Bringing Idaho the future

Group seeks to showcase state’s business environment

COEUR d’ALENE — The Idaho Technology Council is preparing to publish a report that quantifies all the equity investments made in Idaho last year. The goal is to showcase the state’s robust business environment.

“What we are trying to do is create this comprehensive view of what is going on in Idaho,” said Blake Hansen, CEO of Alturas Capital who helped prepare the deal flow report for the Idaho Technology Council. “These companies across Idaho are saying we need more talent (in the tech sector). We need to attract more talent here and we need to attract more capital.

“The best way to do that is to start measuring where we are at and start publicizing where we are.”

Hansen said he and a handful of interns gathered public information on all equity investment and publicly traded mergers and acquisitions over $50,000 in Idaho last year, then verified that information with the companies involved in the transaction.

“What we have proven so far with this data is that Idaho companies have access to capital,” Hansen said. “Idaho companies are growing and thriving and tapping into capital markets to both acquire companies and raise capital from large institutional and venture capital investors.”

He said the data shows Idaho is a growing place for start-up investing.

“We are seeing that right now,” he said. “We are seeing private placement offerings where these early stage companies have access to angel investors and venture capital.”

While the study is robust, ITC President Jay Larsen said it does not capture everything such as investments by friends and family.

“It’s kind of like a sub-aquifer,” Larsen said. “We know it's down there. We just don't see it flowing.”

Larsen said the 86-page report details $15 billion in transactions that occurred in Idaho — $41 million of that in North Idaho.

“But a lot of your transactions in North Idaho were undisclosed,” Hansen said, adding you can’t really go by the dollar amount as a measure of activity. He said of the 37 transactions he has documented in North Idaho, only 17 disclosed the amount of the transaction.

For instance, Hansen said Kochava, a Sandpoint-based mobile analytics company, purchased a California firm called InferSystems on Feb. 27, 2015. Hansen said Kochava purchased key staff, patented systems and technologies. The acquisition facilitated Kochava’s Optimization Beacon, an ad campaign management system.

Hansen said all of Infer’s employees are relocating to Sandpoint, bringing Kochava’s total headcount to 50 employees.

“This is data that we are pulling that we want the world to know about,” Hansen said. “If it’s public information, we are going to share it, and we’ll try our best to validate it.”

Two of the largest transactions disclosed in North Idaho were when RHL Holdings, a subsidiary of Hecla Mining Co., purchased the Revett Mining Co. for $19.4 million; and when Till Capital, of Hayden, completed its acquisition of Omega Insurance Holdings for a little more than $14 million.

Larsen said there are three main areas on which the technology council is focused. Those include developing a talent pipeline, providing access to capital and commercialization of ideas.

“We are bringing them all together and starting to measure what is happening,” he said.

By highlighting these, we are hoping to attract talent and the investment community both locally and nationally,” Larsen said, adding the council is also working on growing talent organically.

They have been working with the state Legislature to increase education funding in the computer sciences from kindergarten through grad school. Larsen said the Legislature recently invested $2 million into coding curriculum in the K-12 public school system. It is a curriculum program developed by Code.Org that is specially designed for early learning.

Larsen said the investments in higher education are starting to show some success. The ITC recently learned that despite the high demand for computer science graduates, Boise State University was only graduating between 20 and 25 students per year, which is nowhere close to what Idaho businesses are demanding.

So the Legislature appropriated the money to hire eight more faculty, with the goal of increasing the number of graduates to 250 per year. Boise State now has one of the largest computer science programs in the nation, staffed with 26 faculty.

In North Idaho, Larsen said University of Idaho is on the cutting edge of cyber security, and university representatives recently met with President Obama in the White House.

Larsen said he wanted to thank three North Idaho legislators who have been very supportive of the technology council's initiatives.

“I can tell you that I have been very impressed with the legislators in the northern part of the state,” Larsen said, adding he works closely with some of them in the Capitol Building in Boise. “Sen. (Bob) Nonini has been a great advocate on the computer science side.”

He said Rep. Luke Malek, R-Coeur d’Alene, and Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, have also been incredibly supportive of the council’s efforts to generate more technology jobs in Idaho.

Overall, Hansen said, he hopes the report will instill some confidence in investors and computer science grads who are considering doing business in Idaho.

“We are a work in progress with this,” Hansen said, adding the ITC wants to work toward bridging the regional gaps in idaho. “We want to make this state smaller for everyone.”