CAPCO Programs

The Denver Post published some recent news on Able Planet, a CAPCO program portfolio company in Colorado:

Wheat Ridge-based headphone maker Able Planet, a regular at the International Consumer Electronics Show, unveiled a few dozen new products and prototypes at this year’s event, including noise-canceling earbuds.

But the one product that chief executive Kevin Semcken beamed about most had little to do with gadgets.
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Virent, a Wisconsin CAPCO program company, has recently partnered with Coca-Cola:

Biofuels technology developer Virent Inc. will shift from research and development mode to commercial production mode in the coming years, under a partnership with The Coca-Cola Co. announced Thursday.

The multi-million dollar agreement will help Virent move forward with plans to open a commercial plant by 2015, the Madison company said.
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Check out the latest news from Virent, a Wisconsin CAPCO program portfolio company –

In Wisconsin, Virent announced the issuance of five new U.S. patents covering aspects of its catalytic BioForming platform. Three of the patents cover the production of various liquid fuels and chemicals related to its recent announced partnership with The Coca-Cola Company and its ongoing partnership with Royal Dutch Shell. The additional two patents are directed to the production of a range of other industrial chemicals and chemical intermediates using Virent’s BioForming process. These patents join the over 175 domestic and foreign issued and pending applications in Virent’s portfolio representing more than 25 different technology families.

Fast Company interviewed Mary Tilton, VP of plant operations at Virent, a Wisconsin CAPCO program company.

Fast Company: How did the company get started?

Mary Tilton: The technology was first developed at the University of Wisconsin in Madison by our founder, Randy Cortright. Originally, we focused on hydrogen generation, and the company was founded to commercialize that technology. Sometime around 2005 we realized the catalytic processes we were using could be tailored to make hydrocarbon fuels. So our focus shifted and became looking into using sugars to make gasoline. That’s what we really concentrated on in 2008 when we embarked on the scale-up and decided to go to 10,000 gallons a year. We found we were very successful at taking standard sugar and converting it to gasoline. We demonstrated scalability in 2009, which was an important milestone.
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