MTEC SmartZone CEO David Rowe, right, presents the audience choice award from Friday’s Demo Day to Palas Borkar and Tim Eisele of BioMang. Garrett Neese/Daily Mining Gazette
HOUGHTON — A week before they will make their pitch downstate, five local companies got some practice at the Bonfire in Houghton Friday.
The MTEC SmartZone hosted the local Demo Day for the inaugural cohort of the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Program Accelerator. The 16-week program gives companies lessons in what they need to grow to bring their product to the marketplace.
“Specifically, we saw this as a gap in not just the state of Michigan, but in the U.P. as a way to focus on building specific skills and resources for these hard-tech, different sort of companies that are so well established here in the Keweenaw,” said Katie Kirsch, co-director of the AMMP Accelerator.
Companies put in 180 hours of classroom time and heard from 40 guest speakers, with lessons in everything from prototyping and governance, to being able to hone a definition for the problem they’re trying to solve.
“As advanced material companies, you’re often considered an ingredient company,” Kirsch said. “You’re having a molecular change, chemical change, some sort of innovation there … finding out where that actually can sit in the real world, can become a real business, is a lot of the work that we focused on during this program.”
The five companies will present next week at MTEC SmartZone’s full Demo Day next week, which will be held in Detroit at Newlab, a co-working space focusing on mobility, automotive and manufacturing companies. If they win, they could receive up to $15,000 in funding.
The federal Economic Development Administration is funding the $1.45 million, three-year pilot program along with the MTEC SmartZone. It will support five to six companies each year in what leaders hope becomes a sustainable model for advancing business that draws more talent to the region. The target is to create 40 full-time jobs in the Keweenaw.
After everyone finished, audience members voted on their favorite presentation. Unlike next week’s presentation, there was no cash prize attached, only bragging rights.
The award went to BioMang, represented Saturday by Palas Borkar and CEO Tim Eisele.
The company is pursuing environmentally friendly, low-impact ways of obtaining manganese. The company is looking at bioleaching, which uses bacteria to extract manganese rather than excavating. There are deposits sprinkled from the Keweenaw over to central Minnesota, Eisele said.
“I think that our technology would allow us to actually get manganese from that without causing environmental harm, provide income for people in the area,” he said after the presentation. “And it’s actually a business that’s fundamentally local, if it works out the way that we think it will. And so I think it’s really appropriate to be doing it through a program here.”
BioMang will bring a portable prototype of its leaching system to Detroit for its presentation next week.
“Then we’ll have a table afterwards where anyone that we’ve managed to interest can come and talk to us in more depth, and maybe could lead to actual investors or partners,” Eisele said.
As an engineer, Eisele said he had no previous expertise in running a company. Through AAMP, he learned how to build a viable program, whether through navigating legal issues, properly structuring the company, or learning how to find employees and investors.
“I wanted to commercialize the technology we were spending the last three years to develop, and I’m not a businessman,” he said. “I didn’t really know what was involved. So this gave us a way to work out how to actually turn our technology into a company.”