The Slater Technology Fund, the state-backed, seed-stage investor, has a decade-long history of investing in innovative businesses, but in the last two years, it has made a point of focusing its resources on the best and brightest people with cutting-edge, life-altering technologies.

Since 2006, despite its skeleton staff and tightening budgets, Slater has invested in startups making amazing technological strides, including developing robotic surgical devices, inhibitors for the treatment of sepsis, and personal communication systems for the hearing impaired, to name a few...

...[Senior managing partner Richard G.] Horan credits the R.I. Economic Development Corporation and more specifically its director, Saul Kaplan, for articulating a strategy for an innovation economy and galvanizing the community around that theme.

“It’s beginning to come into a rather cohesive picture in terms of financing mechanisms to aspiring entrepreneurs,” Horan said of the various statewide efforts...

..Slater needs to be taken to the next level, Horan said, and in order to do that, the plan is to balance public support from the state with private-sector involvement.