Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is taking big steps to inspire more entrepreneurship from the university – a plan that includes a $10 million investment fund and new incubators.
The new RPI Ventures includes the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship — the university's entrepreneurship program that's been undergoing changes — as well as a multimillion-dollar early-stage startup fund and a brain trust.
Joshua D. Espinosa joined the university about three months ago as the assistant vice president of RPI Ventures. Espinosa said the creation of this office comes from a renewed push from the university to prioritize entrepreneurship.
"RPI is a really dominant institution in this area when it comes to things like hard technology innovation, and so from my perspective coming in, I saw the opportunity to really, frankly, capture a lot of low-hanging fruit and just make it much more frictionless to start a company, both on the students and faculty side," he said.
The 'catalyst' fund for early-stage startups
Espinosa said the university is imminently preparing to raise a $10 million fund for early-stage startups, money that is hard to come by for companies in the Capital Region.
"There's a huge gap in funding. Of course, you get research funds, oftentimes from the government and elsewhere, to do the very early-stage research ... but you're still so far away from being ready for any kind of angel capital, venture capital," he said. "That fund would basically support mostly these pre-venture phase entrepreneurs — help them, again, determine how viable their ideas are as early as possible."
Though it's unclear how long the raise will take, Espinosa said the university has identified eager alumni who would be willing to support the fund.
New RPI incubator(s)
RPI Ventures is planning to re-launch an on-campus startup incubator. It's one of the highest priorities right now, Espinosa said.
Future plans also include an off-campus incubator as RPI looks to strengthen its relationship with the city of Troy, especially as the region moves forward with innovation in areas like semiconductors.
"We want to be more involved with the community, because we think that that only benefits RPI — more innovators in the area, more venture capital in the area, a landing spot for talented graduates of RPI. We would love to keep them close to home and get the flywheel going to the extent that we can," he said. "A lot of positive things are happening at the same time ... we need to capitalize on that."
The 'brain trust' for startups
RPI Ventures will also create a group of venture advisers/coaches, industry experts, and lead venture capital law firms/accounting firms for students and faculty to access.
The goal is to create a resource for founders in a variety of industries that will help guide them through the process of starting a company. To form the group, the university will tap alumni.
"It's hard enough to start a company and figure it all out on your own. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel," Espinosa said. "Our thought is we have one of the largest alumni networks of successful tech oriented entrepreneurs or industry experts."
The new tech transfer process
One of the challenges in spinning out businesses from a university is licensing technology. RPI is changing rules to make that easier and less expensive for early-stage startups.
Espinosa said that, usually, licensing technology from a university comes with very steep fees, which is a challenge for pre-revenue companies. RPI is looking to make getting that process off the ground easier for university startups.
"We want to allow them to have room to grow and have room for really better technology before we start demanding that they repay us for all of our investment in technology. One important change is rather than getting immediately into this long, protracted, very expensive negotiation for a complicated license, what we're doing is we've defaulted to optioning out that technology in a very, very, very affordable, off-the-shelf express way," he said.
