TechAccel

Abstract

Kansas City based TechAccel is a start-up company co-founded by Kansas State University which creates an investment-grade vehicle through mitigating the science risk of promising transformational Food and Agriculture (Ag) market-focused technologies in co-funding partnerships with both global and emerging companies.   TechAccel stands alone in its attempt to monetize science risk mitigation (transformational science has a 70% failure rate when advanced) in the Food and Ag sector.

The explosion of global food demand coupled with the effects of climate change have created intense challenges for companies around the world.  Private sector R&D resources are limited at precisely the time when market-focused transformational science is most urgently needed.  At the same time, Food and Agriculture research at universities around the world suffers increasingly restrictive public funding.  The convergence of demand, climate, private/public resources and the high failure rate of transformational science advancement has created a unique global opportunity that TechAccel is attempting to realize.

In the human health industry, private capital is shares the financial risk of early-stage pharmaceutical development to bring the risk profile of a technology to an acceptable level consistent with subsequent regulatory and product development requirements.  The Food and Agriculture industry has many of the same issues, but without established scalable financial models in place share the risk. Leading Food and Ag companies regularly pass on potentially transformative innovations due to the higher science risk nature and limited resources. TechAccel is the Food and Agriculture’s first science risk mitigation investment partner for both universities and companies worldwide.  This is a remarkable niche and TechAccel is already achieving remarkable results.