This year's California Technology Investment Partnership (CalTIP) recipients, announced yesterday during a reception here at the larta offices at USC, cover a broad range of industries and hail from various parts of Southern California, from a nanotech company in Santa Barbara to a wireless startup in Long Beach.

The winners list of the CalTIP program, a state seed grant for research and development administered by larta, was announced yesterday during a ceremony hosted by larta CEO Rohit Shukla and Alfonso Salazar, the Acting Undersecretary of the California Technology, Trade, and Commerce Agency. Since its inception in 1994, the CalTIP program has given numerous California companies the necessary leverage, as Salazar says, to become revenue-generating companies that bring economic growth and job creation to the state (click here for larta's detailed report on CalTIP's success in business growth and job creation).
The program matches technology grants provided by numerous federal agencies, including SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) and grants from NIH (National Institutes of Health) and DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). It focuses its awards on commercialization.

Members of CalTIP's Technical Review Committee were among the guests on hand to meet the winning entrepreneurs, who represent the geographical and industrial diversity of the region: NanoDevices (Santa Barbara), Biocatalytics (Pasadena), XCom Wireless (Long Beach), 4th Wave Imaging (Laguna Beach), Microwave Bonding Instruments (West Altadena), Amonix (Torrance), Broadley-James (Irvine), Cree Lighting (Santa Barbara), Douglas Energy Company (Placentia), Simpex Technologies (Orange County, click here for an August 2 LA VOX company profile on Simpex), and Syagen Technology (Tustin).

"The CalTIP awards in larta's area demonstrate the diversity of the technology base in the region, spanning such areas as nanostructured materials and biomedicine," says Governor Gray Davis in response to the announcement of this year's recipients. "Entrepreneurs in the region are blazing new trails in research and development. The State will continue to enjoy high-growth, high-impact companies which will add to California's economic miracle."

The Winners' Circle

This year's recipients further strengthen Southern California's reputation as having strong roots in the hard sciences, one that will benefit it greatly in a marketplace recovering from the exhaustion of the past few years.

XCom Wireless, a startup based in Long Beach, is building its business in microfabricated electromechanical systems and radio frequency technologies, according to company founder Dan Hyman. "XCom is developing a new technology for RF switching, based on MEMS rather than solid-state devices using transistors or diodes. Communications and radar equipment using these devices can be smaller, less expensive, and consume less power."

Another young business benefiting from the program this year is 4th Wave Imaging of Orange County. Founded by former employees of an oil company just two years ago, 4th Wave Imaging is hoping to market its, "time lapse seismic technology" to reservoir engineers "to help them in developing their fields," says Steve Cole, the company's vice President of Software Development & Information Technology.

This is also the first year that larta has included the Santa Barbara area as part of its work with the program, with two winning companies coming from that area, Cree Lighting and NanoDevices.

"We are delighted to be selected as a recipient of a larta technology grant," says Dennis Alderton, vice President of Nano Devices, whose 'High Speed AFM for Real Time Biological Imaging' proposal won a NSF (National Science Foundation) SBIR Phase II grant. Nano Devices also recently received an R&D 100 award for another technology.

"We are really pleased that Santa Barbara is now part of our constellation," says Rohit Shukla. "larta looks forward to extending our existing association with technology entrepreneurs in Santa Barbara to include the research and economic development communities."

The funding that is awarded to these companies is allotted to different aspects of the business, often marketing and sales or other areas that may be underdeveloped in a startup or mid-stage research and development company. The CalTIP funding is especially helpful for companies that can use the award, as Biocatalytics CEO David Rozzell told larta, "to pay for a lot of things you cannot pay for out of SBIR grants. Patenting costs or accounting support that you need, and even hiring additional people to come and support your product--that allows us to get out in front of the technology curve a little bit instead of always lagging behind."

As part of its CalTIP program, larta conducts workshops before the proposal deadline for applying companies. With detailed, relevant guidance, these workshops have helped companies who have a strong business model and technology yet may not be acquainted enough with the application process to convey its potential clearly. "The workshops were an enormous help to us," says John Mai of Microwave Bonding Instruments. "We went from not knowing how to put together a proposal at all to completing a winning one."

by Wendy Hall
larta Staff Writer