Tag: Oklahoma Venture Forum Page 7 of 8

Written by for the Oklahoma Venture Forum.

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For over 30 years, the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology (OCAST) has been the state’s agency for technology development, technology transfer, and technology commercialization. With Governor Kevin Stitt’s goal to make Oklahoma a Top 10 state, OCAST is doing its part through partnerships and collaborations to stimulate economic development and technology-based economic development.

“We help to get science and technology projects, support those through our grant process and elevate Oklahoma’s science and technology community so that we’re competitive nationally as well as globally,” explained OCAST’s Executive Director, Michael Carolina. “We have some leading-edge researchers and research companies that benefit from OCAST’s grants, and they’re able to attract federal grants as well as private money from the private sector to accelerate research to commercialization or conversion; the conversion of technology to the marketplace.”


With the task to grow and diversify Oklahoma’s economy, Carolina described his job as atypical. Before joining OCAST, he worked in management and executive positions with the Western Electric Company, AT&T and Lucent Technologies. While with AT&T and Lucent Technologies, he was involved in engineering, strategic planning, new product design and introduction, manufacturing, technology transfer, and joint venture operations in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

“I think in Oklahoma, we have an asset base here that’s pretty rich. Again, with our higher education system, with our industrial complex that includes energy and includes aerospace and defense, bioscience, biotechnology, information technology, manufacturing, healthcare,” Carolina said. “The healthcare industry is growing, and so I think there are a lot of things that we can point to that are strengths in a global economy.”

One example of OCAST’s success stories, which Carolina plans to discuss during his presentation for OVF, is the work of Craig Shimasaki at Moleculera Labs. 


“[Moleculera Labs] is doing some work now on the impact of COVID or the correlation of COVID and brain health and mental health,” Carolina said. “That’s a real success story. Craig Shimasaki was able to take an OCAST grant and leverage that with federal dollars as well as private investment to move the autism spectrum along. Hopefully, we’ll have some effective treatments for it.”


From research to pre-seed dollars to seed capital dollars to manufacturing through intern partnerships, OCAST is developing the local talent base Oklahoma needs to go forward and keep the state from losing engineering STEM talent.

“If we have the kind of industrial base that’s attractive to our graduates when they leave our higher education system, they’re more likely to stay in the state because they have jobs in their specific areas of study,” explained Carolina. “We can organically grow our own businesses from scratch. And that’s basically our task as OCAST, to help businesses grow organically.”

For Oklahoma to be top 10 in more areas, Carolina said it would require some strategic investment. By taking advantage of our geography, educational assets at the university level, industrial base, and the pioneer spirit of Oklahoma’s citizens, he believes we can make a difference and make Oklahoma relevant and competitive on a national and international scale.

“It requires working with our politicians, our legislature, the governor, and his team saying, how do we coalesce those assets, so that Oklahoma becomes not a Silicon Valley, but we can become a technology corridor,” Carolina said.

Michael Carolina will be speaking at the Oklahoma Venture Forum Power Lunch on Wednesday, October 14, 2020. Be sure to register for the online ZOOM event to learn more about OCAST, ask your questions, and network with entrepreneurs in Oklahoma. As a member, he encourages others to join the community and help with new ideas. He is looking to addressing the OVF and having some dialogue about where people think we should go next.

With origins in the solar-power industry, David Jankowsky saw a problem in the electric vehicle market. With billions going into EV technology, Jankowsky noticed little of that funding was going towards infrastructure. While Tesla Motors may have popularized the electric car and built their superchargers, they ’re all closed source.

“We know there ’s literally going to be hundreds of car manufacturers in the next five, ten years coming out with electric vehicles, and they would not be able to use the Tesla superchargers, so we solved that problem,” said Jankowsky.“We developed and installed universal chargers, so any car in the world can use them, including Tesla drivers. We solved the range-anxiety issue, meaning no one ’s going to buy a car if there ’s no infrastructure to fuel them if they ’re away from their home.”

The Francis EV Charging Network solved range anxiety in Oklahoma by having a charging station every 50 miles. One could travel from Broken Bow to Guymon in their electric car. Jankowsky notes that one may have to drive 10 to 20 miles out of the way to access a charger because they currently don ’t have enough in Oklahoma. The first phase of the network features 225 fast-charging stations across 109 strategically located sites in Oklahoma, including small towns.

“We’ve done a lot of rural development, and we basically said, ‘We’ll bring a charger here, pay for everything, and it ’s going to cause basically drivers that have been stuck on the highways at the travel stops at the gas stations, they ’re going to have to come into your town to charge, and by the way, they ’re going to be captive there for about 60 minutes,’” said Jankowsky.“When we go to the travel stops on the highways, no one wants to wait 60 minutes to charge their car, so that ’s where we ’ve put in super-duper chargers, we got to call them something at some point, they can charge cars in seven to nine or 10 minutes. That ’s very much equivalent to current gas stations.”

The public infrastructure for EVs is not going to look the same when compared to gas. Jankowsky sees electric stations being more“ubiquitous” as they ’ll be able to go everywhere and anywhere. When people are at the office, shopping for groceries, or eating a meal, there ’ll be a charger.

“There won ’t be like six chargers on one corner, and six chargers on another corner like you see in the gas space, and there ’s a variety of reasons for that,” said Jankowsky.“It ’s not going to develop the same way gas stations developed because quite simply, you don ’t need as many out there as you do gas pumps because people can charge their car at home typically at night, which is where about 90% of the charging is going to take place.”

As a startup in Oklahoma, Jankowsky finds people are surprised to learn they we able to install 225 superchargers across the state.

“That ’s never been done before,” said Jankowsky.“Our largest competitors are definitely not doing 250 charging stations a year, and I mean, we ’re just one data point, but Oklahoma really has, and I preach this to everyone that will listen, we have this unique ability or position where we could be the EV capital of the world, both in terms of the technology, so there ’s a lot of technology in these chargers, it ’s mostly software-based technology, we have the manufacturing capabilities to do it here.”

Looking forward to the future, Francis Energy is expanding into 30 states to build the network out from Oklahoma. There are also plans to upgrade existing stations, which they ’ll continue to do until Oklahoma can take care of every car on the road. In addition to the expansions, they ’re working on an app.

Like competitors, the app will allow users to find stations, initiate a charge, offer a discount, and more. One feature Jankowsky explained is that people will be able to stay in their car and connect to a free wifi hotspot while they wait for a delivery. Stations are separately addressed, allowing orders to come directly to that charging station.

“There are so many cool things that we can do with the software that ’s in the chargers themselves to create this great user experience,” said Jankowsky.“It ’s not perfected yet, and so some of our concern is we have drivers out there that are using our stations that might not be having the best experience, and we want to let people know, ‘Hey, this is new. This is novel. We ’re working on the bugs, we ’re working on the kinks, but it ’s going to be great, just stay patient with us, and then here ’s what we ’re doing to help the user experience.’”

David Jankowsky will be speaking at the Oklahoma Venture Forum Power Lunch on Wednesday, September 9th, 2020. Be sure to register for the online ZOOM event to learn more about Francis Renewable Energy, hear a Pitch Presentation by HyQ Technologies, and to network with entrepreneurs an innovators in Oklahoma. Read more about the September Pitch Presenter below. 

Written by me for the Oklahoma Venture Forum.

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What started with “poor decisions and lots of circumstances,” COOP Ale Works has grown into a company with a $20 million expansion plan at the former 45th Infantry Armory. Despite feeling like an outsider in the brewing community from not being a brewer himself, Daniel Mercer, CEO of Coop Ale Works, sees positives in his business-focused skill set.

“From day one, back in 2006 when Mark and J.D. and I met, one of my kind of tidbits and inputs was that we had the opportunity, in the research phase, to set a foundation for how we wanted to move forward and how diligent we wanted to be and how we wanted to run this thing,” Mercer said. “We were starting a brewery from scratch in a market that didn’t have a production brewery outside of brewpubs, which aren’t packaging breweries.”

One of the first challenges the COOP team faced was Oklahoma’s prohibitive alcohol laws, including 3.2 beer and the lack of availability of beer in grocery and convince stores. They collected data and feedback about what people in Oklahoma were drinking back in 2006. They knew Oklahomans had different tastes than what people were drinking on the coast or what people were drinking internationally. They did beer tastings in the back room of Cheever’s.

“We were interested in whether there was a receptive audience to craft beer that didn’t exist at the time,” Mercer explained.

They worked through the summer of 2006, brewing together. They then spent the next two years putting together plans, which included going to dozens of breweries around the United States. They visited with engineers, brewers, and financial people to investigate their methods of success, their histories and then built a strategy to launch COOP in the summer of 2008. They raised the initial capital, found their building, and then spent about six months building out “this little 5,000 square foot metal shack” over at 51st and Western, next to the 51st Street Speakeasy bar. They started brewing beer commercially on January 9th in 2009 and selling on March 3rd, 2009.

Now, the Armory project is going to consume Mercer’s time over the next couple of years. He believes it will create a massive economic impact in the city and around the State Capitol Complex. However, with COOP’s proven track record, raising the capital has been a challenge.

“Once you get into the core of it, we’re taking this brewery model, and we’re expanding it and adding other new businesses to our model that put us right back in the same boat that we were in 10, 12 years ago,” Mercer explained. “We’re getting into the hotel business or we’re getting into this culinary business that involves a taproom in a restaurant and a speakeasy and all these event support spaces that have culinary features and a pool club, bar. Banks have been interested but not receptive to the total deal structure and scale. It’s a large deal, and when you take a package to a bank that says you’re going to spend $36 million over 20 months, including the money we’ve already spent over the past couple of years in development, it becomes a scenario where virtually every bank is casting doubt, and then your solution, there, is to try to find alternative methods to finance your deal.”

Where others may have given up with the challenges Mercer has faced over the past two years – including modernizing a building built in 1938 with no functional plumbing, electrical or heat and air – Mercer looks for solutions from a wide assortment of resources.

“Luckily, I’ve got some historical background and tax credit work in historic preservation and, at least, exposure to deals like that and even participation and structuring some of those deals long ago,” Mercer said. “Capital can come from anywhere and it does come from everywhere. For us, in this particular deal, we’re not raising more equity, so that component of the capital stack just doesn’t exist for us. We have cash on the books that we’ve been using for development expenses over the past couple of years, and we have a number of other sources of capital in this deal.”

Mercer is excited about the opportunity in Oklahoma, for both investors to bring money in, and also for entrepreneurs to start to drive a focus around their industries.

“We spend a lot of time talking about diversifying industry in Oklahoma, and a lot of that talk is around, either, high-impact or high-level concept industries,” Mercer said. “Whether it’s biomedical research or autoimmune disease treatment or mechanical devices… things centered around the oil and gas industry that may be new technologies and hardware technologies. But there are also plenty of other industries that just aren’t near as sexy, frankly. And I think, in Oklahoma in particular, we’ve done a great job of focusing on our resources that we have. Particularly around the OU Health Science Center, around the oil and gas base that exists here and all the new technologies that have sprung out of that industry over the past, say, 20 years.”

Daniel Mercer will be speaking at the Oklahoma Venture Forum Power Lunch on Wednesday, April 8th, 2020. He’s been attending OVF since 2001 and encourages others to become a member because of the “direct exposure to a knowledge base and resources that aren’t highly-publicized in Oklahoma… and frankly anywhere.”