For local entrepreneurs, especially those in the tech field, it’s no secret that the Huntsville community is renowned for its support of businesses. There’s no reason to go it alone with the wealth of resources that are readily available, one of which is the Invention to Innovation Center (I²C), a high tech incubator located on the UAH campus adjacent to the Business Administration Building (BAB).

The I²C facility houses 30 office spaces within its 45,000 square foot, $16 million facility, which combines three interconnected elements: shared workspaces, a co-working community, and collaborative co-creation. In addition to its building funds, it received an additional $1.5 million in funding for programmatic and strategic initiatives to better serve its mission.

I²C Director Rigved Joshi came on board in 2017, bringing 15+ years of experience in technology development, startup commercialization, venture capital/private equity, and business management. Previously, he managed New Ventures at Vanderbilt University, resulting in 22 startups raising over $7M in early stage venture and research funding.

According to Joshi, the goal of the I²C was very simple: to build resources around the incubation strategy, creating a sort of watering hole for entrepreneurs and startups so they could take their ideas to the next level.

Jason Swafford’s company, JS Solutions, was one of the first to move into the I²C, coming on board in September 2019 as a one-man operation.

“Currently, we have about 25 companies who are physically located here and the goal is to focus on technology-based entrepreneurship,” Joshi explained. “We are always a little less than full and the reason for that is we always want to keep some office space which is available for churn.”

“Besides biotech, life sciences, and traditional healthcare, we want to try to embrace, as much as we can, other technologies–we have EdTech, we have FinTech, cyber, robotics, 3-D printing, additive manufacturing, apps, traditional software, things like that,” Joshi continued. “It’s a really nice mix of companies, and we have a small subset of companies that are in the government technology space as well. That’s where Jason was–he pretty much opened doors.”

Joshi noted that the current occupants of the I²C range from “companies which have one or two people that haven’t raised any funding all the way to a company [Sinequa, an enterprise search technology company] that moved from France.” Sinequa will be celebrating the opening of its new office at I²C with a ribbon cutting event to be held on September 13.

Joshi explained that the I²C strives to create a mix of companies that can collaborate with one another if they want or need to, as well as to “create an environment that facilitates that positive collision or collisions, whether it’s in the hallways, in the cafe areas, in the most organic sense that one would expect in an environment or in a space like this.”

In addition to its collaborative, open environment, the I²C features a mentor program, as well as corporate innovation hubs, which allow companies with mature business models to use the facility as a skunkworks or a sandbox for their innovations.

The I²C provided the perfect environment to enable JS Solutions to get off the ground. Swafford explained that after leaving Booz Allen Hamilton, he felt there was a need for a small business that would focus more on its employees and its customers.

“That’s not to say that the places I worked for previously didn’t, but I felt like we could do it differently and better,” he said, adding that “there were always outside influences on our decision making that weren’t local in Huntsville. Huntsville is different–it’s a different animal specifically in government contracting and the way technology starts and grows and develops here.”

“My time at Booz taught me everything I needed to know about how to get here and to do this, and I got to see all kinds of examples of good, bad, ugly, right, wrong, indifferent, just all kinds of experience in different scenarios,” Swafford continued, explaining that he worked for another company for a year after his departure. “During that year it was really eating at me that ‘this is the time when I can go start something.’”

As the sole earner in a single income family, Swafford needed to find a way for the company to pay for itself instantly.

“Like, I didn’t really want to go out and deplete savings and risk putting the whole family in financial ruin. My oldest son has special needs so I couldn’t do that. It had to have no impact really to the family or minimal impact to the family.”

After being asked for consulting help by multiple colleagues, Swafford launched JSS, using FreeLogoServices.com to create his company logo.

“Then I picked up a couple consulting clients…I was at one of the RISE morning events and I met the gentleman who was doing the nametags for that group. He was here at the I²C and so I came here to meet him…they’d just moved into this facility,” Swafford recalled.

“I was three minutes in and I’m like ‘hey, at the end of the meeting I’d like you to introduce me to the director of this facility because I want in.’ Like, this was what I was looking for for an office space to start up but I couldn’t afford office space that looked like this as a one person consulting company.”

In order to be accepted, Swafford said, “you’ve gotta go through an approval process, and to do that approval process they force you to build a business plan. I hadn’t built a business plan yet. I mean, yeah, I knew I was supposed to do these things but I didn’t have time to do that. But to get what I wanted, which was to be in this facility, I had to go through the different requirements to get in. And that helped me kind of formalize some things.

“We built the business plan, [and] we had to justify why we felt like we deserved the privilege to be in the facility. We were fortunate to get accepted,” Swafford said.