The Louisville startup ecosystem will be receiving a boost with the announcement of a new partnership between the University of Louisville, High Alpha Innovation and Craftsman Capital to form a new studio space in town by the name of Cardinal Direction.
The studio will initially be housed inside the UofL's Research and Innovation offices — specifically the Ignite Innovation Building, located at 252 E. Market St.
High Alpha Innovation CEO Elliott Parker told me on Thursday that the studio would initially help cultivate four to five ideas that would eventually be fleshed out into actual companies. The studio's first cohort will be selected the spring of 2023.
These companies would receive strategic support and have access to investment capital if in the appropriate early-stage designation — built either using technologies backed through research at the university or by leveraging university expertise. The investment capital will be made possible through a partnership by High Alpha Innovation and Craftsman Capital.
Parker — who was at UofL on Thursday to talk about his company and the partnership at the Louisville Entrepreneurial Summit — said that the studio arrangement should be able to address the gap that often exists between forming an idea and having a commercially viable product.
"What the studio does is it closes that gap,” Parker said. “It takes these raw ideas and turns them into viable companies that venture investors can actually deploy capital into."
This past year, other universities have announced similar venture studio partnerships with High Alpha Innovation, including the University of Notre Dame (announced Thursday) and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Programs have been established at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Purdue University, where the studio there announced the launch of its first startup in October. Since 2020, High Alpha Innovation has launched 13 startups though a combination of corporate and university partnerships, with those companies raising a collective $15 million in investment capital.
High Alpha Innovation will manage the program, in collaboration with the UofL's Office of Research and Innovation’s new ventures team, which will be lead by Will Metcalf, the assistant vice president for Research and Innovation.
“UofL is a true research engine, discovering and developing the technologies and ideas that start new businesses and shape the economy of our city, region and country,” Kevin Gardner, executive vice president for research and innovation at UofL said in a release. “We are excited to work with High Alpha Innovation and leverage their expertise to launch this first-of-its-kind venture studio in Kentucky and help local startups grow.”
To date, High Alpha Innovation — based out of Indianapolis as a byproduct of the $2.5 billion merger in 2013 between Salesforce and Exact Target — has launched 45 companies that employ 600 people, since launching its studio eight years ago. Currently, the studio has approximately 100 people working in Indianapolis, making it one of the largest of its kind in the world, Parker told the crowd at the summit. High Alpha Innovation specializes in working with startups in the B2B SaaS space.
When he was ending his speech at the summit, Parker alluded to additional information to be shared later down the road.
“A venture studio can be a tremendous force for good and helping accelerate that flywheel in a region to enable more entrepreneurs and to help more entrepreneurs be successful… Getting the flywheel going in a region can have dramatic impacts for a long, long time,” he said.
“We love the Louisville region and the foundation of entrepreneurial success here both old and new… We are working really, really hard right now with partners here in Louisville to build a better studio in this town. I hope we'll have some big announcements on that very soon.”
