News

We are saying a fond farewell to Stephen Miller, who, after six years with Venture Partners at CU Boulder, is pursuing a new opportunity. We will be welcoming a new director of venture development in the near future, to continue CU Boulder’s trajectory as a premier university for impactful spinout companies.

2023 was another tremendous year for innovation at the University of Colorado Boulder. Campus researchers and inventors created a strong crop of 162 breakthrough technologies this past year. These spanned the breadth of CU Boulder’s research expertise, with innovations in climate tech, biotechnology, quantum science, optics and aerospace, to name a few. CU Boulder's commercialization arm, Venture Partners at CU Boulder, supports a groundbreaking pipeline translating research into real-world impact, as highlighted in their 2023 Annual Report.

The Venture Fellow position is a time-limited fellowship with a 2-year duration. This is an excellent opportunity for anyone wanting to break into the exciting innovation ecosystem in Boulder, Colorado. Previous Venture Fellows have translated their fellowships into positions in venture capital and university innovation. Join our team and participate in bringing breakthrough innovations from the university to the world!

New Venture Challenge—The 2024 New Venture Challenge (NVC) culminated in a final showcase on April 17 in front of a live audience cheering on the University of Colorado Boulder’s next big innovations. At an event filled with great ideas and even greater entrepreneurial spirit, five teams competed for $165,000 in prize money. BioSensor Solutions, part of the first cohort of the Embark Deep Tech Startup Creator launched by Venture Partners at CU Boulder, won fourth place in the competition.

CU Independent—Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are working to make the moon habitable. And they are focused on one of the most difficult challenges to lunar living: dust. Xu Wang, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at CU Boulder, was one of the winners of NASA’s 2023 Entrepreneurs Challenge.

CU Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science—Distinguished Professor Zoya Popovic is among 162 inventors named 2023 fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Election as a fellow in the academy is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to inventors. Popovic, a leading researcher in high-efficiency, low-noise microwave and RF engineering, was elected for her “prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society.”

Within minutes, a laser-based device the size of a small suitcase could spot dangerous aerosols and alert safety crews. That's the vision of a team of engineers and chemists at CU Boulder, the California Institute of Technology, UC Santa Barbara and three companies. Frequency comb lasers can act like fingerprint scanners for aerosols, teasing out the signals from even minute concentrations of particles or gases in the air. The team includes LongPath Technologies, a CU Boulder spinout that uses these tools to search for methane leaks at oil and gas facilities.

The Intermountain West innovation ecosystem came together at the sixth annual Destination Startup Investor Showcase hosted by Venture Partners at CU Boulder. In a highly competitive field, twenty-three select ventures from the region’s research institutions presented at the showcase.

Deming Center for Entrepreneurship—The New Venture Challenge (NVC) and Deming Center for Entrepreneurship teamed up to present the NVC Women Founders competition, awarding $10,000 to groundbreaking new ventures. SuviCa and PrecisionTerra—CU Boulder startups working with Venture Partners to bring their university discoveries to market—both won funding.

The New Venture Challenge (NVC) and Venture Partners at CU Boulder teamed up to present the NVC Deep Tech competition, awarding $53,000 to groundbreaking new ventures.