About PowerBridgeNY Validation Grant Ignition Funding Documents Events Resources Contact
About PowerBridgeNY
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority recently awarded three separate $5 million grants to educational institutions in New York State to create clean energy proof-of-concept centers (POCCs). PowerBridgeNY is the result of the collaboration of two of the awardee teams. One POCC led by Columbia University includes Brookhaven National Laboratory, Stony Brook University, and Cornell NYC Tech, and the other POCC led by The NYU Tandon School of Engineering includes City University of New York (CUNY). These two POCCs have decided to work together to create PowerBridgeNY. As a joint center, PowerBridgeNY is better positioned to provide more support for all aspects of technical validation and company formation for early-stage clean energy technologies. In addition, the Center will be able to foster a more robust ecosystem around the clean energy sector in downstate New York.
The goal of PowerBridgeNY is to leverage clean energy innovations emerging from institutional research labs to create more and stronger energy businesses in New York State. PowerBridgeNY will identify promising early stage technologies and invest in translational work to advance these technologies towards technical validation. The Program will provide support to selected project teams for all aspects of company formation. This includes active mentoring and project management to aid in assessing the competitive landscape, developing a business plan, team building, and securing investors as well as financial investments from PowerBridgeNY to translational projects for prototyping and in-field testing studies. To further aid these emergent companies, PowerBridgeNY seeks to enhance the cleantech ecosystem in downstate New York by hosting a number of networking and educational events throughout the year.
The process to apply for a Validation Grant is broken down into the following stages: pre-proposal, full proposal, pitch, and awardee.
The process to apply for an ignition grant is still being determined, as the process is not likely to begin until Spring 2014.
The Institutions
Brookhaven National Laboratory is the only multidisciplinary national laboratory in the northeast United States. It is home to a vibrant research community exploring a wide spectrum of research which includes: fundamental studies of matter at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), basic studies of the role of electron correlations in complex materials and their applications for energy security through advanced materials such as high temperature superconductors, studies of advanced materials for sustainable chemical conversions, basic and applied research exploring the unique properties of nanoscale materials, research into solutions for energy challenges in the electric grid, and more, covering basic and applied research in physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine.
Brookhaven National Laboratory also operates major user research facilities that have particular importance for materials science and its applications including the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN). The National Synchrotron Light Source II is currently under construction and will soon be the world’s most advanced synchrotron light facility. These facilities provide advanced characterization capabilities allowing both hard and soft materials to be probed with high spatial resolution and high energy resolution, utilizing photon-based probes over a broad spectral range and electron-based probes, including aberration corrected instruments. Brookhaven has also invested in instrumentation and equipment to provide in-situ and environmental capabilities for its photon-based and electron-based analytical and characterization tools, providing enormous support to advance the development and commercialization of a broad spectrum of materials for a variety of applications.
Columbia University is considered to have one of the most experienced and successful technology transfer offices in the world. Since it was founded nearly 30 years ago, Columbia Technology Ventures (CTV) has managed more than 4,000 inventions and 1,800 patents and executed more than 500 licenses. These activities are supported by CTV’s 45+ staff members, $10M+ in annual investment in patent prosecution, three full-time, in-house patent attorneys and more than a dozen active outside patent counsel.
Each year, CTV manages, on average, approximately 300 new inventions from Columbia inventors; files over 250 patent applications; executes 50 to 70 license agreements, launches 15 new companies, and generates in excess of $135 million in gross licensing revenues. Columbia’s licensing revenues have consistently placed CTV among the top three technology transfer offices in the country for the past decade.
Columbia Technology Ventures has also been strongly committed to forming spin-offs based on Columbia technology. Since the formation of a dedicated venture lab in 1994, CTV has been involved in the launch of 135 companies, 85 of which are still active, a third of which received venture capital financing and roughly one in six of which experienced a successful exit (for example, IPO or acquisition). This rate of startup creation compares favorably with many of our peer schools around the country; we are very proud of these startups and the many jobs they have created in New York City and across the country.
Cornell has been chosen to build a new tech campus on Roosevelt Island called CornellNYC Tech. The intent of CornellNYC Tech is to directly connect academia and industry in a way that catalyzes growth. CornellNYC Tech will help make New York City a magnet for worldclass researchers, young entrepreneurs, and venture investors while retaining talent prepared to promote change. The curriculum is being designed to bring leading tech talent to key New York industries including media, health care, and construction.
Applicants from the Ithaca campus are not currently eligible to apply to PowerBridgeNY. They are encourage to apply to NEXUS-NY, which is the other cleantech proof-of-concept center funded by NYSERDA.
CUNY has significantly increased its focus on clean energy technology over the last five years. In 2008, CUNY founded the Energy Institute, which is active in three areas of research: nuclear engineering, oil and gas extraction, and energy storage. The energy storage program has raised over $9 million in federal, state, and utility grants and has developed several technologies that are now ready for commercialization. CUNY has supported the Energy Institute with significant cost share and is committed to duplicating its success in other cleantech initiatives by providing resources and acting as a testbed when appropriate.
At CUNY, the Technology Commercialization Office (TCO) transfers CUNY innovations to the commercial marketplace by nurturing collaboration between academia and industry, by championing sponsored research at various facilities within the university, by licensing CUNY intellectual property to sponsors and other industry partners, and by supporting the formation of new startup companies. Although patentable inventions constitute the majority of TCO’s licensing activities, it also handles matters involving copyright (software), trademark licensing, and tangible research material transfers.
i2e = invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship. It is NYU-Poly’s fundamentally new way of approaching academics and research by arming faculty and students with the tools, resources, and inspiration to turn their research into applications, products, and services that take flight as faculty- and student-owned companies.
NYC ACRE helps clean technology and renewable energy companies in New York City grow, advancing the City as a role model for environmental sustainability and smart growth. NYC ACRE is seeded by a four year, $1.5M grant from the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority (NYSERDA) to NYU-Poly aimed at growing an ecosystem of entrepreneurs, international companies, and innovative local businesses that are providing solutions to climate and energy issues while growing the cleantech/renewable energy sector and creating jobs in NYC.
The leading technology transfer campus of the State University of New York, Stony Brook co-manages Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) with Battelle Memorial Institute on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy and, in its Research and Development Park, is home to the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center (AERTC). AERTC is the only New York State Center of Excellence with a broad multidisciplinary mission across the energy landscape, and an onsite and affiliated facilities including a DOE EFRC, Smart Grid cybersecurity and energy modeling and forecasting facilities, and energy harvesting and energy storage labs as well as energy enterprise incubation programs and facilities. The NYSERDA-supported Clean Energy Business Incubation Program and New York State Energy Policy Institute, located in the AERTC, are important state resources in the energy space. Stony Brook’s “Cradle to Fortune 500” suite of economic development programs can provide assistance to companies of any size at any stage of development and has a strong track record of helping dozens of companies start up and grow, based upon technologies invented at Stony Brook and elsewhere. In the last three years alone, nearly 700 projects have been performed with more than 1,000 companies and entrepreneurs, helping them to obtain more than $160M in revenues and $87M in federal contracts, while creating or retaining a projected total of almost 2,000 jobs.
Application Process
Validation Grants are for project teams looking to identify an initial target market and develop a prototype or conduct in-field testing of a technology they have developed in a lab at one of the participating institutions. Teams are not expected to have incorporated or have any background in business or commercialization of university-based technologies. Funds will be used to engage in customer discovery as well as conduct the laboratory activities needed to build a prototype or conduct in-field testing. PowerBridgeNY will provide additional support in the form of a Mentor, educational events, and subsidized access to resources for both business and technical development. Funds (up to $150,000) will be released in tranches as teams complete milestones laid out in their proposed project plans.
Ignition Grants are and additional phase of funding intended for newly formed startup companies based in New York State that are emerging from the Validation Grant process. Funds (up to $50,000) will be released in tranches as companies complete their proposed milestones. Funds will likely be used to cover costs associated with incorporation, including securing intellectual property rights, hiring a management team, renting office space, applying for SBIR/STTR funding, and other activities.
For more information regarding timing, eligibility, restrictions, and more, please visit the Validation Grant and Ignition Grant pages.
Resources
Judges
PowerBridgeNY Internal Steering Committee will nominate the Judges, who consist of members of prominent cleantech venture capital firms such as Osage University Partners, Arch Ventures, and IP Group, government organizations and NYS-operating utilities, and leading industrial research labs such as GE Global Research and Dow Chemical Company. For a current list of our Judges, please visit our website.
None of the Judges will be allowed to hold any board seats or other positions at the partner institutions that would potentially create a conflict of interest. Teams and Judges will both be asked to indicate any possible conflicts of interests so that the Judges will not review applications where a conflict might exist.
The Judges are asked to provide scores and comments to all teams who have eligible pre-proposal applications. The Judges also have the freedom to suggest changes to the project plans, including altering budgets, timelines, and milestones. The Judges may issue conditional awards in which awardees will only be eligible to receive PowerBridgeNY funds if they meet certain criteria.
Once the final awardees of a cycle have been selected, the Judges will be encouraged to take on a mentorship role in one of the awardees, if the Judge finds one of particular interest.
For a full description of the judging process, please visit the Validation Grant section.
Mentors
Once the pre-proposal application period closes, the Internal Steering Committee starts seeking suitable Mentors for the types of proposed projects. The Mentors will consist of serial entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, IP and tech transfer experts, and others, including individuals with deep knowledge of a variety of cleantech sectors, including solar, wind, smart grids, and green building. The Internal Steering Committee will generate a roster of potential Mentors who may or may not all be paired with teams. Mentors not paired with an individual team will still be available to applicant teams as ad hoc Advisors and may be asked to give presentations or hold office hours on a particular subject. Only teams moving on to the full proposal round will be paired with a Mentor.
Mentors who do receive a pairing will be expected to conduct regular progress meetings with their assigned team, particularly during the Bootcamp. In these meetings and throughout the course of the validation phase, the Mentor will review and provide detailed feedback and advice on the overall business strategy, weekly Bootcamp presentations, full proposal application and the pitch presentation. As many of the team leaders will not have previous entrepreneurial experience, the Mentors will provide critical guidance on how to meet the business and technical milestones throughout the validation and company formation phases. Therefore, the Mentors will be intimately involved in giving direction on writing a business plan, identifying and consulting with potential customers, and preparing a presentation for potential investors. If the Mentor’s team is selected to become an awardee, the Mentor will be expected to continue to assist the team toward the goal of creating a successful startup.
Some Mentors or Advisors may be asked to participate in the review meetings for awarded teams. There are at least two official review meetings per team: one to approve the plans to build and test the prototype and one to review the results of test and assess whether or not an Ignition Grant is warranted. Team Mentors will be asked to participate, but Mentors from other teams may also be asked to join if they have expertise in a particular area. These review meetings will also include the Internal Steering Committee, some Judges, and Advisors.
For more information on how teams are paired with mentors, please visit the Mentor Pairing section of the Validation Grant page.
Service Providers
PowerBridgeNY is constantly seeking partnerships with local service providers, including marketing firms, university laboratories, testing facilities, grant writers, graphic designers, and law firms specializing in startups and IP protection. Any service provider looking to get involved with PowerBridgeNY should contact Lilly Belanger (lilly.belanger@powerbridgeny.com). Interactions can include single lectures, pro bono office hours, or paid service work on a recurring or non-recurring basis.
Events
Throughout the year, PowerBridgeNY will host a variety of networking and educational events, including Roundtables, Brainstorming Sessions, Bootcamps, Skills Labs, and Partnership Events. To receive updates about these events, please sign up for our mailing list. All researchers at one of the participating institutions are welcome to attend any of the events.
For a view of all events hosted by PowerBridgeNY in addition to a variety of unaffiliated cleantech events happening in New York City, please visit the PowerBridgeNY calendar.
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