The first Techstars accelerator in the Southeast is opening in the Knoxville-Oak Ridge corridor with the support of the nation’s biggest publicly owned utility, the Department of Energy’s biggest research laboratory and the state’s biggest university.
The new program announced during the Tennessee Valley Corridor Summit in Knoxville is designed to attract and nurture high-growth startup businesses and is being established with $1 million annual grants for each of the next three years from its primary sponsors – the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the University of Tennessee.
The accelerator will work with 10 startups a year over the next three years as part of the Techstars program, which began 15 years ago in Boulder, Colorado and has since grown to nurture startup companies around the globe with both financial and technical assistance.
Techstars General Manager Nancy Wolff said the partnership of the DOE lab, a major university and the country’s biggest government utility provides ” a unique and galvanizing opportunity” for startups, especially in energy-related fields or other research areas where ORNL is pioneering new technologies such as materials sciences, nuclear engineering and supercomputers.
ORNL will soon resume its title as home to the world’s fastest computer, dubbed the Frontier by Cray Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices. The $600 million Frontier computer system is expected to go into operation at ORNL this year and will be the largest of three exascale computers planned by the Energy Department, including the Aurora and El Capitan computers at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.