February 2019

In hopes of making valuable industry connections to commercialize and advance their technologies, 25 university ventures spun out of Colorado research institutions and federal laboratories pitched to local investors and venture capitalists from both coasts.

Researchers at CU Boulder are starting work on a new collaborative grant from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that will improve solar wind modeling.

MAVEN is preparing to take on additional responsibility as a data-relay satellite for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, which launches next year.

CU Boulder spinoff Stateless, a “network-as-a-service” company, raised $11.33 million in Series A funding in late January 2019. The company was founded in 2016 by PhD student Murad Kablan and Assistant Professor Eric Keller from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

LASP employs student “command controllers” to help operate the space missions under its supervision. “LASP is the only place in the world that has students work on spacecraft like this,” says Reidar Larsen, a graduate student who started working at LASP as an undergraduate at CU Boulder. “It’s completely unique.”

CU Boulder researchers Bob Marshall and Svenja Knappe are collaborating to bring down the cost of studying the magnetic field through the use of small satellites called CubeSats and tiny sensors previously used to collect measurements of the brain.