Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

For its 10^th anniversary, the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN²) is expanding in a major way.

The clean technology program is funded by the Wells Fargo Foundation and co-administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), specifically NREL’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center (IEC). Over the past 10 years, IN² has supported 12 cohorts of start-up companies with up to $250,000 each in nondilutive funding. The companies use those funds to work with the world-class experts at NREL and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis to improve, validate, and de-risk their technologies. Applicants are referred by the Channel Partner network, a group that includes more than 60 incubators, accelerators, and universities that collectively have access to more than 6,000 start-ups.

What’s changing?

In 2024, IN² is evolving with a new track designed to help deploy clean energy technologies. The plan is to partner start-ups — potentially IN² program alums — with companies and communities that want to adopt clean energy technologies. While the program will look to IN² alums first, the key will be finding the technology each adoptee needs. The funding from IN² will help the start-up install its technologies at one of the partner’s locations and provide a targeted curriculum for the adoptees to give them the knowledge needed to uptake the new technology.

For this first cohort on the new track, IN² will find industry partners across a broad spectrum — from large corporations or grocery chains to mid-size companies in real estate, and nonprofit and/or government entities (city, county, or state).

Then Knoxville-based start-up mobius, formerly known as Grow Bioplastics, was one of six new ventures focused on agriculture technology solutions that participated in the seventh cohort of IN².

To learn more about the program and its changes, read the NREL news release.

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