The University of Florida’s start-up incubator, UF Innovate, further solidified its Accelerator program as among the industry’s best after earning top awards at the 2025 International Business Innovation Association’s annual conference in Philadelphia last month.
The awards recognized both Sid Martin Biotech and The Hub Accelerate programs with Top Entrepreneurial Support Organization (ESO) of the Year for rural programs (Sid Martin Biotech), the Top ESO of the Year for Science and Technology Program (The Hub) and the Dinah Adkins Award for Technology-Focused Incubation.
The Dinah Adkins Award is one of the highest honors and recognizes UF Innovate’s Accelerate program for its overall excellence and sustained impact of UF’s hybrid incubation and acceleration model.
The new awards brought the Accelerater’s total number of international and industry accolades up to 14.
During an Alachua City Commission meeting last month, UF Innovate Accelerate’s director, Karl LaPan, and Sid Martin Biotech manager Elliott Welker presented the commission with the ESO of the Year for rural award.
LaPan said they wanted the city to be able to share in the program’s success because it wouldn’t be possible without their partnership, and will be critical for the future as the bar of competition internationally, and as local as Newberry, is raised every year.
“Our program continues to be benchmarked all over the world as a best-in-class, award-winning program,” he said. “We’re really excited to share this award with you and to thank you for your continued partnership and support as we try to attract the best kinds of companies from all over the world to launch and grow their businesses here in the city of Alachua.”
UF Innovate’s earliest branch of Tech Licensing launched in 1985, piggybacking off the Bayh-Dole Act passed in 1980.
According to a 2018 UF Innovate guide, the act changed how America developed technology by enabling universities, nonprofit organizations and small businesses to retain titles to inventions and other works made under federally funded research programs.
The Tech Licensing of UF Innovate serves as one of the transfer arms for getting innovations from the incubator to the market. It has generated more than $1 billion in private investment from around 200 biomedical and technology startups, with some of the most successful ones being Banyan Biomarkers, AxoGen, K&A Wireless and Gatorade.
Founded in 1995, UF Innovate’s Sid Martin Biotech center launched the company’s Accelerator program. The center, located in Alachua’s Progress Park, houses laboratory and greenhouse spaces and hosts seminars and networking opportunities for innovators specializing in medical devices, ag-bio, clean energy and biopharma technologies.
Sid Martin Biotech has created more than 2,000 high-wage jobs in Alachua County with an economic impact of more than $105 million per year. In 2013 and 2017, it won the title International Business Innovation Association’s Global Incubator of the Year, along with the Global Science and Technology Incubator of the Year award in 2017.
In 2011, UF Innovate used a federal grant and UF funding to expand the Accelerator program with The Hub. Located in a 100,000 square-foot facility on SW 2nd Avenue in Gainesville, The Hub serves as a mixed-use business incubator aiming to encourage collaboration between resident clients, partners, visitors and the community.
In 2024 alone, UF Innovate’s Accelerate program supported 69 companies with 350 full-time employees, granted 77 patents and launched 54 products. The Accelerater has generated over $25.3 billion in cumulative economic impact since starting in 1995 and supported over 113,000 jobs with an average wage rate close to $90,000.
LaPan said the program’s 72% overall venture survivability rate and 78% survivability in biotech is UF Innovate’s most noteworthy marker of impact, especially since only 10% of biotech companies nationwide survive 10 years on average.
He said this makes Alachua a significant beneficiary from its long-standing support, enabling the incubator to recruit companies from all over the world.
“The fact that the program over three decades has had such a profound impact on making sure that life-changing therapies and diagnostics and biopharmaceuticals have been able to be developed for suffering people, I think that’s a real testament to the staying power of our program, the quality of the companies and most importantly, the quality of the community that supports those companies,” LaPan said.
In September, UF Innovate will host a celebration for the 30th anniversary of Sid Martin Biotech. Lapan said he hopes to shine a light on all the companies that the program has launched, as well as everybody at the organization and in the community who helps make the program world-class and award-winning.
“It takes all of those dimensions because when we talk to people from all over the world, they have lots of choices and we want to make sure that they choose us,” Lapan said.