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A $500,000 seed fund is being launched by the State of Illinois to encourage the best tech ideas from each university in the state. The fund promises $25,000 to each promising student startup so that it can pitch itself to investors - as long as the respective university pledges to match that investment 2:1.
The University of Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University, Northern Illinois University, Southern Illinois University and Argonne National Laboratory are all participants in the fund, called Regional Proof of Concept Fund, that will start accepting applications soon.
Each university must commit money to its own students before the state makes an investment, an idea by Nancy Sullivan, CEO of early-stage tech investment firm Illinois Ventures. Then the state will have a smattering of young brainpower and powerful ideas to show off to national investors, Sullivan told Crains: “What's valuable is we get to show at a national level what we're doing. We needed a platform for the best discoveries coming out of Illinois.”
Sullivan herself has experience not just with funding early-stage tech companies, but with university-level startups. As an executive director of UIC’s Office of Technology Management, she oversees a $10 million fund at UIC that encourage students - and faculty - to advance their ideas past the research stages.
Illinois is already known for its successful student startups have built themselves with the help of the local tech ecosystem: 1871, for example, admitted nine student startups as members last month as a result of a startup competition. Sports statistics company Blinkfire, which was developed partially through Northwestern University’s NUvention entrepreneurship course, just received funding.
The University of Chicago boasts a number of startup successes like GrubHub and Braintree from its New Venture Challenge. Another University of Chicago student startup called Kip Solutions was acquired by Post + Beam in 2013 after participating in the university’s summer accelerator. Travel tech company Georama started out of DePaul University in 2012 and has since increased its team to nearly 20.
This new multischool funding effort from the state promises that the list of promising startups coming out of local universities will rapidly expand.
