Military tech, drone advertising, yeast for craft brews and biotech – sounds like a booming scientific, culturally rich and diverse town! One might think of naming off hot towns in the Northwest and on the coasts, but this is definitely Huntsville, Alabama. In our last short feature about Huntsville, native entrepreneur Brandon Kruse had called the city “Sili-cotton Valley.” It has since been living up to the name.
Huntsville is traditionally home to the defense sciences: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center is based in the area. For this reason, many aerospace and military tech companies have set up camp in the area as well. It’s airspace that even drone commercialization now has entered. The use of drone technology is still controversial, and while the FAA hasn’t set up rigid guidelines for years, some business owners around Huntsville are seeing the benefits of using the technology in the meantime.
In an article on AL.com, there are mentioned a few small start-ups using the drones for photography and film, promotional purposes, and land mapping. While the legislation for the drones has lagged, companies like Sky View and and XF Aerials are forging ahead in the safest, most legal way they can to utilize the advantages of drone technology. That’s not all that’s flying around the city.
Kruse, who sold his long-distance company to Magic Jack when he was just 21 years old, has also gotten into the real estate game with his new Huntsville-based company. In addition, the Huntsville Entrepreneurial Initiative that Kruse heads up has recently acquired an old school building in which to house its operations. Prior to the acquisition of the building, his team already had a large chunk of the space leased out.
The project itself will provide about 50,000 square feet of space for entrepreneurs, he said. “Anyone who is part of the accelerator will have free office space, otherwise it will be very discounted, below-market rent for entrepreneurs,” Kruse adds, “with features like gigabit internet and 24/7 access from fingerprints. With a great environment for motivation and ongoing training, the school will be a fantastic place to launch and/or grow your company.”
Working alongside BizTech, an established Huntsville-based incubator, Kruse and BizTech CEO Gary Tauss will be helping to grow business in Huntsville, but with different strategies and hooks.
“They’re following the ‘lets bring a bunch of people in to interview in the Huntsville area, and then choose three, and invest in them and give them office space;’” Kruse said of BizTech. “Whereas ours is more (of a message that says) if you already have a business you can come and have free office, depending on where your company is at, or a very cheap office with Internet.” The vision is consistent with the creation of collaborative community Kruse tells Techie and others about.
HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology is another type of Huntsville workspace that currently houses 27 biotech companies, in the heart of the Cummings Research Park Biotech Campus. With lots of open space and white boards to foster the sharing of ideas and conversation, the campus is buzzing with business that is moving towards making the future happen today. One of them is Leavendary.
Yes, as in – wait for it! – “legen-dary.” Leavendary is filling a major gap in industry in the Southeast: producing the yeast strains and control that craft brewers need to produce their beers at a high quality, and still have money left over to offer it to the public. Peyton McNully, founder of the yeast propagation service, says the company is growing like, well, yeast.
McNully was invited to check it out when others heard he was looking to get into biotech in some way, and he found HudsonAlpha to be the place his business would fit best. “People were saying ‘come get a desk here,’ so I went and checked it out. Leavandary was based in a pharmaceutical lab while my lab space was being prepared, and it cost a few six-packs every few weeks,” McNully said.
The community of scientists and business all moving forward together creates a unique dynamic at HudsonAlpha. “There’s a crazy level of conversation, especially with all the biotech guys pushing the envelope, and I’m the yeast guy working with yeast practices from ancient Mesopotamia where beer brewing started,” McNully said. “All the biotech guys like to think back and tell stories, as yeast is basically biologist training wheels.”
But just because yeast is a place where biologists start, doesn’t mean that it’s easy science. That art of perfection is what makes Leavendary so necessary for craft brewers around the Southeast, and especially in Alabama. The demand is keeping Leavendary’s operations spanned across four floors of the facility, literally “spreading like yeast.”
“Freezers are held at minus 80 degrees Celsius,” McNully explains. “Brewers tell us what strains of yeast they want, and we tell them what we can do and sell it to them.” It’s a complex process ultimately involving trillions of cells, and one that McNully explains in more detail in a WAAY TV news story.
McNully says those trying to enter the craft brewing market in Alabama have enough government red tape to get through and paperwork to file, equipment to buy, and some would even mortgage their homes to get the stainless steel tanks needed for the process, but they’d go through all of it and still not be able to get yeast. He adds, “I’d hate them to go through all of that and have the yeast be the reason they couldn’t do it. This helps the brewers be better artists.”
But there’s still much more that’s brewing in Huntsville, and the entrepreneurial energy and quality of life attracted McNully, a former Atlanta resident. The city is building on its urban-center strengths, with a vibrant downtown full of opportunities many think of as big-city life. The expanding social scene fosters networking and a great creative environment for the like-minded people in town.
“Most places it’s not easy to get a posse together when you have an idea. Huntsville people seem to rally around cool ideas,” he says. “Most people here aren’t from Huntsville, they moved here. So it’s unlike other places in that way. People are more willing to change things they don’t like and band together to do crazy stuff.”
A lot of that collaboration happens over a Huntsville beer or two, but what’s the best beer to grab in town? Asking “the yeast guy” is too political. He’ll tell you that all of them are his favorites.
Follow Leavendary on Twitter at @Leavendary. You can follow @HudsonAlpha for more updates on the Huntsville tech scene.
