The recently launched Case Western Reserve University Alumni Venture Fund already has made a handful of small investments in startups associated with the Cleveland university.
Leveraging an initial $1.1 million — much of which came from the Veale Foundation in Pepper Pike, Ohio — the alumni venture fund is focused on supporting companies started or run by Case Western Reserve University's (CWRU) alumni, students and faculty, said Michael Goldberg, executive director of the university's Veale Institute for Entrepreneurship, in an interview.
The fund's primary goal is teaching students how to do venture capital investing, said Goldberg, a venture capitalist who also is an associate professor of design and innovation at the university's Weatherhead School of Management. But the fund also is "a really good way to engage with our alums and try to be helpful" to the startup community in Cleveland and other cities, Goldberg said.
In addition to investing in alumni-related companies, the fund also raises investments from alumni with a goal to reach a fund of between $2 million and $5 million, he said.
CWRU students run the fund with oversight from managers such as Goldberg and Tim Milanich, chief investment officer for the university. Advisors who include Prince Ghosh, co-founder and CEO of Factored Quality, and Sue Tyler, a venture partner at Caduceus Capital Partners, also help guide the students, according to a fund brochure.
"We're trying to pick companies that we think can drive strong financial returns," said Goldberg, who sees the fund as evergreen — it is designed to reinvest its returns in future companies to "support the work we're doing around our entrepreneurship on campus."
The fund has invested in a handful of companies alongside larger venture investors:
- Deciduous Therapeutics — the San Francisco, California-based developer of a novel class of immunity-related therapies was founded by Robin Mansukhani, who graduated from CWRU in 2005 with a bachelor's degree in biochemistry.
- Extendify — the Chagrin Falls, Ohio-based company that developed a plug-in to make it easier for small and medium businesses to build digital experiences using WordPress was co-founded by Artur Grabowski, who graduated from Case Western Reserve in 2007 with a bachelor's in finance.
- Picture Health — the Cleveland-based startup that provides oncologists with artificial intelligence-powered diagnostics tools was co-founded by Anant Madabhushi, a longtime biomedical engineering professor and entrepreneur at the university's Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics.
- Lime Therapeutics — the New York City-based biotech spinout from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center that is developing cancer therapies was founded by Shardule Shah, a 2007 CWRU graduate with a bachelor's in biochemistry.
