Venture Partners at CU Boulder: News

A dozen entrepreneurs and 10 groundbreaking innovations took center stage at the recent inaugural Embark Showcase—the pinnacle of the program’s first year working with selected entrepreneurs to provide IP rights, salary support, grant funds and investor introductions to launch startups with real-world impact.

In 2011, Jeffrey Thayer (Aerospace Engineering) invented LiteWave's core technology—a new type of LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) that can ‘see’ objects in shallow water from above the water’s surface—alongside two CU Boulder graduate students. The company has now been acquired by Arcfield.

Sixteen teams of faculty, researchers and graduate student innovators competed for a combined $1.5M in startup funding grants in this year’s Lab Venture Challenge. Judges from CU Boulder’s entrepreneurial network heard pitches across two nights for innovations in biosciences, physical sciences and engineering.

Unlike many universities, CU Boulder views “getting technology out the door” as part of its mission. According to the latest report from the Association of University Technology Managers, which assessed startup creation by universities in 2021, CU ranked fifth nationwide, ahead of Stanford and MIT.

The NAI has ranked the CU system 14th among the “Top 100” institutions nationwide for recent patent activity, reflecting the strength of CU-led discoveries and their potential to be translated into society-benefiting technologies with the support of CU’s robust entrepreneurial ecosystem.

“From our experiences doing research at CU Boulder we developed an appetite for solving difficult problems with uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) and the tools to develop that into a career,” said Jack Elston (ElCompEngr’03, MS’05, AeroEngr MS’07 PhD’11), CEO of Black Swift Technologies.

Venture Partners at CU Boulder has officially launched its first Embark Entrepreneurs in Residence cohort. Embark aims to connect business minds outside the university with breakthrough inventions emerging from CU Boulder's research labs to bring them to market.

CU Boulder researcher Linda Watkins and CU startups Beryl Therapeutics Inc., Modendo Inc. and TissueForm Inc. are among 37 companies and researchers awarded Proof of Concept and Early-Stage Capital Retention grants through the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT).

In the two years that the Ascent Deep Tech Accelerator has been up and running, CU Boulder has spun out 32 deep tech startups. Through targeted programming during Ascent, experts have helped 19 teams looking to transition their research into companies with real-world impacts.

In taking its next-gen all-solid-state battery technology from the lab to the streets, Solid Power is changing how electric vehicles run. The spinout went public in 2021 with many past CU Boulder students—undergraduate, Master’s and PhD—working within its ranks, major partnership deals with BMW and Ford, and a new facility in Thornton.