Cherry A. Murray,
Harvard: Experiment Fund - Early Stage Venture Fund Supports Student
Start-Ups
January 31, 2012
When
the “next big thing” is invented in a dorm room, ruminated over in a
late-night café, or discovered in a laboratory, it will now find more
support in—and its inventors will have better reasons to stay connected
to—the Cambridge area.
Designed specifically to support student start-ups and nurture novel
technologies and platforms created in Cambridge (or by innovators
educated here), the Experiment Fund will eventually include additional
strategic angel investors and advisers.
“We are very excited about The Experiment Fund; we believe it will
provide a much-needed set of people, skills, and financial resources to
spur the innovation and idea creation of our students,” says Cherry A.
Murray, Dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
(SEAS), who will formally launch the Fund on January 27, 2012.
Murray, who helped to realize the Fund, will designate SEAS faculty
members to advise student entrepreneurs about the Fund and other
available opportunities and resources, such as the new Harvard
Innovation Lab (i-Lab).
The
idea to provide an intensely local company-building resource to young
innovators originally grew out of close collaboration between venture
capitalist Patrick Chung, academic and entrepreneur David Edwards, and
scholar-turned-entrepreneur Hugo Van Vuuren.
“Cambridge has always seeded and cultivated brilliant minds and
entrepreneurs, and now they’ll have another reason to stay rooted in and
draw strength from these fertile soils,” says Chung, who is co-head of
NEA's consumer and seed-stage investing practices.
Chung received his A.B. degree in environmental science from Harvard
College and a joint J.D.-M.B.A. degree from Harvard Law School and
Harvard Business School.
“Students will have an obvious place to go once they breach the boundary
of the classroom,”adds Edwards, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice
of Biomedical Engineering at SEAS and founder of Le Laboratoire in
Paris.
“We are very excited to work with everyone on campus to infuse the Fund
with our global platform and entrepreneur-first tradition,” says Harry
Weller, General Partner at NEA and graduate of Harvard Business School.
Van Vuuren, a 2007 graduate of
Harvard College, student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and
Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, adds,
“The Fund is looking for smart and resourceful people, zealous full-time
teams, and experiments in need of seed funding and hands-on help to get
off the ground.”
Designed to attract engineers, entrepreneurs, and designers and to
empower them to test and build bold ideas, the Experiment Fund will
explore three core areas: Information, Healthcare, and Energy
Technologies.
Chung, who serves as an Expert-in-Residence at SEAS, expects the Fund to
support several promising companies in the coming two years. Each new
venture will receive up to $250,000 over that same period.
While the Fund expects to cultivate student innovation initially at
Harvard, it will function completely independently of the University and
will invest broadly on the East Coast.
The Experiment Fund’s formal launch event, featuring Harvard University
leaders, prominent alumni, and student innovators, will take place on
January 27 at 3 p.m. on the Harvard campus.
When
the “next big thing” is invented in a dorm room, ruminated over in a
late-night café, or discovered in a laboratory, it will now find more
support in—and its inventors will have better reasons to stay connected
to—the Cambridge area.