In January 2025, the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2) chose seven winners for its ninth Channel Partner Strategic Awards cycle. The funding provided from this award addresses commercialization gaps for energy startups through action-oriented initiatives, regional collaboration, and knowledge-sharing.
Many awardees focused on creating partnerships and pilot opportunities by connecting startups with new markets and resources. Here is the story of how one award winner is working to strengthen the energy-tech ecosystem in their region.
Cleantech San Diego is all about making connections for energy technology entrepreneurs, linking them with investors and manufacturing contractors alike. Those connections aim to push promising energy technologies from promising to proof of concept—and beyond.
“In the energy space, we saw companies needed someone with technical ability in this highly regulated industry,” said Jason Anderson, president and CEO of Cleantech San Diego. “There wasn’t the level of support entrepreneurs needed to get their technology to market, meaning they didn’t have access to resources or people who were energy domain experts.”
Cleantech San Diego arose from the need to support San Diego’s cleantech sector. The organization launched in 2007 to foster private-public-academic collaboration, promote energy technology priorities, support innovators throughout Southern California, and advocate for solid investment across San Diego. Today, it is a policy and economic development organization with more than 135 stakeholders, including businesses, universities, governments, and nonprofits in the industry.
“Throughout the years, the organization has advocated for policies to create market certainty and to help advance the energy sector here in California and in San Diego,” Anderson said.
In 2016, Cleantech San Diego launched the Southern California Energy Innovation Network (SCEIN) to bridge the gap between entrepreneurs and the resources needed to bring their energy technologies to market. Through the network, Cleantech San Diego helps innovators identify capital, provide grant support, establish industry connections, navigate policy guidance, spotlight pilot opportunities, and more. Since its launch, SCEIN has served 81 companies, with 34 still active in the program today.
Cleantech San Diego’s services are geared to a startup’s individual needs, Anderson said, meaning that Cleantech San Diego customizes their service plans to each unique situation. “It’s a more hands-on approach to the company, the founders, and the technology.”
For example, SCEIN supported grant writing for one of its portfolio companies, helping the company secure $1.6 million through a competitive California Energy Commission award.
Recently, Cleantech San Diego identified another major barrier for its startups: lack of support for prototype development. Anderson described it as a “chicken-and-egg problem,” in which innovators need help building a prototype and figuring out their pathway to market. But too often, this puts energy startups in a vulnerable position—unable to build a prototype without capital, and unable to access capital without a functioning prototype.
With its Channel Partner Strategic Award, Cleantech San Diego is developing a voucher program to support innovators in this predicament. Funding from IN2 will launch this program and support innovators as they develop their prototypes, Anderson said.
SCEIN startups applied for support in August 2025. Cleantech San Diego will soon select participants for the pilot cohort to connect them with a bench of resources for prototype development. Cleantech San Diego have worked closely with development engineers and prototyping experts in the region to ensure the program and voucher participants are set up for success.
“We’re not designing the ship as we fly it,” Anderson said. “We’ve created a program that makes sense for the entrepreneur and for the contract manufacturer we’ll connect them with.”
The hope is that this program could serve as a model for connecting startups with the prototype resources they need, when they need them most. For Cleantech San Diego, it’s another way to strengthen the San Diego region’s innovation ecosystem, ensuring promising energy technologies have a clear path to market, the expert support to get there, and the potential to attract additional funding that sustains and scales the effort beyond the IN2 award.
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