The New Mexico Innovation Hub announces the expansion of its campus in Santa Fe Midtown. Plans are set to build 85,000 square feet of new flex industrial space to meet growing market demand. Financing has been approved by the New Mexico Finance Authority through its Opportunity Enterprise Commercial Development fund for $17.5 million.

Santa Fe is known as a global hub for the tourism industry. But David Perez wants to see it known for more than that.

Through the New Mexico Innovation Hub that Perez has founded on the city’s midtown campus, the tech entrepreneur seeks to establish Santa Fe as a center for the innovation economy — Silicon Valley in the Sangre de Cristos, perhaps.

Perez’s latest goal is set in Santa Fe, launching the New Mexico Innovation Hub for high-tech and advanced manufacturing startups on the campus of the former College of Santa Fe and Santa Fe University of Art and Design. (There is also a planned innovation hub near the Albuquerque airport, which Perez has worked on.)

Liberty Fusion seeks to create commercial fusion using technology licensed from Los Alamos National Laboratory research. Founder and CEO Koichi Masuda spoke to Business First about the startup’s origins and how the Santa Fe-based company spun out of LANL.

High-tech companies have filled the 50,000-square-foot New Mexico Innovation Hub at Santa Fe's midtown campus, prompting the founder to start looking ahead at his project's next phases.

The New Mexico Innovation Hub is a midtown Santa Fe campus built to connect the region's national laboratories with private industry, and to give fusion and advanced energy companies a place to land, build, and grow. The campus is demand-driven, developed in response to over 300 stakeholder interviews. Perez has taken two companies from idea to exit, most recently a healthcare technology company, before turning to the harder problem of building an entrepreneurship ecosystem in Santa Fe.

A nonprofit that provides financing to spur the use of technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants has become the latest tenant to join the lineup at the New Mexico Innovation Hub.

A high school could soon become the latest addition to the burgeoning midtown campus.