US-based venture firm M34 raises pool to seed 15 academic startups over the next three years.

Errol Arkilic (pictured), chief executive of venture capital firm M34, has raised a debut pool of capital to seed 15 academic and laboratory startups over the next three years.

He said its standard investments range from $50,000 to $250,000 and would be typically the first outside funds into a company.

By email he added that M34, which stands for Mach 34 the escape velocity from the Earth’s gravitational pull, was “developing an evidence-based approach to academic spin-outs that extends the scientific method to business model development. We believe this discipline has the potential to radically alter (in a positive way) the probability of success for tech commercialization.”  

Arkilic was a former founder of the US’s National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) programme that has helped government-backed research be commercialized, primarily through the creation of startups.

Founded in 2011, I-Corps feed the NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programmes.

There are three distinct components of I-Corps:

Teams, composed of the principal investigator(s), an entrepreneurial lead, and a mentor;

Nodes, which serve as hubs for education, infrastructure and research that engage academic scientists and engineers in innovation; and

Sites, which are academic institutions that catalyze the engagement of multiple, local teams in technology transition and strengthen local innovation.

Steve Blank, an academic and serial entrepreneur widely regarded as the founding father of the I-Corps programme after the NSF adopted his Lean Launchpad class as the US standard for commercializing basic and applied research, said: “Errol is living proof that government employees and their agencies can be innovative and creative. As the program manager of the Innovation Corps at the National Science Foundation he created a program that trains scientists and engineers to learn the basics of entrepreneurship and enable them to commercialize their technology. 

“He’s been a pleasure to work with. And so good that I’d even have him run a startup!”

 

Picture source: Errol Arkilic/LinkedIn