Venture Partners at Boulder News
Venture Partners at 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 Boulder's research labs to bring them to market.
Boulder researcher Linda Watkins and 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, 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 Boulder students—undergraduate, Master’s and PhD—working within its ranks, major partnership deals with BMW and Ford, and a new facility in Thornton.
Boulder researchers and inventors created a strong crop of 145 breakthrough technologies in 2022, with innovations in climate tech, biotechnology, quantum science, optics and aerospace, to name a few. Read more in Venture Partners at Boulder's 2022 Annual Report.
“We're looking for companies that have the most interesting, disruptive technology, that are managed and are founded by the strongest people ... [and] that are targeting products that really fit an unmet need in the market,” said Mark Lupa, co-founder and general partner of Buff Gold Ventures.
The intermountain west innovation ecosystem came together at the fifth annual Destination Startup® showcase on Feb. 15 and 16, hosted by Venture Partners at Boulder. In a highly competitive field, 21 university ventures from intermountain west research institutions were selected to present at the showcase.
Solid Power—a Boulder spinout company that specializes in solid-state, sulfide-based electrolyte technology—will develop a 3D-structured Li metal anode and novel sulfur composite cathode to enable high-energy and fast-charging EV battery cells. It hopes to scale so that energy-dense cell costs are reduced.
A Boulder startup that builds laser systems to monitor methane emissions, LongPath has received regulatory approval by the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—the first emissions-monitoring technology to be approved at both state and federal levels.
According to a new report from the Leeds School of Business, commercialization activities led by Venture Partners at Boulder had an economic impact of $8 billion nationally and $5.2 billion in the state of Colorado over the last five years—a four-fold increase in impact since 2019.