Tech agency bridges lab, market

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Researchers can only tinker for so long — eventually, they need money.

The Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO) gives it to them. TEDCO, established by the Maryland General Assembly four years ago, supplies budding entrepreneurs in the technology sector with the startup funds they’ll need to go from tinkering to selling.

“Our role was to come in and to try to connect the researchers with entrepreneurs,” TEDCO Executive Director Renee Winksey said. “There’s so much technology that gets developed with federal dollars and university dollars that might otherwise sit on the shelf.”

With institutions such as Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland churning out patents for everything from nanomaterials to stem cells, Maryland became an untapped resource for tech investment.

The Maryland Technology Transfer Fund (MTF), which Winksey called TEDCO’s “workhorse program,” helps change that, she said.

Private investors are usually wary of teaming up with researchers still in the tinkering stage — who often have great ideas, but no commercialization strategy. It can be difficult if not impossible to “spin out” technology from labs onto the market.

So the MTF bridges the gap. The program provides up to $75,000 to startup companies that partner with researchers in higher education or government to sustain them through the murky development process — where even the boldest venture capitalists won’t go — until their technology is finally marketable.

The funding allows the researchers to decide “whether to make the leap or not” from the lab to the market, TEDCO Program Manager David Minges said at a Friday briefing on possible funding options.

The money TEDCO provides takes entrepreneurs from “the thing [they’ve] been tinkering with in the basement to something [they] can show investors.”

And whereas the average venture capitalist will only actually invest in about 1 percent of the technologies that come its way, according to Winksey, TEDCO provides money to about 60 percent — and, for the most part, successfully.

Seventy companies have completed the Maryland Transfer Technology Fund so far, she said, and TEDCO provided them with about $4 million in funding, allowing them to develop products from nanotechnology to stem cells and bring them to investors.

According to Winksey, those 70 companies leveraged about $138 million from private venture capitalists with their finished products.

“If we’re trying to be anything here,” Minges said, “we’re trying to be the anti-traditional grant program.”

sgentile@baltimoreexaminer.com

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