Startups led by women and Spanish-speaking and rural food entrepreneurs will get a boost from $100,000 in federal funding recently awarded to the University of Arizona Center for Innovation and Startup Tucson.
Each organization won $50,000 in prize money from the U.S. Small Business Administration Growth Accelerator Fund Competition, taking two of three prizes awarded in Arizona.
UACI, the UA’s longtime tech-oriented business incubator, proposed innovative ideas to support women-led startups researching and developing STEM-related innovations.
The center plans to use the prize money to hire female student interns and match them with women-led startups to give them strategic commercialization insight and to support them in advancing technology through federally funded projects such as federal Small Business Innovation Research awards.
Nikita Fernandes, research scientist at the University of Arizona Center for Innovation member Cellstate Biosciences, works in a lab at the UACI-Oro Valley, which is focused on the biosciences.
Startup Tucson plans to use its prize funds to expand its existing food and agricultural programs to entrepreneurs who are rural and/or Spanish-speaking in communities surrounding Tucson.
The money will also help translate Startup Tucson programs into Spanish, a need identified throughout the rollout of the food programs developed under a 2020 USDA Farmers Market Promotion grant, the nonprofit group said.
The funding also will boost financial resources to agricultural entrepreneurs through training on how to win federal small-business research grants and will allow Startup Tucson to add an “AgTech Prize” to its annual business pitch competition, IdeaFunding, next April.
Dre Thompson, executive vice president of Startup Tucson, said the prize money will help the group meet critical needs identified working with food entrepreneurs in its Food Forward program, which is supported by a $250,000 grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture last year.
“This project will be just one building block of moving toward a unified and supportive food ecosystem,” Thompson said.
Eric Smith, executive director of UACI, said the fact that Tucson won two of three of the state’s SBA Growth Accelerator Fund Competition prizes shows the region “has what it takes to creatively support innovators.”
“This funding will allow us to increase support for women-led startups in the region while providing opportunities for female students at the University of Arizona to understand what it is like to take innovations to the market,” Smith said.
The other Growth Accelerator Fund Competition prize awarded in Arizona went to Seed Spot, a Phoenix-based business incubator focused on helping social entrepreneurs.
