Monday, December 1, 2008

Qteros reportedly plans HQ move to Worcester area

By Mass High Tech Staff

Just weeks after changing its name from SunEthanol and landing a significant amount of new funding, Qteros Inc. is reportedly preparing to move its headquarters from Hadley to a new facility in the Worcester area.

Qteros will be moving into a production-ready facility at an unnamed location around Worcester, according to a report in Sunday’s edition of the Springfield Republican. The move follows $25 million in Series B financing the company reported in November, led by new investor Venrock Associates, as well as Battery Ventures. Other new investors included BP and SorosFund Management LLC, in addition to returning backers Long River Ventures and Camros Capital.

Qteros plans to use the funds in part to add staff, according to executive vice president Jef Sharp, who said the 20-employee company is targeting a staff of 50 eventually.

Originally named SunEthanol, Qteros CEO William Frey said the name change was intended to reflect the company’s core technology, the Q-Microbe, which was discovered by company founder and chief scientist Susan Leschine. The Q-Microbe digests and ferments cellulosic feedstocks to ethanol in a single-step process.

In the Repulican article, Leschine said that Qteros needed to move quickly into a production-ready facility, and the right kind of site wasn’t available in the Hadley area.

Qteros in June named former DuPont Applied BioSciences leader Frey as its new CEO. Later that month, Qteros entered into a research collaboration agreement with Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development to develop new genetic strains of the Q-Microbe, in the laboratory of George Church, a professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Computational Genetics.

Qteros has landed an undisclosed amount of funding from Waltham’s Battery Ventures, Hadley’s Long River Ventures and South Dakota’s VeraSun Energy. The company was chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy to participate in the agency’s $114 million project to build four small-scale biorefineries across the country, announced in February.