Economic development boosters are quick to argue that if Connecticut doesn’t offer the tools businesses need to succeed, those companies will simply go elsewhere.
In this case, a business owner moved here specifically because Connecticut offered the goods.
Michael Raab’s start-up, Agrivida, has been the focus of coverage in Scientific American and Technology Review, the magazine of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, because of its patented ideas for improving the processes –- both before and after harvest — of creating ethanol from corn.
But after Raab left MIT’s graduate school in 2005, with money from grants and two rounds of angel investments in hand, he had trouble finding greenhouses and lab space where the company could locate. He was willing to go anywhere, and looked hard at locations in North Carolina, Texas, Michigan, Missouri and Illinois.
Unable to find unoccupied greenhouse space, he posted a note of desperation on the Web, and the University of Connecticut responded. A site less than two hours from their rented lab space in Cambridge, Mass., seemed too good to be true.
“When I first heard it, I thought ‘Oh God, this is going to be a dead-end,’” Raab said.
But after seeing UConn’s technology incubator at Storrs –- which he called “incredible” –- Raab decided to move the company there. He has 11 employees now, but is hiring, and looking to have 20 in a year or two.
Patented Process
Agrivida’s patents are for creating genetically modified corn that exhibit enzymes for breaking cellulose down into sugar (the start of making ethanol).
Like other alternative fuels, ethanol has never been heavily driven by industry because of the cost of producing it. But while most current ethanol production focuses on kernels, Raab’s plan is to create a seed that will grow corn with stalks and shoots that can also be used by taking sugar from cellulose. He is also developing a patented production process.
“There’s a lot of sugar in [cellulose], so there’s a lot of energy in it. But the problem is breaking that material down into sugar is difficult,” Raab said.
He said the perception of ethanol as unprepared to compete with other fuel sources was accurate.
“Corn has some problems and cellulose has some problems too, but we’re going to work those out,” Raab said.
Though it is still six or seven years from offering a product, Agrivida plans to sell genetically modified corn seed and an accompanying production process to ethanol production plants and farmers — who could continue to use the kernels for livestock feed.
A University of Wisconsin graduate and Minnesota native, Raab said he had planned to go into academia before entering business plan contests at Harvard University and MIT in 2003. At MIT he finished in the top eight out of 130; at Harvard he was runner-up.