Sahil Lavingia, the CEO of commerce platform Gumroad, is raising $5 million in new funding. But he's not traversing Sand Hill Road looking for a few big checks. Instead, he wants that $5 million to come in a few hundred dollars at a time, from investors he's never met. Maybe even investors who no one would [...]
Melisa Ellis (BA UTSC 2015), a University of Toronto graduate and founder of the non-profit social and technology enterprise Nobellum, is joining forces with U of T to help launch at least 100 Black-owned start-ups by 2025. “I know first-hand what it’s like to be the only Black person working at a tech company,” says Ellis, whose mission [...]
Over the next three decades, Yale will funnel $15 million in funding to early stage projects aimed at fighting climate change. The Climate Impact Innovation Fund, which was announced late last month by University officials, was financed by anonymous donors. It will operate within the Planetary Solutions Project, a University-wide initiative established in December 2020 that aims [...]
In 2001, when Phil Ferneau and his partners were launching a venture capital firm focused on New Hampshire startups, they met with several academics at Dartmouth College. Ferneau had been an advocate for converting academic research into viable companies in his role as founding executive director of the Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurship at [...]
The connection was on view in October, when leaders of university entrepreneurship centers from around the country filed into Johns Hopkins’ FastForward U innovation space in Remington to talk community. When it comes to universities and economic development, the conversation historically has been one of attracting students who will one day become residents that choose to call [...]
In publishing the FY21 Innovation Report the University of Utah’s (the U) PIVOT Center highlights several important partnerships, including Recursion and RenalytixAI. The report also celebrates some of the U’s innovation by promoting quantitative and qualitative metrics, such as the precedent-setting $884 million in investments raised by U startup companies; and technologies developed by University [...]
The University of Pittsburgh wants to make seed-stage levels of funding more accessible and successful for those among its faculty and staff who have innovative ideas, and it's altering the traditional way it offered such funding by making changes to its Pitt Seed Project. With the Pitt Seed Project, selected entrants can now receive up [...]
The Prototype Fund, a partnership between the Innovation Hub at Research Park at Texas Tech University and the Lubbock Economic Development Alliance (LEDA), part of Market Lubbock Inc., has awarded the largest amount of funding to date to 10 technology startups. The fund, designed to spur innovation in the West Texas community, has awarded a combined $136,550 this year in [...]
TUCSON, Ariz. – Three University of Arizona inventors have been selected as Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors. The NAI Fellows Program highlights academic inventors who have demonstrated a spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society. Election [...]
Everyone knows that the viability of a startup depends on how well it can support itself during its early days. Startup founders without the necessary funds fare much worse than do those who have their own savings or backers among their family and friends. Yet many founders can’t find the initial money to give their [...]