5 Incubators, 40 Startups, One Big Showcase

Stony Brook University’s vast business-development ecosystem will take a bow, and enjoy a healthy dose of self-promotion, during the university’s first-ever Business Incubator Showcase.

The June 2 event at SBU’s Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology is scheduled to include more than 40 presentations and exhibits by startup and early-stage companies based in the CEWIT and other university research and commercialization incubators, including the Center for Biotechnology, the Long Island High Technology Incubator, the Advanced Energy Center, the Clean Energy Business Incubator Program and the Business Incubator at Calverton.

The university has become a “major innovation center,” according to Yacov Shamash, SBU’s vice president for economic development, and the idea here is to bring visibility to the startup companies developing in and around that ecosystem – and to expose them to other professionals that can help them on their journey to market.

“We have a number of incubators on campus and in a number of different locations, and probably around 50 companies in our system,” Shamash noted. “We’re trying to get them to know the community around us and the community around us to know them.

“The visibility will be good for them,” he added. “Whether it’s angel financing or venture capital or legal help or accounting help or HR help, we’re just trying to bring everybody together.”

While the number of early-stage companies populating the likes of CEBIP and the Calverton Incubator continues to grow, so does the ecosystem’s diversity. Although about five dozen different companies are now in various stages of development throughout the SBU system, no two are alike – a testament, Shamash noted, to the wide range of big thinkers making use of the university’s topflight laboratories and research facilities.

“Some of these companies are coming out of our laboratories, but more than half of the companies are people from outside the university who come to the campus because they need to utilize our resources,” he noted. “And I have not had two companies that were in exactly the same line of business or trying to develop products in the same area.”

Also on the June 2 agenda is a “graduation ceremony” saluting Codagenix, a 2012 startup founded by Farmingdale State College biology professor J. Robert Coleman and SBU assistant research professor Steffan Mueller. Codagenix, which this year completed a relocation from the university’s tech incubator to Farmingdale State’s Broad Hollow Bioscience Park, has become the poster child for a successful SBU-incubated startup, according to Shamash.

Codagenix is still performing some R&D work at Stony Brook but is now based at the bioscience park, which Shamash – who sits on Broad Hollow’s board of directors – said is not in competition with SBU’s incubators.

“We work collaboratively with Broad Hollow Bioscience Park, and Codagenix just needed more space,” he told Innovate LI. “We like to see companies graduate out and make space for other companies.”

In addition to the Codagenix commencement, the Stony Brook University 2016 Incubator Company Showcase is slated to include networking sessions, tours of the on-campus incubator facilities and one-on-one conversations with the biotech, energy and IT startups in attendance.