What: Irvine Incubation Center.

Where: 111 Academy, Irvine, California

When: No deadline for applications as the program is ongoing.

Who: Entrepreneurs looking to work surrounded by high-level university research in a space surrounded by other innovative companies.

Why: To gain access to other entrepreneurs working in disciplines from biotech to information technology, and to work in close quarters with venture capital firms and mentors.

How: Rates vary from $0-$2,000 depending on subsidy qualifications. For more information, click here.

In a state where Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay area are at the top of the list for growing new high-tech businesses, it’s a little tough to think of anywhere else as a hotbed for building companies.

But the Irvine Incubation Center, opened last summer, is looking to bolster the startup scene in the southern part of the Golden State. The Southern California center plays host to companies from IT to biotech.

Founded in 2004 as a “virtual incubator” under the auspices of the University of California, Irvine, the center took much longer to grow into a full-fledged facility with office space for startups of all kinds.

The actual incubation center is a nonprofit supported by UCI, the Irvine Chamber of Commerce and the city of Irvine, which worked to establish the center at University Research Park in Irvine in August 2010.

“We have everything from information tech to biotech to media. We even have some no tech companies,” said Managing Director Bob Flack. He said the philosophy of his center is to tap into the intellectual power of UCI, as well as Southern California’s biotech, media and technology talent to help build businesses.

Companies can either rent offices at sliding, subsidized rates, or can pay to use the center’s space more occasionally.

One company at the center is far along on its nanotechnology solution to halting and perhaps reversing blindness in those with diabetes and macular degeneration.

For Ram Rao, the CEO of 2C Tech Corporation, the proximity to the university and its biotech facilities brought him to Irvine. Though technology to treat blindness was developed at the University of Colorado, he believed Southern California had more talent at the ready.

“The human resources, capital resources, testing laboratories, manufacturing facilities that can make this (medical device) are here,” Rao told Jan Norman, small business columnist for the Orange County Register.

Rao told Portfolio.com this week that after successful tests on animals, his company is ready to run tests in humans in Mexico City this year.

Flack said another major piece of the puzzle for his incubator, as with others like the massive Cambridge Innovation Center at Kendall Square in Massachusetts, is to put entrepreneurs together with potential investors, along with providing them office space.

As with the Cambridge center, Irvine’s Incubation Center invites angel investors and venture capitalists to be part of the ecosystem. Though unlike the more established Cambridge Center, there are no venture capitalists in the building, there has been success in finding funding.

Last year, companies housed in the center raised $34 million in loans and equity investment, and in the first five months of this year, they landed $21 million.

And the incubation center, though it’s brand new, has recently hooked another very big partner.

Earlier this month, the incubator was selected as the Cisco Entrepreneur Institute Training Center for the Western United States. What that means is that companies will come to the Irvine center for training from Cisco experts on growing their businesses.

“The Cisco Entrepreneur Institute complements the other free and low cost services provided,” said Flack.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com