The University of Southern California (USC) will be sharing some numbers about its startup funding activities at First Look L.A. tomorrow, an invitation-only event it’s organizing in partnership with UCLA and CalTech. These numbers are nothing to sneeze at: in less than two years, USC has managed to raise an impressive $115 million in funding for 15 startups.
For your background: the University of Southern California, to be more precise its Stevens Institute for Innovation, helps USC spin-offs manage intellectual property, regularly incubates and showcases new high-tech ventures and connects promising young teams to appropriate investors for follow-up financing and commercialization.
Los Angeles-based USC tells us 15 startups have raised a healthy $115 million in funding in total since the beginning of the 2008 calendar year, tapping ‘creative’ financing sources beyond venture capital such as private and overseas investors as well as government grants. Based on those funding numbers, USC asserts the spin-offs are averaging close to $7 million in funding each, not including those that haven’t yet secured a significant investment and also excluding funding numbers for startups that couldn’t be verified through multiple sources.
You can find some of the startups on the USC Stevens Institute website, but most familiar to you will be Box.net, Orgoo (now dead) and Flixya.com. Another promising one is BigStage, which lets you create photo-realistic 3D-animated avatars that can be used in virtual worlds, video games, etc. The startup was recently ranked 18th in Forbes Magazine’s list of America’s Most Promising Companies and has raised over $10 million in financing over two rounds.
Needless to say, I think it’s a great to see universities doing their part in furthering technological innovation and giving promising young companies a leg up, and I think it’s equally great to see them reach out and disclose numbers. Id be interested to seeing how they stack up to other education and research organization’s results.
HHmmmm – good !
Yes, thats something that shows their productivity & efforts for promoting new innovations & technologies to take a big shape from the roots.
Such actions are really awesome.
MIT released a study last year with a lot of good data related to this topic.
Here’s the full text (title of report – “Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT”)
http://www.kauf...full_report.pdf
Pretty sure USC stands for University of Southern California not South California. That’s kinda a big mistake, especially when you link right to the website.
Getting your money from USC is about the same as getting from the government (tax payer).
How do you figure? USC is a privately funded institution (to the tune of abouot $40K a year in tuition) and they’re not giving away any money. They are assisting in the incubation and VC process.
Just to make sure you have it all right –> it’s the University of SOUTHERN California, not “South” California.
thanks Greg, fixed
That’s awesome! Cornell has a great new startup incubator called eLab (http://www.elabstartup.com/) and I know lots of other schools are getting involved in the space as well.
Dana – I am interested in compiling a list of schools combining mentoring, incubation and fund raising. Can you tell me where I can get more information about this ?
Thanks,
Elliott Dahan
elliott(a)thegrowthgroup.com
This is great to hear! Kudos to Mark Stevens and his wife for making this possible! Mark is a partner at Sequoia and a USC alumni.
Z, Elisa and crew are doing some amazing work over at USC. You should also note their annual events that support innovation (including TEDx) and their constant contributions to socal tech and startups. Respect!
Fight On Trojans!
Thanks everyone for your support! I have to give the credit to our startups, for their resourcefulness in raising funding from creative sources during these tough times, and building innovative companies that can attract these investments in the first place. We can’t take credit — we can only encourage, coach, and connect. But the real heavy lifting in this economy is being done by the entrepreneurs themselves.
Since I joined USC a few years ago, I have been so impressed by the depth and breadth of the research, and the innovativeness of our faculty and students. It’s really exciting to see what’s on the horizon!
Krisztina “Z” Holly
Vice Provost for Innovation, USC
Executive Director, USC Stevens Institute for Innovation
@krisztinaholly
Wow good job guys. At least Biz school is good for soemthing