By VStart, on April 6th, 2010
Micromidas has just completed its first major round of funding, having raised $3.6 million. The funds will be used to deploy their technology at the pilot scale.
Micromidas, based in West Sacramento, develops and scales environmentally benign biological and chemical processes that produce valuable chemical and material commodities from waste biomass. The first Micromidas application for their technology is scaling a process that converts the carbon in organic wastewater into PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate), a family of bio-degradable plastics that can be used in lieu of conventional petroleum plastics. Their process generates highly functional bio-plastic while simultaneously reducing the quantity of bio-solids that municipal utilities must pay to treat. Micromidas is Read More »»
By VStart, on February 9th, 2010
Brett Owens of Chrometa was one of the first entrepreneurs mentored by VentureStart. We recommended “go get customers” rather than trying to raise money from organized investors. He did that and has been growing ever since with an ever-increasing customer base.
Chrometa maintains an excellent blog and today we saw an interesting post on customer support for software companies and its challenges. Take a look and I think you’ll find that Chrometa have met the challenge well with some good thinking. The very fact their blog talks about this is also great marketing. Go Chrometa!
By VStart, on January 30th, 2010
VentureStart gets many Sacramento region web startups applying for our mentoring. Very often we see great ideas and the need to raise money to hire people to code the idea/application. We normally encourage these startups to get a co-founder, or someone who will work for stock, on the team, and then get some traction before even considering raising money from Angel groups or VCs.
Adam Kalsey, the founder of SacStarts and a VentureStart mentor, recently gave advice on this to one VentureStart entrepreneur and then published it on his blog. We quote it here since it is so relevant to web startups.
Read More »»
By VStart, on December 7th, 2009
The Food and Health Entrepreneurship Academy is a one-week intensive run by the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship. It designed for science and engineering PhD students, postdocs, and research faculty in the fields of nutrition, viticulture and enology, plant science, biochemistry, nutritional genomics and fields relevant to foods for health, as well as early-stage start-ups in the food and health arena.
See full details for the February 1st to 5th, 2010 Academy here.
By VStart, on November 28th, 2009
Why would students give up their Saturday mornings during school year to attend yet another class (and at 8 am no less) and why would busy, successful entrepreneurs, Angel and VC Investors, and business people volunteer their time to meet with them? It’s a passion shared by the students wanting a real, practical education in entrepreneurship, and mentors equally passionate about giving back and breeding entrepreneurs of the future. This is the Sacramento Entrepreneurship Academy (SEA).
The students are talented, motivated, ambitious people. Take a look at the video they put together with board members for SEA, one of Sacramento’s best kept Read More »»
