopharma Inc., which counts CytoCom among its subsidiaries, said capital markets have been “abysmal” in the past 24 months but the first quarter of this year has taken a turn. 

“Last year, an all-time high number of biotechs filed for bankruptcy. They either ran out of cash or didn’t execute efficiently. That leaves an opportunity to pick up a lot of biotech assets on the cheap. We’re working to identify undervalued assets,” he said. 

Handley said Statera has eight companies under consideration for acquisition. 

“Now is the time for aggregation to build a much larger portfolio. We’re agnostic (about the type of bioscience company) but feel this is the right time and right place.”

Longtime contract manufacturer Vergent plans a move to the Forge Campus this year, Dokter said, where it will occupy 16,000 square feet of space in Building C. The expansion will include a clean room.

“We’re expanding our services into rapid prototyping. There are a lot of design capabilities in Colorado, but not a lot of design services for manufacturing specifically — making things efficient for production. We want to manufacture domestically, onshoring and we’re purposely building out those capabilities.”

Billson of Avid Product Development, also a contract manufacturer using 3D printing technology, said demand has been good for what it can produce. Unlike parts manufacturers that consider “how much material can I remove” and still keep the part functional, in order to be efficient with raw materials, the 3D printer considers “what’s the least amount of material I can add to make this part work.”

Scott Warner, CEO of information technology company Connecting Point, advised companies to consider their communication infrastructure “from day one.” 

“The fabric of an organization is how you handle data and move data from job to job,” he said. Startups need to be focused on what they are building, which could mean that they can outsource their IT because “it isn’t core to what they’re doing.” 

Startups dealing with government contracts, venture-capital investments and compliance issues might find it helpful to use a managed IT service to help avoid missteps and to establish an IT framework that doesn’t change with employee turnover.

Almost all the companies represented at the roundtable said they were using or considering use of some form of artificial intelligence or AI.

“We don’t have a field at the university where they’re not trying to figure out how it applies,” Magid said.

VanDyne uses it to help him compose written documents. He said he’s trained it to produce paragraphs that require little editing. “It allows me to communicate a lot faster,” he said.

Rivoire has used AI in a project involving a specific neuro cell type. AI helped to model what is happening at the cellular level with a certain drug.

Warner noted that a lot of software is coming with pre-scripted automated tools built in. “They  are powerful tools but you have to be prepared to use them. They’re easy to implement but harder to control.”

Handley said some projects require “more than the human brain can manage,” but AI tools require good data in order to produce reliable results. “It’s still garbage in, garbage out,” he said.

Dokter uses AI to help with part sourcing. A part that might have periodic spikes in demand might not be the best part to use if it isn’t always readily available, he said.

CEO Roundtables in Northern Colorado are sponsored by accounting firm Plante Moran, Elevations Credit Union and law firm Berg Hill Greenleaf Ruscitti LLP.