Stanford’s StartX Gets $800,000 to fuel student innovation
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation today announced an $800,000 grant to StartX, which runs a startup accelerator for university students, to support expansion and national scaling of the program.
StartX, formerly SSE Labs, was initially launched in 2010 by Stanford students to accelerate the development of the best Stanford student entrepreneurs through experiential education. Kauffman’s grant will help StartX scale its current services and build a model for replication.
“StartX has taken important initial steps to develop an experiential education-based program for founders at the university level,” said Wendy Torrance, Kauffman director of entrepreneurship who leads the Foundation’s curriculum development. “Our grant will help StartX further develop its curriculum and program and identify a model for replication, while bolstering its capacity to gather and analyze data on its work and crucial outcomes.”
StartX, a non-profit organization affiliated with Stanford University that takes no equity from its portfolio companies, has received applications from more than 6 percent of the Stanford student population each year. To date, StartX has supported more than 240 founders and 90 companies in several markets, including clean tech, biotechnology, enterprise, consumer internet/mobile, hardware, healthcare technology and social enterprise. In total, StartX companies have raised more than $70 million in funding.
Although StartX’s primary focus is founder education, 85 percent of StartX companies attract institutional and/or angel funding within three months of joining the program. StartX entrepreneurs go through an intensive, hands-on learning program that combines product, leadership and corporate development at an accelerated pace. More than 300 mentors and advisors work with the founders throughout the year. Beyond this mentor group, the accelerator also provides access to its extensive faculty, alumni and expert network based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founders in the program receive resource support including stipends, office space, legal support, accounting, banking and web services.
StartX staff, comprised of Stanford students and recent grads, has tripled in the past year to a team of 20. Since 2009, staff members have been writing the StartX Manual, A Guide to StartX Operations. The manual will be instrumental in scaling the accelerator’s progress and knowledge transfer.
StartX, which operates year-round, supported more than 25 companies this summer, marking its largest session ever. This cohort included the inaugural class for StartX Med, a division of the accelerator dedicated to developing medical and biotechnology entrepreneurs. StartX also piloted its Visiting Founders program, which is a program designed to bring in teams from around the country to participate in StartX’s accelerator program, with plans to expand.
“We’re building a scalable, education-focused organization to serve as a trusted resource for the world’s best entrepreneurs,” said Cameron Teitelman, founder and senior managing director of StartX. “The Kauffman Foundation’s support will help us take a big step toward our goal of building a truly disruptive platform for entrepreneurial education.”
