The University of South Florida Tampa campus. File photo.
USF CONNECT, a University of South Florida business and economic initiative that helps tech startups scale, will remain at the Tampa Bay Technology Incubator for another five years, maintaining space that its director says distinguishes the program from other organizations. The roughly $5.5 million lease renewal covers the incubator’s existing space and expansion, according to director Shannon Pastizzo.
The agreement keeps the incubator’s wet and dry laboratory space available to startups. Pastizzo said those labs inform CONNECT’s advantages in a Tampa Bay startup scene that also includes Embarc Collective and Tampa Bay Wave.
Wet labs accommodate work that requires specialized plumbing, ventilation and safety infrastructure. Dry labs are geared toward work such as engineering, computing and other research that does not require the same setup, but rather the hardware side of science.
Pastizzo named Psilera, Soil CEA, Modelithics and PolyMaterials App as success stories from the incubator.
She also tied the lease renewal to USF’s efforts to move university research out of the laboratory and into the marketplace.
“The renewal of this lease shows the prioritization of commercializing USF technologies,” Pastizzo told the Catalyst.
That includes intellectual property developed at USF that could eventually form the basis of new companies or products.
Pastizzo did not provide figures for how many companies have gone through CONNECT over the past five years, how many remain based in Tampa Bay or how many jobs and how much investment those companies have generated.
Psilera is a Tampa biotechnology company founded in 2019 by USF alumni Chris Witowski and Jackie von Salm, who both earned doctorates in natural products chemistry from the university. The company joined the Tampa Bay Technology Incubator in 2020 to develop psychedelic-inspired treatments for neurological and mental health disorders.
The company has since attracted outside investment. Psilera recently closed an oversubscribed $8.8 million seed round to advance PSIL-006, its lead drug candidate, toward its first human clinical trials. The USF Research Foundation previously invested $200,000 in the company. Psilera also struck a licensing agreement in 2025 involving a portfolio of DMT-related patents.
Modelithics dates back to the beginning of USF’s incubation efforts. The company was incorporated in 2001 as a USF spinout and became the first company admitted to what was then the USF Technology Incubator. Its technology grew from university research involving models used to design microwave and millimeter-wave electronic components.
More than two decades later, Modelithics remains headquartered in Tampa and sells its simulation-modeling products and services to customers around the world. USF engineering professor Lawrence Dunleavy, who co-founded the company, has described its growth as the worldwide commercialization of technology that originated from work at the university.
PolyMaterials App offers a more recent example of that path. Former USF engineering faculty member Manoj Ram founded the company in 2017 to develop energy-storage technology. Its work includes solid-state supercapacitors designed to provide high energy density and long life cycles for applications ranging from consumer electronics and medical devices to aerospace and defense.
The company remains based at the USF Research Park and has received federal research funding. Its awards have included Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer funding involving the Air Force and Missile Defense Agency. In 2026, the company reported receiving another Air Force STTR Phase I award.
