Now in its second year, the Embark Deep Tech Startup Creator, offered by Venture Partners at CU Boulder, matches business minds outside the university with breakthrough inventions created within its walls and provides funding for those ventures. The application for entrepreneurs is now open for the 2024 cohort.
Each year, roughly 150 inventions emerge from CU Boulder’s research labs. Some are spun out and brought to market by the innovators themselves, while many more join an underutilized pool of university innovations. At the same time, many entrepreneurs are searching for the newest breakthrough technologies to bring to the marketplace but lack the needed access and support.
Given that symbiosis-to-be, Venture Partners’ Embark brings together those would-be entrepreneurs and inventors in a unique way, says Bryn Rees, associate vice chancellor for research and innovation and managing director of Venture Partners. “Just because the university inventors didn’t create a startup company doesn’t mean the technology is not a really exciting startup opportunity,” he said. “We think some of our very best innovations are available, and Embark is a way to catalyze that.”
To that end, Venture Partners has curated a list of promising innovations with strong commercial potential from a broad array of scientific and engineering disciplines.
Embark presents an exciting new avenue for ideas like the breath monitor to get out into the world where they can make a difference, according to Marta Zgagacz, director of licensing at Venture Partners. “[Our researchers] are extremely enthusiastic to have their technology go through the Embark program and hopefully come out the other side with a startup,” she said.
