Two graduate students at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania launched a venture fund to invest in Penn startups and fulfill a need they see for capital within the Ivy League university's community.
Center City Ventures is the brainchild of Patricia Tang and Siddhartha Bose, two students set to complete their master's of business administration at the prestigious business school in 2026. The fund is raising money from class of 2026 Wharton students with a $3,000 investment minimum. It has a 10-year life cycle, so Tang and Bose will be involved with Center City Ventures for the next decade as it looks to invest in startups founded by current Penn students or recent graduates through a co-investment model.
They will look to invest $50,000 in pre-seed rounds of around $500,000 or more.
The goal is to help young startups in the Penn community get their first tranche of funding, and Tang and Bose hope it's a model that will be replicated by classes in years to come. Neither Tang, 26, nor Bose, 27, hail from the Philadelphia area, but they see the potential for the fund to strengthen Penn's startup ecosystem — and in turn Philadelphia's — by adding to what they see as a relative dearth of early stage funding opportunities for startups.
"Penn becomes folks' home and I think the ability to stay in Philadelphia is definitely a strong proposition for founders if we're able to build that ecosystem and allow founders to more easily get funding without having to move to Silicon Valley, as most do right now," Tang said. "I think that would be a really powerful add to the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Philly."
Tang knows the Silicon Valley startup scene well. The Northwestern University alum grew up three miles from Stanford's campus in the San Francisco Bay Area and describes herself as someone who has "always been immersed in the startup ecosystem," with both of her parents having experience working with startups. Tang worked with Silicon Valley venture firm Amino Capital, has a current role with the Bay Area's Virta Ventures and previously spent time Oakland-based startup success story ThredUp. The company went public in 2021.
Tang didn't have to look far for a model for Center City Ventures. Her and Bose are following the lead of university-related venture funds like 20|20 Fund at Stanford or Courtyard Ventures at the University of California, Berkeley. At those schools, they say there is a stronger connection between local venture capital firms and the campus startup ecosystem, in part thanks to the co-investment model of the student-run venture funds that provide funding in partnership with established venture firms.
Penn does have funding resources like Red + Blue Ventures, which is run by Penn alumni, and the Venture Lab's Innovation Fund led by current students. Tang and Bose, however, want to provide startups with larger checks and a network of outside venture firms.
"There is no sort of strong equivalent relationship between established VCs and startups at Wharton," Tang said." So as we were thinking about founding, that was our motivator to build kind of an incentive structure that allowed student startups to become more successful, to have the connections, have the resources to get funded at Wharton, and move to the next stage."
It's not just an opportunity for Penn startups, but for students as well to gain real-world experience with venture capital — and see a return on their investment. Center City Ventures is looking to attract investments from around 200 to 250 students of an MBA class size at Wharton that typically has between 800 and 900 students.
From those investors, Tang and Bose also want to build out a team of about 50 who will be more closely involved in Center City Ventures day-to-day operations. Additionally, they want to have an investment committee of about 10 people who will be tasked with filtering through potential deals and pitches from startups. That will be a group of students more experienced in the venture capital world and will be selected primarily by the fund's advisoes.
In addition to "bridging the gap" between Penn's founders and venture capital, Bose said they have a goal of providing access to a venture capital world that can be hard to break into. Bose, a native of Singapore and alum of UCLA, worked as a software developer for the Singapore Armed Forces before joining Chicago venture accelerator Evergreen Climate Innovations.
"For Patricia and I, working in VC is something that we see as inherently gate kept," Bose said. "It's something that is not accessible to the masses, and it's not a meritocracy by any means. Making it so that getting experience in the space was more accessible was something we were both very passionate about. We both acknowledged that someone had to take a chance on us for us to get to where we are today, and making that more available and democratized was something that we knew we wanted to make happen here at Wharton."
