HX Venture Fund raising $75M for VC investments 

HX Venture Fund, which aims to grow Houston’s venture capital ecosystem, is raising money for its second fund-of-funds. HX Venture Fund is raising $75 million from institutional limited partners for HX Venture Fund II, managing partners Sandy Guitar and Guillermo Borda told the Houston Business Journal. The fund-of-funds will have a series of rolling closes, but HX Venture Fund […]

First UK ‘Knowledge Intensive’ deeptech university fund

UK venture capital fund Parkwalk has launched one of the first Knowledge Intensive Funds to be approved by the UK government to invest in deeptech startups. The fund will invest in ground-breaking deeptech businesses spun out of UK universities, but with a facility to carry back income tax relief to the previous tax year and reduced administration […]

UVA iTHRIV Distributes $200,000 to Fund Innovative Medical Research Projects

The integrated Translational Health Research Institute of Virginia, or iTHRIV, a National Institutes of Health-funded Clinical and Translational Research Award hub, has awarded $200,000 in pilot funding to five multi-institutional research projects in Virginia. Teams of physicians, researchers and engineers at the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Inova Health System and Carilion Clinic were awarded the […]

Cornell startup awarded $600K to improve food safety

Halomine, a Cornell-based startup developing cutting-edge technologies for the sanitation of food processing equipment, has been awarded $600,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA), under Phase II of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. One of the primary objectives of the USDA-NIFA program is related to manufacturing […]

Trask Innovation Fund accepting applications from researchers, innovators seeking to advance Purdue intellectual property 

Purdue University inventors who are prepared to move their innovations to market have until Feb. 19 to apply for funding through the Trask Innovation Fund. The fund is designed to advance the commercial potential of Purdue intellectual property through short-term research projects. Submitted proposals will be reviewed by the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization based on criteria including […]

Here’s how Ohio State plans to support more startups

Ohio State University’s new research and innovation chief is bullish on increasing the number of startups supported by the university and formed under its wing. Grace Jinliu Wang joined the university Dec. 1 in the newly created role of senior vice president for research, innovation and knowledge enterprise, a position in which she’ll oversee a newly […]

UW-Milwaukee battery spinout SafeLi rebrands as COnovate, lands $50K investment

COnovate, Inc., a Shorewood company developing materials for lithium ion batteries, is receiving $50,000 in a seed investment from BrightStar Wisconsin Foundation, the Milwaukee-based nonprofit and an early-stage investment organization. COnovate was formerly known as SafeLi LLC, a startup founded in 2016 by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors Carol Hirschmugl and Marija Gajdardziska-Josifovska. The company’s material, named Cophite, is designed […]

Pilots over pitches: how to accelerate growth through corporate-startup collaboration

“Always be pitching” has been the startup mantra for years, and for good reason. Pitching helps improve and validate ideas, understand customers, and accelerate learning on a consistent basis, so your company can build the right product. But over-investing in pitches has a dark side. The obsession with the perfect pitch has led to countless […]

UNeTech levels the playing field for high-risk, high-reward tech startups 

The “valley of death” is a term used in the startup community to refer to the dreaded gap between the discovery of promising new technologies and the bringing to market of commercially viable new products based on those technologies. It is the badlands where risky and possibly disruptive tech goes to die. Put more formally, it’s […]