These startups are now cleared for takeoff, thanks to a boost from the state 

For Irene Rombel, the big moment came when her biotech startup won crucial funding for her next big step. For Lisa Sabia, it was when she finally nailed down an elusive bank loan for her new yoga studio in Fairfax. 

For any new business, dreams start to seem more real when your balance sheet gets a boost from someone who believes in you.

Those hurdle-leaping, life-altering moments happen more often in Delaware these days, thanks to an unprecedented effort by the state’s Division of Small Business to connect young businesses to early-stage financing.

Since 2024, the division has lifted more than 60 up-and-coming ventures through its State Small Business Credit Initiative, which has supported entrepreneurial visions including laid-back beer halls, laundromats, and AI-enhanced pharma technology companies like BioCurie.

With $1 million in seed capital financing in hand, Rombel and her team at BioCurie were able to make key hires and critical advances in developing its AI-driven digital platform, designed for cell and gene therapy manufacturing.

“That funding went very, very far in terms of building a very credible software platform,” said Rombel, BioCurie’s co-founder. “That then enabled us to get our first big customer.”

It also enabled the Division of Small Business to take another step in its ongoing mission to keep the businesses ideas and energy flowing, and to enhance the state’s growing reputation as a place for innovation. The Division fuels these investments with $60.9 million in federal funding awarded to Delaware in 2023. DSB receives this award in 3 allotments of approximately $20 million each.

So far, the pot of money supporting the Delaware Accelerator & Seed Capital Program (DASCP) SSBCI program has helped a remarkably diverse – and technologically courageous – group of entrepreneurs, including:

• Nanotherm Therapeutics (Wilmington), which is developing ground-breaking technology that battles cancer tumors using nanoparticles.
• Versogen (Newark), where they are inventing ways to use water and renewable energy to produce “green” hydrogen at scale, reliably and affordably.
• Whip Flip (Wilmington), which uses an AI-bolstered app to streamline the car-purchasing process.
• Sindri Materials (Wilmington), which is developing a high-tech carbon material – just one atom thick – that can enhance the speed and effectiveness of pharmaceutical research.

“Sindri Materials is a great example of our focus on supporting cutting-edge ideas that could revolutionize an industry, and exponentially grow jobs in Delaware,” said Joe Zilcosky, one of the Division’s Business Managers focused on STEM companies.

Ultimately, DASCP aims to help Delaware make deeper inroads into the industries that are shaping up to be key drivers of the 21st century economy. Delaware has been making solid strides toward enhancing its reputation as a home for biotechnology and pharmaceutical jobs, and the SSBCI program helps bolster that mission.

Division of Small Business Director Christopher “CJ” Bell says he and his team in Dover want to create a place in Delaware for more companies like Incyte, which started as a relatively small pharmaceutical venture that was eager to tap into the state’s talented candidate pool. Today, Incyte operates out of a massive complex near Wilmington, employing more than a thousand people, with many more to come.

“If I could wave a magic wand, I’d like to help turn our accelerator and seed capital awardees into the next Incyte,” Bell said. “Incyte is a company that was built here and then scaled to the point of having hundreds of jobs, hundreds of good-paying jobs. That’s a big thing.

“It’s one thing to create jobs, but it’s important to also create sustainability. And I think some of our recipients have that potential,” Bell added.

But the SSBCI program isn’t solely meant for big companies with global ambitions. While part of the program supports tech-focused businesses with sizable growth potential, there’s also plenty of room for more human-sized ventures, and business dreams that live closer to home.

Just ask Lisa Sabia. Back in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, the healthcare professional had a vision that she could turn her love for yoga into a studio of her own. She had the concept down pat — it would be a place for “hot” yoga, but also a space where people in the community could build up social bonds that the pandemic frayed so badly.

Problem was, that construction loan was proving more elusive than she expected. Turning to the Division of Small Business, she found that elements of the SSBCI program are expressly designed to help with just those kinds of small-venture hiccups — either by providing up to 50% of the loan amount, or by using “risk-pooling” to make loan approval easier. (For businesses that are not yet “bank ready,” the division connects people to the Small Business Development Center, which will provide one-on-one assistance in preparing business plans for loan consideration.)

Today, Sabia is close to opening her studio in the Avenue North complex, in the shadow of Concord Pike’s latest suburban skyscraper in Fairfax, and within a short jaunt of the thousands of workers nearby. “This is a very expensive project, so getting this loan helps significantly,” she said. “I’m not sure I would have gone through with it without the help I got from the state and Del-One Federal Credit Union, which partners with the state.”

To Bell, stories like that show how even acronym-laden government programs like SSBCI have a very human side. By supporting residents with business dreams, the state can help in strengthening the broader community and building a sense of pride within that community for the things it has built together.

“When you’re a small business owner, you’re going to be producing jobs for residents in this state,” he said. “Being able to see your neighbor, your cousin, your father-in-law grow a company just gives you that much more pride and sense of belonging about it.”

He often thinks about how SSBCI has had so many real impacts on real people, with real community roots. The 3-year-old Rail Haus beer garden in Dover is one of those. “With the help of SSBCI, they were able to refinance a loan that was going to balloon. And now they’re saving about $9,000 a month.”

Small victories like that can lead to bigger victories down the road, participants find. Success tends to breed success, and the support from the state often leads to backing from others who see a potential winner. Primed for success, BioCurie went on to snag a whopping $9.3 million award from the federal government and is already setting its sights even higher.

“The support from the Division of Small Business has been catalytic all the way through, enabling us to build our technology, our intellectual property, and even recruit our team,” Rombel said. “It’s been really a virtuous cycle.”