Press Release

On Friday, September 16th, the second Massachusetts Manufacturing Mash-Up attracted over 1,000 attendees to Polar Park, the home of the Worcester Red Sox, to celebrate the Commonwealth’s manufacturing sector. The day-long event featured hands-on STEM challenges for students, plus special sessions on robotics in manufacturing, award presentations, and a startup pitch competition.

BURLINGTON, MASS. – On Wednesday, September 7th, the Baker-Polito Administration visited Northeastern University’s Innovation Campus in Burlington for the announcement of a new $3.5 million grant for the Experiential Quantum Advancement Laboratories (EQUAL), a nearly $10 million project to advance the emerging quantum sensing and related technology sectors in the state. The Northeastern-led project will establish new partnerships and leverage several ongoing ones with academic institutions and industry partners. The aim is to develop next-generation quantum technologies, boost training in quantum information science and engineering for students and workers, and establish greater partnerships among industry and government around quantum sensing and related technologies.

BOSTON – Housing and Economic Development Secretary Mike Kennealy joined leaders from the tech and innovation sector at Rapid7 in Boston today for the announcement of three new grants from the Commonwealth’s Tech Talent Diversity Initiative, an effort aimed at boosting diversity hiring and training opportunities for diverse candidates. The three grants, totaling $494,947, were awarded to Hack.Diversity in Boston, Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology in Boston, and Tech Foundry in Springfield.

Burlington — Today, the Baker-Polito Administration announced a new grant of $681,631 to Burlington’s SiPhox Inc. to support the development of a first-of-its-kind facility that will mass-produce pluggable photonic biochips, boosting output from 100 biochips per month to roughly 5,000 per month to help meet growing demand from biotech verticals such as distributed diagnostics, drug discovery, and vaccine development.

SOMERVILLE, MASS. – The Baker-Polito Administration joined healthcare and technology leaders to celebrate the legacy of the Massachusetts Digital Health Initiative, a statewide effort launched in January 2016, and to celebrate the finale of the 2nd Massachusetts Digital Health COVID-19 Recovery Challenge, a pitch competition supported by the Commonwealth and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

BOSTON – The echoes of the COVID-19 global health crisis were apparent in the latest edition of The Index of the Massachusetts Innovation Economy, a report that tracks the strength of the Commonwealth’s tech and innovation sectors. Even with net job losses in nine of 11 key tech sectors in 2020, the Massachusetts tech and innovation economy continued to be a top state in terms of total R&D investment ($36 billion in 2018, second only to California), record venture capital investment ($15.8 billion in 2020), and increased investment in higher education per student (up 29.4 percent since 2015).

QUINCY, MASS. – Today, the Baker-Polito Administration announced a $1,961,375 grant to Quincy’s QUBIC Labs, an incubator that will work with startups and entrepreneurs interested in building blockchain apps, technologies that hold the potential to transform innovation-focused sectors including finance, healthcare, insurance, supply chain, and government. The grant is the first award made under the Commonwealth’s Technology & Innovation Ecosystem Awards program, a funding initiative launched earlier this year to provide capital support to innovative projects statewide.

BOSTON – On Wednesday, the Baker-Polito Administration announced a $4,394,848 grant to Boston University for a new research and development center called the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Teaching and Innovation Center (RASTIC). The project will drive the development of new innovations with private sector partners in Massachusetts and increase student research opportunities in the robotics space. RASTIC will emphasize real-world prototyping projects to integrate new materials, functionality, and artificial intelligence into robotic devices, delivering tools that will allow students to design and launch their own R&D projects.

BOSTON- On Tuesday, Housing and Economic Development Secretary Mike Kennealy visited UMass Boston to announce a $999,000 grant from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that will fund new quantum computing infrastructure. The grant is from the Collaborative Research and Development Matching Grant program, an effort managed by the Innovation Institute at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), and will support a three-year, $1,999,774 project managed by UMass Boston in partnership from Western New England University in Springfield.

NORTH ANDOVER – Thursday, April 7, 2022 – Today, the Baker-Polito Administration announced a new $1.5 million grant from the Massachusetts Manufacturing Innovation Initiative (M2I2) to 6K, which will boost the company’s cutting-edge production of advanced materials that are used in additive manufacturing and in the production of batteries for electric vehicles, grid storage, and consumer electronics. 6K’s cutting-edge UniMelt® microwave technology is “quintessentially Massachusetts” in terms of its innovative, sustainable, and environmentally-friendly characteristics, which recycles scrap materials or used metal powder or parts that would otherwise have gone to landfill, and instead transforms it into premium metal powder used in 3D printing for the production parts used in aerospace, defense, medical, and automotive applications. 6K has also announced a new 33,000-square-foot battery center of excellence pre-production facility in North Andover, which will be one of the largest battery material production facilities in the United States.