The CITRIS Foundry and Hub Ventures recently announced an innovative collaboration to accelerate startups using information technology to address our most pressing social, environmental, and health care problems.
The collaboration will include recruitment and selection of participants for CITRIS Foundry, as well as the shaping of its curriculum. Hub Ventures will lead workshops for entrepreneurs in the areas of lean startup methodology, business model development, and growth strategies. Hub Ventures will also provide automatic “finalist” status to Foundry participants, giving them preferred consideration for acceptance into Hub Ventures.
CITRIS Foundry focuses on helping entrepreneurs develop their innovations to be ready for market while Hub Ventures excels at bringing innovation to market once ready. “CITRIS Foundry is an ideal partner for Hub Ventures,” said Rick Moss, Founding Director of Hub Ventures. “Aside from the fact that we have a mutual interest in building a better world through entrepreneurship and innovation, a number of our best startups have come from the UC community, including MobileWorks, NextDrop and Acopio. Formalizing our relationship with CITRIS Foundry is a logical extension of a connection we’ve been nurturing since our beginning.”
“The fact that CITRIS Foundry participants have access to the world-class CITRIS Invention Lab for rapid prototyping and product development is a big advantage,” said Paul Wright, Director of CITRIS. “We like that Hub Ventures shares our deep commitment to leveraging innovation to address some of the world’s most pressing problems.”
CITRIS Foundry is accepting applications now from four UC campuses including Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz, and Merced, for its inaugural cohort to begin in January 2013. Hub Ventures is accepting applications now for its Spring 2013 cohort.
About Hub Ventures
Hub Ventures is a startup accelerator for entrepreneurs building a better world. The program operates 12-week cohort cycles during which startups receive seed funding and engage in mentorship, peer collaboration, workshops and speaker events relevant to impact-oriented startups, and investor connections. Hub Ventures is based at the Hub Bay Area, a purpose-driven collaborative workspace with over 1,000 members in San Francisco and Berkeley and connected to 30 other locations through the global Hub network. Hub Ventures is a member of the Global Accelerator Network, an alliance championed by TechStars. For more information, please visit www.hub-ventures.com.
About CITRIS Foundry
CITRIS Foundry provides access to design, manufacturing, and business development tools, along with a community of entrepreneurs and experts, to support UC faculty, students, and alumni to develop new businesses. CITRIS was created to “shorten the pipeline” between world-class laboratory research and the creation of start-ups, larger companies, and whole industries. CITRIS facilitates partnerships and collaborations among more than 300 faculty members and thousands of students from numerous departments at four University of California campuses (Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and Santa Cruz) with industrial researchers from over 60 corporations. Together, the groups are thinking about information technology in ways it’s never been thought of before.