Community Equity Partners links with NSF BRIDGES Engine to bring private capital to university founders
The BRIDGES team projects are expected to generate tens of millions of dollars in additional annual income for farmers in Tennessee and Alabama, while attracting more than $2 billion in private capital investment for bioproduct manufacturing.
In July, Teknovation reported that a regional team, including the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), was selected as a National Science Foundation (NSF) Regional Innovation Engine, which could bring up to $160 million in NSF grant funding to the University over the next decade. 70 proposals were submitted nationwide, and only 12 were named winners.
The initiative, called BRIDGES, was built around a straightforward idea: take underused farmland across rural Tennessee and Alabama and turn it into a launchpad for biobased manufacturing.
UTK, the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, Auburn University, AGgrow Tech LLC, and Volkswagen Group of America jointly lead the project, which includes a broader coalition of 85 partners spanning academic institutions, industry, and community stakeholders.
One of those key stakeholders is Community Equity Partners, and Eric Dobson, the Managing Partner, couldn’t be happier about it.
“It’s a big deal. We’ve been working on this for over a year, and it sets us up for a nice decade of work,” Dobson said.
Looping in private capital with public funding
For decades in academia, commercialization was almost like an afterthought. The National Science Foundation Regional Innovation Engines program is an extremely competitive grant because it gives university researchers an avenue to transfer their technologies to market. Community Equity Partners (CEP) has been a long-time advocate for technical founders in this regard.
“If you’re talking about working with technical founders in East Tennessee, we’re an exceptional partner,” Dobson explained. “We built a whole model around it because technical founders are the types of founders we find in East Tennessee… Brilliant people are doing incredible things, but they don’t have any history of raising capital or owning a business. So it’s a blind spot.”
However, the character quality that Dobson and his partners at CEP are drawn to is the “sponge” mindset. In his experience, academics and researchers almost always have a willingness to learn.
CEP was selected as the commercialization team lead for the BRIDGES grant, which means that Dobson and his team will help play matchmaker between university intellectual property (IP) and entrepreneurs who can bring it to market.
Dobson said he and his team have already started the inventory process to see what sorts of technologies are available among the regional partners included on the BRIDGES grant.
Additionally, CEP will be the capital partner, helping connect founders to funding, whether through CEP and Community Equity Ventures (CEV)-related investments, or additional outside capital.
The fine print of the grant
The $160 million headline doesn’t paint the full picture of how the grant is executed. The money flows in over the course of ten years, and kicks off with two years of relatively lean payout. Dobson explained that at the end of those two years, BRIDGES must resubmit the proposal to obtain the next eight years of funds.
“We have a big hurdle in the first 18 months to stand up the Engine, and demonstrate that it’s working in a steady state,” he said. “We’re going to be investing in companies. We’re going to be helping start companies. And, we’re going to be training a lot of founders.”
The big goals
“I did the math on it – we need to create, find, or invest in about 100 companies,” Dobson said. “And the hope is that 10 or so of those would be runway hits that could support economic and job growth.”
To accomplish that, Dobson said he and his team are seeking passionate founders, dedicated mentors, and eager investors to come alongside CEP and the BRIDGES team.
According to the press release from UTK, the BRIDGES team projects are expected to generate tens of millions of dollars in additional annual income for farmers in Tennessee and Alabama, while attracting more than $2 billion in private capital investment for bioproduct manufacturing.
Already, the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (TNECD) also awarded a $10 million grant from the state’s Federal Innovation Grant Matching Fund to support BRIDGES.
The goal is to have more than 10,000 people go through technical, agricultural, and manufacturing workforce training as the project ramps up.
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