SYRACUSE, N.Y. — CenterState CEO has announced $676,000 in funding awards to 13 Upstate companies in the 14th round of its Grants for Growth program.

CenterState CEO is the primary economic-development organization in a 12-county area of Central New York.

Launched in 2006, Grants for Growth is a CenterState CEO seed program that supports applied research projects between universities and industries to “improve business competitiveness and create jobs,” according to a CenterState CEO news release.

“Over the time period [that] this program has existed, I have had a front-row seat to watch an evolution in our innovation ecosystem that’s as exciting as just about anything I’ve worked on,” Robert Simpson, president and CEO of CenterState CEO, said in his remarks at a Thursday afternoon event at the Syracuse Tech Garden, announcing the winners.

Through 14 rounds, Grants for Growth has invested nearly $3.8 million in small and “emerging” companies, CenterState CEO said. New York State Senator John DeFrancisco (R–Syracuse) secured the funding for the grants.

Funding awards

CenterState CEO awarded funding in this round in two categories based on a company’s growth stage. They included “proof of concept” grants for early-stage companies and “concept to marketplace” investments for later-stage companies.

Six companies will use “concept to marketplace” investments.

LC Drives, a firm that is developing “the next generation” of electric motors, will use a funding award of $125,000; and Rosie — which is creating new technology, operational procedures, and integrative systems to address, manage, and analyze food security, access, and nutrition issues — will use a $100,000 grant.

The companies also include Ichor Therapeutics, a pre-clinical biotechnology company; Pelitex, which customizes physical and chemical properties of metal nanoparticles to improve corrosion resistance; Euphony, which has developed speech-synthesis technology that provides text-to-speech voices that sound more natural in the user environment; and New Age Renewables, which has developed a “unique” process to extract “valuable” elements from dairy byproducts.

Those companies will all use funding awards of $75,000.

Another seven companies will use “proof of concept” grants, CenterState CEO said.

The firms, Ionica Sciences, UMA Bioseed, Opterus, Life Unit, and Sound Reading Solutions will each use funding awards of $25,000. The companies, Ecolectro and Volu will receive $12,500 grants.

State investment

The program’s “success” has also driven the need to “expand and further enhance” it so more companies can “benefit from its structure and investments,” CenterState CEO said.

The organization plans to expand the Grants for Growth program after Empire State Development (ESD) provided $1.5 million from the New York State Innovation Venture Capital Fund (NYSIVC).

NYSIVC is a seed and early-stage venture-capital fund with $50 million to support and attract new “high-growth” businesses, according to the ESD website.

The new program will “further advance” technology commercialization and pre-seed, stage-company investment by leveraging the “support, mentoring and commitment” of the state-funded Innovation Hot Spots in Central New York, the North Country and Southern Tier regions, CenterState CEO said.

The expansion will allow more businesses to tap into the expertise found on college campuses across “an even broader region,” it added.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com

CAMILLUS — RealtyUSA, which says it is the largest independent real-estate agency in upstate New York, is constructing a three-story office building at 5110 West Genesee St. in Camillus.

The new facility — almost 16,000 square feet in size — will be RealtyUSA’s Central New York division headquarters. It will also house the Camillus branch office, which was demolished to make room for the new building, according to Mark Re, VP/general manager at RealtyUSA and the head of its CNY division.

The former Camillus branch office, which comprised about 3,300 square feet, had been too small for several years, says Re. The CNY division is currently headquartered down the street from the construction site, at 5104 West Genesee St., in a two-story building about 4,500 square feet in size.

“We’ve had these two offices two doors from each other for umpteen years, and for economies of scale, it just didn’t make sense,” Re says, explaining why he and Merle Whitehead, the president, CEO, and owner of RealtyUSA, decided to consolidate the two offices.

Construction on the $3 million project began in May, and is expected to be finished before the end of the year, according to Re. Syracuse–based Zausmer-Frisch, Scruton & Aggarwal is the design-build contractor handling the project.

The cost includes the acquisition and demolition of an adjacent house that belonged to St. Michael’s Lutheran Church, which is situated next door to the construction site at 5108 West Genesee St.

Re says he and Whitehead first approached the church more than a year ago about purchasing the house. Continued talks, which he describes as “positive,” led to the acquisition. He declined to disclose financial terms.

RealtyUSA is funding the entire project with company cash, says Re. “We have the good fortune to be secure financially,” he says. Re declines to disclose RealtyUSA’s revenue history, but says it closed 21,873 transactions in 2014, totaling about $3.5 billion.

“We’ve grown quite a bit in the last several years. So I anticipate that continuing,” Re says, adding that he made the new building larger “because I figured we would grow into it as well.”

The bottom floor of the new facility will be occupied by the 15 corporate staff members, which comprise its relocation, marketing, and accounting departments, according to Re.

The second floor will house the Camillus branch — currently working from the old division headquarters down the street — which is comprised of three staff members and about 40 independent agents, according to Re. It will have room for about 60 agents.

The top floor will provide space for a training center for the western-suburb area of Syracuse. An elevator will service all three floors.

Part of the construction includes moving the entrance to the parking lot further up Hinsdale Road, away from where it intersects with West Genesee Street where the office is being built. Re says the intersection became more dangerous after a Walgreens facility was added across the street, and this makes pulling in and out of the new parking lot safer.

Tearing down the old Camillus branch office and building a new facility was not the only option considered by the company, Re says. RealtyUSA also weighed putting an addition on the now-demolished building, but it would have left too few parking spaces.

“We were bursting at the seams, so we needed to do something,” he says. Growing the current division headquarters wouldn’t work because the entrance is too narrow, and it isn’t as ideal a location as the corner of Hinsdale and West Genesee streets, across the street from West Genesee High School.

“It is a very visible corner, it gets lots of traffic,” he says. It’s so ideal, in fact, Re claims he has had people approach the company, asking to purchase it.

RealtyUSA has received some inquiries to lease the current CNY division office, which rests on about 10 acres of land, but the company has decided to sell it.

“There’s [10] acres behind me, and so I thought this would be great to just put on the market and give somebody an opportunity to do whatever they want to do,” says Re.

He and Whitehead are handling the sale of the property, which is on the market for $699,000, Re says.

Prior to the demolition of the former Camillus office, Re says several fire departments requested to use the building for smoke training. The company agreed as a form of community service, and for several nights, the building had a dummy placed in it before being infused with smoke for firefighters to perform exercises.

The CNY division, which also encompasses northern New York, is comprised of 18 offices: Auburn, Skaneateles, Marcellus, Camillus, Fulton, Liverpool, Cicero/North Syracuse, Manlius, Cazenovia, Oneida, Chittenango, Fayetteville, Utica, Clayton, Watertown, Carthage, Henderson Harbor, and Camillus, according to Re.

The division has about 400 agents and 50 employees, and closed 3,510 transactions in 2014, worth more than $500 million, according to Re. That number is up from 2013 (3,243 transactions for $485 million) and 2012 (2,869 transactions for $382 million).

RealtyUSA has more than 60 offices total. Its 2,600 agents and employees closed 21,873 transactions in 2014, totaling about $3.5 billion.                      

CICERO — U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has announced a new bill to help small businesses obtain financing to expand their advanced-manufacturing operations.

The legislation seeks to create and keep “high-paying, high-skilled” manufacturing jobs in the U.S., Gillibrand’s office said in a news release issued on Aug. 18.

Gillibrand introduced the “Scale-Up Manufacturing Investment Company Act of 2015,” a bill that would increase capital for entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to scale-up and commercialize their advanced-manufacturing and “innovation” operations.

Gillibrand promoted the bill during a stop at the headquarters of JADAK, LLC at 7279 William Barry Blvd. in Cicero.

JADAK is a manufacturer of machine vision, radio-frequency identification (RFID) and bar-code products for the health-care and life-science industries. The company made headlines earlier this year with the announcement that it merged with Bedford, Massachusetts–based General Scanning Printer Technologies, a firm that JADAK parent GSI Group also owns.

Gillibrand recently hosted a series of roundtables across New York to hear from community leaders and entrepreneurs about ways to help grow businesses in the state, her office said.

“If we want our economy to grow and create more jobs, we need to give small businesses the tools they need to turn their innovative ideas into successful business opportunities and expand their manufacturing operations instead of being forced to outsource that work in order to stay competitive,” the senator said. “The Scale-Up Manufacturing Investment Company Act will provide critical resources and opportunities for local entrepreneurs and small businesses to bring their innovations to market, and ensure that new technologies are made here in America, creating more jobs and growing our economy.”

The bill creates a loan program that allows private-investment firms to leverage funds that the federal government provides to help “emerging” manufacturers commercialize their products. 

The senator contends that many community banks and venture-capital firms are risk-averse about making loans to small manufacturers.

The program, which is modeled on the U.S. Small Business Administration’s small-business investment companies program, seeks to solve that problem. It would allow approved participating investment firms to raise capital that would then be invested into emerging manufacturers’ businesses, Gillibrand’s office said.

The federal government would use any fees, interest, and profits that the investments produce to offset the cost of the program.

Gillibrand introduced the legislation on Aug. 4, along with U.S. Senators Corey Booker (D–N.J.), Patty Murray (D–Washington), Chris Coons (D–Delaware), and Gary Peters (D–Michigan), her office said.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation; the National Venture Capital Association; and the Small Business Investor Alliance, which are all headquartered in Washington, D.C.; and the Chicago, Illinois–based Association for Corporate Growth, support the bill.

The proposal represents the second bill Gillibrand has introduced aimed at bolstering manufacturing. 

The senator in March announced “Manufacturing Universities Act” to “enhance advanced workforce training for the 21st century economy,” according to Gillibrand’s office.