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Mark Galvin, left, managing director of the new accelerator, and Mark Huddleston, president of UNH, plan to fill up the row of cubicles with tech startups.
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The accelerator was first drafted by managing director Mark Galvin, a telecom veteran who launched Cedar Point Communications Inc. in Derry and Whaleback Systems Inc. in Portsmouth. According to Galvin, he started seriously considering the idea of an accelerator last summer and had his first meeting with UNH officials in September of 2009.
"It turns out, they were thinking of some things at the same time that I was thinking about them." Galvin said.
The NH-ICC plans to have a new company located in its space every quarter in its first year, eventually adding a new company every month by 2012. In addition to space and shared business services such as VoIP phones, startups will be given between $100,000 and $250,000 in seed money, from an investment fund the accelerator is finalizing. While the backers of the fund and its total amount were not disclosed, with the stated goals of new companies coming in, the NH-ICC will need up to $1 million for its first year and as much as $3 million in its third year and each one thereafter.
One backer that is known is UNH. The Durham-based university is putting $165,000 per year for three years into the accelerator's fund. According to Jan Nisbet, senior vice president of research for UNH, the accelerator is part of the university's overall strategy to improve its technology transfer efforts. UNH gets about $350,000 per year in licensing revenue, she said, well below the amount received by universities of similar size and with similar federal research funding. They would like to see that double pretty quickly, Nisbet said.
The first move in that strategy was putting Nisbet in her new role, with a mandate to improve UNH's licensing revenue, according to UNH president Mark Huddleston.
"Step one in getting this turnaround was getting the right people," he said.
Nisbet said that UNH hopes to have around 25 percent to 30 percent of the startups in the NH-ICC. To get in to the accelerator program, startups will have to get past a selection committee and then a board that will have seven members, only three of whom will come from UNH.
Galvin noted that the NH-ICC would still be in the startup process itself without some donations. Pease Development Corp., which handles all of the buildings and sites at the old Air Force base, donated the cubicles that are already on site in the accelerator's space. Galvin's most recent startup, Whaleback Systems, donated the VoIP phone systems and four years worth of free service, he said.
The startups that will first get space in the NH-ICC will likely be in the telecommunications, software or networking fields, in part because those are the areas of expertise of the staff that are already in place. Joining Galvin is Allen Hauf, a network technology veteran, as marketing director, and Roger Tuttle, a serial CFO with experience at telecom, software and IT services firms, as finance director. One other reason for that initial concentration is UNH's internationally known InterOperability Lab, which has for decades been helping networking and telecom companies get their gear to work together.
Hauf said that the NH-ICC plans to create between 1,500 and 2,100 jobs in the area through the companies the accelerator helps get started.
Once a company comes in and gets its funding, Galvin said that they should be developed to a point where they can leave the nest in 12 months to 18 months. "Pretty much 18 months is your lease on life here," Galvin said.
For UNH, its participation in the accelerator will change a long history of ignoring the value of the research being done at the university, Nisbet said.
"We've been very good at supporting the state and the country, because we give away a lot of what we do," she said, to which Galvin said, "That'll stop."
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