A Community of Entrepreneurs Ready to Change the World

Catalyze is the Launchpad for CU Boulder ventures

What is Catalyze CU?

Catalyze CU is a summer-long startup accelerator designed for CU students, faculty, and staff. Catalyze combines world class mentorship, funding, and dedicated co-working space to help the most promising ventures from across campus reach escape velocity - all without taking any equity. We level up the founding team startup skill set, and help you go from idea to impact, and prototype to production. Catalyze alums have a strong track record of being accepted to top tier accelerators like Techstars, raising funding, winning grants and launching successful Kickstarters.

We're excited to welcome our 2018 cohort of founders and companies.

The Power of Catalyze CU

Catalyze CU relies on the support of the community to operate, preparing university startups to thrive once they leave the university. We welcome you to join our strong network of mentors, sponsors, and friends.

How Catalyze Works:

Create an Idea

Develop an innovative, creative idea that you want to see come alive!

Gather a Team

Get a team of unique individuals who share your passion!

Apply!

Build out your dream!

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Stories

Everyone at Catalyze has a story... What's yours?

Read All The Stories Meet the Mentors

Companies in Focus

InFormU

inFormµ (2016) was created by the intrepid, hard-working duo of Lang Mei (Leeds, 2017) and Rishabh Berlia (CEAS, 2017). The two international students, from China and India, respectively, joined forces to add Prerna Nayyer (CEAS, 2017), an international student also from India. This team worked tirelessly to address the issue of lost items; those valuables that are accidentally left behind. The Mu tag, their product, connects to a users phone or smart watch and sends a notification when the user is further than a given distance their valuable item. inFormµ staged a successful Kickstarter campaign in spring of 2017 and gained $150k investment from an angel investor in December of the same year.

Stateless

Stateless (2016) was founded by the Electrical and Computer Engineering research team of PhD student Murad Kablan and Assistant Professor Eric Keller. Their revolutionary technology makes even the most sophisticated networks simple to manage. After completion of Catalyze CU, they moved on to the NSF I-Corps program and ultimately to Techstars Boulder in Spring of 2017. They continued to build their technology and added seven members to their team, include specialists in marketing and business development. In Summer 2017 they were awarded an NSF SBIR grant on the order of $225k. By winter of that same year, they had completed their first round of seed funding at $1.4 million.

Specdrums logo

Specdrums (2017) was founded in 2015 by Steven Dourmashkin when he was an undergraduate at Cornell. As a lifelong drummer, he wished he could bring his drum set into his college dorm. The result is Specdrums, a wearable ring that allows the user to tap colors to trigger sounds. Since coming to CU for his PhD in aerospace engineering, Steven and the rest of the Specdrums team have been able to take the utmost advantage of what CU has to offer, such as the Idea Forge and its prototyping capabilities. Since finishing Catalyze CU, Specdrums launched a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, bringing in almost $190k.

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