Richard G. Horan

When it comes to innovation, Richard G. Horan of the Providence-based Slater Technology Fund is the wind beneath the wings of biomedical and life science startups in Rhode Island. An active advocate for technological development, he oversees the state-backed, nonprofit venture capital fund that collaborates with co-investors and others to build the sector.

While venture investing is a high-risk endeavor, it does yield success stories, and in Rhode Island there are a number of them.

The growth Horan has helped foster includes IlluminOss of East Providence, which completed a $43 million series C financing round last year; and Luc Pharmaceutical – formerly Mnemosyne Pharmaceuticals – which announced a license and collaboration agreement with Novartis and hiked venture funding to about $6 million before moving to Cambridge, Mass., last year. And Nabsys, a genomic sequencing company that had attracted $50 million in financing but then went bankrupt, and rose from the ashes at the end of March, putting its original idea back in play after a pivot turned out not to be profitable.

Not all is smooth sailing. Horan has been outspoken in his disappointment that the proposed Wexford Science and Technology project in the former Interstate 195 land – with research-and-development space among other uses – has not broken ground yet.

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Horan told PBN that he hopes Gov. Gina M. Raimondo’s administration can help put Rhode Island’s innovation economy on a faster track.

“Our old industrial economy is declining faster than our innovation economy is being developed,” he said. Now, with more entrepreneurs and investors out there, it’s about “building that critical mass,” Horan said. •

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