Startup Leaders Present at the CNSI Technology Incubator’s Tenth Anniversary

A group comprising faculty, present and former graduate students, staff, and interested visitors gathered in the Marine Science Auditorium in June to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) Technology Incubator. The half-day event featured presentations by representatives from eleven of the forty-plus new companies that had their start in the Incubator to date.

Some of the speakers were faculty, some were still doing their doctoral work at UCSB, others were alumni preparing to spin out of the center, and others were seeking their next round of funding. They all told compelling stories about their varied roads to creating, developing, and selling their diverse and highly innovative products — and the indispensable role of the Incubator, which was established in 2015, has played in their progress.

At an afternoon gathering, Chancellor Henry Yang, UCSB Executive Vice Chancellor David Marshall, COE Dean Umesh Mishra, and California Assemblymember Gregg Hart spoke about the Incubator's important contributions and impact.

“Our highly interdisciplinary and cutting-edge approach to research and teaching at UC Santa Barbara fosters a collaborative environment in which innovative discoveries and entrepreneurial ventures thrive,” said Yang. “This, in turn, contributes to our community and our society by creating jobs, companies, and industries and increasing public access to transformative technology. In only a decade, the CNSI Technology Incubator has made a transformative impact on our university and its entrepreneurial landscape, contributing to our leadership in innovation and further strengthening our economic impact. We are proud of the phenomenal success of the Incubator and excited for all that the future holds.”

“The CNSI technology incubator is a critical part of the start-up ecosystem stimulated by research at UCSB and innovations spawned elsewhere but best nurtured within the incubator, said Mishra. “It not only facilitates creation of companies and associated jobs and wealth in the community and beyond, but also sparks the imagination of would-be innovators and entrepreneurs. The CNSI incubator, in combination with ecosystem partners Technology Management and the Office of Technology & Industry Alliances, has become a destination for the transition of technology into the community, and we are all very proud of its success and are committed to supporting its continuous growth.”

Hart, Assemblymember for the 37th District, spoke to the power of the incubator in terms of the local economy. “CNSI’s Technology Incubator is a powerful driver of startup growth and job creation, turning breakthrough research into real-world impact. By supporting early-stage companies and creating hands-on opportunities for students, CNSI is helping to grow California’s innovation economy in critical areas like clean energy, sustainability, quantum science, healthcare, and robotics. I’m proud to support policies that invest in students, researchers, and entrepreneurs shaping our state’s future.”

In his remarks to begin the day, Tal Margalith, Executive Director of Scientific Initiatives and Innovation for CNSI at UCSB, described the Incubator, which went from no startups to forty in ten years, as a “humming innovation ecosystem.”

The Incubator began as a relatively tiny six-hundred-square-foot space in Elings Hall, the back wall of which was occupied by a large cold room, reducing the working space available to the first three occupants: Apeel Sciences, (winner of the first UCSB New Venture Competition [NVC] in 2012) Milo Sensors (winner of the 2015 NVC) and Next Energy. In 2018, the State of California invested $22 million in the UC system to support infrastructure development for entrepreneurship, with $2.2 million of that going to UCSB. That funding made it possible to expand the Incubator space and build an Innovation Workshop, attracting more users, even as others waited for a place to open up.

Jenny Du, vice president for research at Apeel, where she was employee No. 2, spoke for the company, which was founded by UCSB alumnus James Rogers (PhD Materials ’12), who was soon joined by alumnus Louis Perez (PhD materials ’13) and Du, who earned her PhD in chemistry at Queens University in Ontario, Canada, in 2011.

In a conversation following the day’s final presentation, Du recalled that even though Apeel was founded before the Incubator was formally created, “The concept and the desire — the spirit — for it were already there, so that even without a formal framework or a named center, it was possible for us to partner with UCSB faculty and staff. We had access to people who gave us kind and generous advice. We had access to instruments like an NMR machine. There is no way we could have done that by ourselves.”

Now, more than a dozen years later, she says, “It’s amazing to see what the Incubator has matured into. There is the specialness of CNSI itself, and that is combined with the power of the broader campus ecosystem, which includes things like the New Venture Competition, the emergence of the Technology Management certificate, and the maturation of the coursework for it into, first, a full program and, now, a department.”

For Alan Liu (PhD ’16), CEO of Goleta-based Quintessent, which develops optical connectivity solutions to scale computing and AI, the Incubator provided a kind of self-contained support system. “The Incubator was our first official home — our first office, our first lab space — and it granted us a sense of normalcy and stability in the chaotic ambiguity of the early days of a startup,” said Liu, who co-founded Quintessent with his PhD advisor, laser and photonics expert John Bowers. “The incubator rent easily paid for itself in value, and the office space, lab space, and discounted rates for the UCSB Nanofab were great accelerants for us in the early days. Besides that, I personally enjoyed having a diverse community of fellow entrepreneurs around to learn from.”

Now, seven years after the company was founded, Liu says, “We maintain close ties to UCSB and still make use of the UCSB Nanofab. The community connections I made are alive and strong to this day. I still grab coffee regularly with other fellow entrepreneurs — both alumni and current CNSI Incubator companies — either to learn from each other, trade notes, or just cheer each other on.”

Jenny Du highlights another aspect of the rapidly developing entrepreneurial community that extends across and beyond campus. “Even within the broader UC system,” Du added, “you are starting to see campus-to-campus partnerships emerging to leverage resources. In this last talk [presented by Hikari Medical Technologies], for example, they were saying that they are able to get access to UCLA animal labs.”

Kezi Cheng, CEO of FLO Materials, which has the mission of developing “infinitely” recyclable and reusable polymers, says that the Incubator provided exactly what FLO required, so much so that the company relocated to Santa Barbara to become a part of it.

“We started FLO in the Bay Area, initially working out of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as part of the 2021 Cyclotron Road cohort," Cheng said. "When that program ended, we needed to find lab space with flexible and affordable lease terms. Most of the options we found in the Bay Area — sublease, long-term lease, incubators — were either too expensive or lacked the equipment we needed to keep our R&D moving forward. I've learned that being lean and flexible is so crucial in building a startup during tough funding environments. We are commercializing a new material, which requires high R&D investment to test hundreds of samples, run characterization, and iterate quickly. That kind of work would typically require either spending a fortune to buy our own equipment or outsourcing every test, which isn’t sustainable for an early-stage company. When we came across CNSI and MRL, it felt like the ideal fit. They offered access to the equipment and facilities we needed, along with lease terms that made sense for a startup. It gave us the space, literally and figuratively, to continue refining our product.”

The words of these entrepreneurs go a long way in validating the reality of the previously mentioned “humming innovation ecosystem” at UCSB, characterized by an interdisciplinary cross-campus and intercampus desire to grow, expand, and develop.

Throughout the event, a seat in the center of the room was occupied by CNSI director, Craig Hawker, a Distinguished Professor in materials, the Heeger Professor of Interdisciplinary Science in chemistry, and a serial entrepreneur who in 2021 received the Kathryn C. Hach Award for Entrepreneurial Success from the American Chemical Society. The award recognized Hawker’s “innovative leadership in creating, developing, and commercializing revolutionary polymer-based therapeutics and personal-care products through multiple successful start-up companies.”

Following many of the presentations, and in his own talk, Hawker noted the important long-term service to those pursuing new ventures provided by CNSI and the CNSI Incubator. Reiterating after the event, he said, "The CNSI Incubator has become a transformative force across UCSB’s research landscape, driving applied and entrepreneurial research that fuels both economic growth and societal advancement. Its success rests on access to state-of-the-art equipment and world-class staff with CNSI's support of the forty-plus Incubator companies continuing long after they have established themselves off campus. These long-term interactions foster deep industry partnerships, leading to a vibrant local entrepreneurial ecosystem which strengthens California’s innovation economy."