The first University of California, Berkeley AccelerateHer @ Berkeley (AxH) is a wrap! The program consisted of two Startup Weekends last Fall for 20 teams with at least one team member identifying as Female. Three teams (Revision, Bubble & Goodi, pictured) were selected for a semester long program of mentoring. On Saturday, Read more
April NSF I-Corps wrapped this week with stellar teams from UC Berkeley, Stanford, Stanford GSB, Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley Labs. Appropriately for the week of Earth Day, multiple teams focused on sustainability and environmental impact mitigation solutions. Mars Materials (pictured) conducted customer discovery for their solution converting methane into high value Read more
One more example of the Bay Area STEM community joining forces to fight the pandemic. Great to see top teams for both Diagnostics & Ventilators helmed by #FemaleFounders who are *both* NSF I-Corps National alums! Tara DeBoer, founder of BioAmp Diagnostics (UC Berkeley) & Winnie Liang, co-founder of Neptune Fluid Flow Read more
Industry Mentors (IM) are the backbone of the National I-Corps program. They volunteer their time as an extension of the teaching team, going through kickoff/closing and weekly online sessions. Their guidance and support is invaluable in getting teams over the finish line with insights derived from 100+ interviews. Cathy Farmer Read more
Although our first session was in-person, we had to quickly pivot to Zoom for classes 2 and 3. Dentia (the team pictured) includes a dentist & post doc working on a filling that prevents future cavities while saving patients time, $$ and anxiety. What can you learn from 15 customer Read more
This #FemaleFounderFriday we celebrate recent Berkeley Haas MBA/MPH grad Amy Fan, co-founder of Twentyeight Health. Now located in Brooklyn, Amy et al. wrapped pre-seed fundraising last Fall and is starting StartX now. They’re growing like gangbusters and helping women across the country get their birth control in three easy steps. Amy Read more
“We were trying to do too many things, for too many people.” “NSF I-Corps taught us to look through the lens of real people to see what they actually care about–we now know how to quantify that.” Startup teams from UC Berkeley, Haas EMBA & EWMBA, UCSF, University of Alaska Read more
UC LAUNCH ’18 standout & National NSF I-Corps team Cruz Foam announced their seed round, as well as a $225k Phase I SBIR grant. Hailing from UCSC, the team creates a biofoam from shrimp shell waste. The original idea was to replace the material inside surf boards, but through our Read more
January wrapped with 10 teams from across UC Berkeley and UCSF, all completing at least 15 customer discovery interviews. UCSF Startup Marketplace team, WYZ is a group of MBA-MPH students working with a UCSF researcher on a digital tool for teens with HIV. WYZ (pictured here with their ecosystem diagram), completed Read more
In the Fall of 2018, electric scooters faced a scale-limiting problem–charging. Three first year Berkeley Haas MBA students took their idea through our one week NSF I-Corps course. Instead of receiving an easy “thumbs up”, they were shocked and discouraged by what they heard from customers. They applied the lessons Read more