Venture Partners News

Eleven university innovators pitched their innovations at Lab Venture Challenge (LVC) , an annual funding competition hosted by Venture Partners at CU Boulder that accelerates commercially promising technologies accelerate into impactful business ventures. Judges from CU Boulder’s entrepreneurial network awarded a record 15 grants totaling $1.475 million. Awardees were the...

CU Boulder researchers attracted a record $634.4 million in fiscal year 2021 for studies that, among other things, examine how artificial intelligence can transform education, led to the United Arab Emirate’s Hope spacecraft orbiting Mars, and address threats posed by climate change in the Arctic.

In the past year alone, CU Boulder spun out 20 new “deep tech” businesses from its research labs. At the same time, as we reflect on our progress as an Innovation & Economic Prosperity (IEP) University, we are careful not to lose sight of the very personal stories that are contained within the metrics of economic impact.

“Rather than just focusing on intellectual property and IP transactions, we are putting our effort and our resources toward developing entrepreneurs and helping them build businesses," says Brynmor Rees, assistant vice chancellor for innovation at CU Boulder and managing director for Venture Partners.

Startup company founders who commercialize CU Boulder’s research innovations will be getting a boost in 2022. Ascent, a startup accelerator specifically created for CU Boulder innovators, will help founders launch their companies, raise investment capital, and gain market and partnership traction.

With a new, $15 million dollar award announced by the National Science Foundation (NSF) on August 25, engineers and scientists from top research universities across the Western United States—including CU Boulder—will form a new consortium, the I-Corps Hub West Region, to help advance new technologies and incubate emergent companies that can move breakthrough discoveries from the lab to the marketplace.

A detailed article on Venture Partners' “hyper-accelerator” program—Pandemic Hyper-Accelerator for Science and Technology (PHAST)—appears in the July issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. PHAST leverages Economic Development Administration (EDA) funding while also rapidly bringing innovative solutions to market. That program is now beginning to bear fruit, with a first cohort of startups preparing for an inaugural Demo Day scheduled for January 2022.

SBIR and STTR grants are highly competitive programs that encourage research by small U.S. businesses with the aim of putting innovative, profitable products on the market. The STTR program also requires small businesses to collaborate with nonprofit research institutions such as CU Boulder.

The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) today named the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) as one of six university finalists for its ninth annual Innovation & Economic Prosperity (IEP) University Awards.

Venture Partners at CU Boulder—the university's commercialization arm—has launched the Pandemic Hyper Accelerator for Science and Technology (PHAST) to support the translation of CU-developed, COVID-19 innovations into new businesses. Crucial to PHAST's programming is the partnership formed with local angel investing group Rockies Venture Club (RVC), as the program requires participants to complete RVC's 1-week HyperAccelerator. PHAST is taking applications through May 21.