Description
Founded in 2010, the NYU Innovation Venture Fund provides seed capital to scale startups based on technologies, innovations, and intellectual property developed by NYU students, faculty, and researchers. Together with co-investor angels and venture capital firms, the Fund supplies not only capital but also connections to the entrepreneurial and venture communities and hands-on management and marketing coaching to help transform NYU-originated ideas and inventions into successful startups. The Fund makes approximately three to four investments per year and recycles returns from successful portfolio company sales back into the University to finance future ventures. It targets early-stage businesses that have reached proof of concept or prototype stage, have clear differentiation and validated customers, and are capable of generating venture-scale returns. Its portfolio includes NYU-affiliated startups such as Vengo, BioDigital, Opentrons, Clarifai, Wrapbook, Rilla, and Steg AI, spanning sectors like hardware, healthcare, enterprise software, and fintech.