The 91����Ƶ Boulder Research & Innovation Office (RIO) announced a targeted realignment in November to enhance strategic integration across key areas and best position RIO to serve the university's growing research and innovation needs. The shift focused on RIO’s internal organization and operations and was designed to support long-term growth, collaboration and impact. 

RIO’s operations are now organized into four pillars to encourage more cross-team activity and distribute decision-making more broadly and flexibly. We sat down with Bryn Rees, associate vice chancellor for innovation and partnerships, to discuss the new Innovation & Partnerships team, which brings together Venture Partners at 91����Ƶ Boulder, the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative and Workforce Development. The realignment is designed to boost effectiveness across the three units and drive larger goals, including entrepreneurial activity and training, new company and job creation, economic development and commercialization of research discoveries.

How will these changes enhance strategic integration across innovation and partnership efforts?

The three units that are coming together—Venture Partners, the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative, and Workforce Development—share many commonalities. They all provide training and support for an entrepreneurial mindset, and they all connect the university community with the business community. The realignment brings together three great teams that were already working together. By bringing them closer together organizationally, we can better serve our partners. If a corporate partner or investor engages with the university, for example, they can explore a wider range of commercialization, entrepreneurship and workforce opportunities in an integrated environment.

How does this closer integration of initiatives benefit the university?

Here is a concrete example of how the university benefits. 91����Ƶ Boulder is a national leader in spinning out new companies based on innovations created through university research. However, if the university unit enabling spinout creation is separate from the unit for undergraduate student entrepreneurship, it may be more difficult for students to benefit from the university’s startup prowess. More seamless integration will only help us advance 91����Ƶ's impact through innovation. This realignment opens up many new opportunities to broaden the resources available to our university community. It’s already begun. We are seeing 91����Ƶ Boulder students engaging directly with spinouts through the New Venture Challenge.

How will the realignment affect the support and resources available to startups and entrepreneurial ventures associated with 91����Ƶ Boulder?

The realignment will enhance the experience of our students, faculty and staff who choose to engage in our existing innovation resources. Primarily, that will be through easier navigation. Someone inside the university or an external partner typically has multifaceted needs. Let’s consider a faculty member with a startup company commercializing a quantum innovation they created at the university. That company might want to hire specially trained students, license intellectual property, participate in accelerator programs and perhaps do other things too. Our new integrated Innovation & Partnerships team can help with all of it.

How do you envision the impact of this integration a year or two from now?

This integration provides a foundation for future growth. An organizational change like this does not itself produce the large-scale impact we seek in giving our students incredible entrepreneurship experiences or turning breakthrough research into innovations that help society, but it’s an important step along the way. I expect that, in a few years, we will see increases in faculty and student engagement in innovation and be able to tie those increases back to many beneficial changes and improvements, one of which is the organizational change that brought several of the university’s key innovation units together. Similarly, for our external partners including investors and companies, this realignment will provide a more seamless and integrated experience of interacting with the university through a single point of contact. Being one of the very best universities in the world for innovation will require a holistic effort; this is one step along a much larger journey.

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The second cohort of Entrepreneurs in Residence in the Embark Deep Tech Startup Creator will pitch their newly built startups bringing to market ten groundbreaking technologies developed within 91����Ƶ Boulder's research labs. Investors and business partners will get an exclusive look at the companies built in the last six months program in various sectors, including biotechnology, cleantech, health and wellness and advanced materials.

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This is a new funding opportunity available to 91����Ƶ Boulder therapeutics projects. This program offers up to $50,000 in rapidly accessible funding to help advance early-stage therapeutic projects with strong commercial potential. 

Program Highlights

• Funding Amount: Up to $50,000 per project
• Goal: Accelerate the development of new drug candidates by supporting projects to gather crucial go/no-go data and/or generate new intellectual property (IP).
• Commercial Path: Ideal for projects that have a clear route to commercialization but are currently on hold due to lack of funding

Eligibility Requirements

1. Disclosed Innovation: Your innovation must be disclosed to Venture Partners. Submit new invention disclosures here.
2. Long-Term FDA Goal: Must aim to develop an FDA-approved drug; supplements are ineligible. Drug discovery platforms and FDA-approved diagnostics will be considered.
3. Clear Milestones: Proposals should detail critical milestones that provide go/no-go data or result in new intellectual property.
4. Customer Discovery: Strong preference for teams that have completed customer discovery interviews validating the proposed development path. Get started with customer discovery here.
5. Detailed Budgets: Proposals should have comprehensive budgets and clearly outlined deliverables from internal teams or third-party contractors.
6. Funding Gap: Commercial progression is currently stalled due to funding constraints.

Key Dates

• Application Opens: Monday, Jan. 13, 2025
• Application Deadline: Friday, Feb. 14, 2025, 11:59 p.m. MT

Intellectual Property Terms

As a condition of receiving this award, project-related IP will be subject to a memorandum of understanding (MOU) ensuring that future companies licensing the technology either:

• enter into a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) for the award amount at a 30% discount or
• reimburse the investment plus a 30% fee within one year of the license agreement being signed.

Application

For any questions about the funding, eligibility criteria or the application process, contact Justin Stitzlein. We also encourage you to share this announcement with colleagues who might be interested.

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Photo: Associate Professor and co-founder of Mana Battery, a startup developing sodium-based batteries for sustainable energy storage, Chunmei Ban, is working with chemical engineering student Kangmin Kim in the 91����Ƶ Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science lab. Source: Jesse Morgan Petersen

Innovation at the 91����Ƶ reached an unprecedented milestone in fiscal year 2023-24 by launching 35 startup companies based on university innovations. This achievement shattered 91����Ƶ Boulder’s previous record of 20 startups in FY 2021 and placed it among the most prolific single-campus institutions in the country.

As the commercialization arm for 91����Ƶ Boulder—as well as 91����Ƶ Denver’s physical sciences which launched one startup in the same year and UCCS—Venture Partners at 91����Ƶ Boulder is at the heart of transforming new inventions and discoveries into real-world impact by empowering university innovators to build new companies and industry partnerships.

This leap from launching just four to six startups annually a decade ago is a testament to years of strategy and investment in entrepreneurship. Considering 91����Ƶ’s location outside traditional venture capital hubs like Silicon Valley and Boston, its rise as a startup powerhouse showcases a unique ecosystem driving extraordinary results.

Journey to the Top

In data collected and published by AUTM (the leading association for university “technology transfer,” which tracks the number of startups launched by universities to commercialize university-owned intellectual property) from FYs 1990-2023, the standing leaders of startups launched in a year by a single-campus are Stanford with 38 startups in 2022 and MIT with 32 startups most recently in 2020. Full university data from FY 2024 is expected from AUTM in late 2025.

“Universities spinning out similar numbers of startups have significantly larger research budgets feeding their innovation pipeline,” says Bryn Rees, associate vice chancellor for innovation and partnerships, “But this is actually where 91����Ƶ Boulder really shines, when we look at our efficiency: the number of startups we’re launching per dollar of funding.”

“Among institutions with the highest output of startups, Columbia University tops that indicator with 3.5 startups launched in FY 2018 per $100 million in research funding. With 34 startups out of 91����Ƶ Boulder in FY 2024, that’s 4.7 startups per $100 million of funding. That is a top result among leading universities and a real credit to our approach,” says Rees.

Strategic Pillars of Success

Through experimentation and entrepreneurial thinking, the Venture Partners team has redefined how academic research translates into impactful businesses. “Our journey reflects years of careful planning, experimentation and a relentless commitment to supporting our startup founders,” says Rees. “We’ve embraced Boulder’s collaborative ethos and created a model that aligns with our community’s values while delivering national impact.”

Founder-First Philosophy

Venture Partners prioritizes the experience and development of its founders—primarily faculty, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. Innovations like Licensing with EASE^® simplify the startup process with pre-negotiated intellectual property licensing terms, reducing administrative friction and allowing founders to focus on building their ventures. This philosophy extends to providing tailored mentorship and long-term support, creating an environment where new founders thrive.

Holistic Support for Founders

Recognizing the distinct challenges academic founders face, Venture Partners offers a comprehensive suite of resources from idea to launch. From entrepreneurial training to funding, academic founders receive support tailored to their unique needs, even as the fundamentals of entrepreneurship are constant. For example, Venture Partners’ Center for Translational Research (CTR) helps bridge the “valley of death” between early-stage research and commercialization with comprehensive support for researchers applying for grants that cater to startups.

Integration and Collaboration

To ensure a seamless startup pipeline, Venture Partners integrates resources across the university and community. In federal partnership, the National Science Foundation I-Corps^TM Hub: West Region programming at Venture Partners provides startup training to researchers in and outside of the university, while the Lab Venture Challenge (LVC) awards over $1.25 million in proof-of-concept grants annually in partnership with the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT).

Experimentation and Adaptation

Venture Partners’ willingness to experiment and learn from failure has been critical to its success. “Have you heard of the ‘i-Teams’ program?” Rees jokes. “Of course not! It was a failure. We wanted to match lab innovations with business students. It was a fun experience and great learning for the students, but we didn’t start any new companies.” However, it provided insights that led to the creation of the highly successful Embark Deep Tech Startup Creator, which launched 10 of the 35 companies in 2024 by matching experienced entrepreneurs with cutting-edge 91����Ƶ Boulder innovations. New partnerships through the New Venture Launch class at the 91����Ƶ Boulder Leeds School of Business are also proving to be a successful approach to the original idea. Venture Partners has also adapted lessons learned from Columbia University’s leveraging of state economic development grants, MIT’s mentorship strategy and the University of Utah’s end-to-end solution for startups to fill gaps in the local ecosystem to inspire similar initiatives to suit Colorado’s ecosystem.

Startups Accelerating Toward Impact

Venture Partners Annual Report

Explore more about these startups and how Venture Partners achieved record-breaking success in transforming innovation into impact.

The 35 startups launched in FY 2024 represent a diverse array of industries, from clean energy to biotech. Among them is Mana Battery, founded on research from Chunmei Ban’s laboratory (91����Ƶ Boulder Paul M. Rady Mechanical Engineering), winner of a 2023 LVC grant. Mana Battery is developing sodium-based batteries as a safer, more sustainable alternative to lithium-ion technology, addressing critical challenges in energy storage. Over the past decade, 91����Ƶ Boulder has spun out several battery-focused startups, collectively creating hundreds of jobs and attracting over $1 billion in investment to Colorado. These startups exemplify 91����Ƶ Boulder’s ability to address pressing global challenges while driving economic growth in the state.

91����Ƶ is a growing international leader in both quantum and healthcare research and technologies, both found in the new startup Flari Tech. The company is developing technology created by Jun Ye (91����Ƶ Boulder Physics, , ) and Qizhong Liang (JILA) to detect diseases via the breath, all built upon the Nobel Prize-winning frequency comb developed at 91����Ƶ Boulder and NIST. The company was founded by Eva Yao in the first cohort of Embark.

Another shooting star is Mesa Quantum. Venture Partners helped match a motivated grad student, Sristy Agrawal (, 91����Ƶ Boulder Mathematical Physics), with a novel atomic clock invented in Svenja Knappe’s lab (91����Ƶ Boulder Paul M. Rady Mechanical Engineering). Mesa Quantum was first conceived in the I-Corps Hub West programming offered at Venture Partners. Mesa Quantum is ushering in the next generation of chip-scale atomic clocks and quantum sensors, powering the industries of tomorrow in fields like autonomous vehicles and advanced deep-water oil exploration.

91����Ƶ Boulder’s success is bolstered by recent ecosystem wins like the NSF Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine and the Elevate Quantum Tech Hub designations. These initiatives enhance 91����Ƶ Boulder’s capacity to attract top talent, secure funding and support high-impact startups.

“These programs bring together the resources and expertise we need to address global challenges,” says Rees. “They’re amplifying our impact and positioning 91����Ƶ as a leader in innovation.”

Looking ahead

As Venture Partners celebrates its record-breaking year, the team is focused on the future. Plans include expanding incubator spaces, enhancing funding opportunities and increasing diversity within the entrepreneurial mentor network. The university is also working to refine programs like Embark and explore new collaborations with other institutions.

“Our goal is to create ventures with lasting impact,” Rees emphasizes. “We measure success not only by the number of companies we create but by the societal and economic benefits they deliver.”

91����Ƶ Boulder’s dramatic rise as a leader in university-driven entrepreneurship has illuminated its role in the broader U.S. innovation ecosystem. By prioritizing founders, embracing Colorado’s unique strengths and continually evolving its approach, Venture Partners offers a model for other institutions seeking to foster innovation.

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