UC Berkeley has received a $15 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) that will fund a new ‘Innovation Hub’ and help bridge the gap between academia and entrepreneurship.
Under the grant, Berkeley will lead a new NSF Northwest Region Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Hub with UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC San Francisco, UC Santa Cruz, Oregon State University, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the University of Washington. The five-year grant will be used toward regional training, hiring new instructors, expanding programs, and building outreach.
“We’re excited to apply Berkeley’s expertise in basic research and entrepreneurship to push innovation forward all along the West Coast,” said Chancellor Rich Lyons, who served as principal investigator on the project in his role as former dean of Berkeley Haas.
Since 2011, nearly 8,000 people have received training on commercializing their research through the NSF’s I-Corps, and almost half of participating teams have launched startups, among them many from Berkeley and Haas.
Rhonda Shrader, executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program (BHEP), will serve as director of the NSF I-Corps Northwest Hub. Shrader helped grow Bay Area I-Corps after it was established in 2013 with Lyons and S. Shankar Sastry, Berkeley’s former dean of engineering.
“We’ve been delivering results for a very long time for Berkeley and Haas companies through I-Corps,” Shrader said. “The methodology we use works so well because we are applying the scientific method to business. This common language bridges the gap between business and STEM students and allows them to move more quickly than traditional advising or mentorship methods.”
There are two I-Corps programs: a seven-week national program open to teams that have developed intellectual property for the university or a national lab, and a one-week virtual boot camp. UC Berkeley, overall, is the world’s top producer of venture-capital-funded startups founded by undergraduate alumni, according to the 2024 PitchBook university rankings (and No. 4 for U.S. MBA programs, according to the P&Q Top 100 MBA startup list).
Success stories
Berkeley has built many I-Corp success stories, including early-warning earthquake app MyShake, founded by Berkeley Seismology Lab director Richard Allen and Qingkai Kong, PhD 18 (seismology and machine learning). I-Corps has also served as the launch point for scores of successful Haas startups whose founders connected with their team members through I-Corps programs.
I-Corp teams are often MBAs, faculty, postdocs, PhD students, or engineering graduate students, who have gone on to win coveted grants from federal agencies such as NSF, NIH, NASA, and more. I-Corps Hubs across the country work collaboratively, training researchers from 128 colleges and universities to brings ideas to market.
MBA students who completed I-Corps programs while at Haas include:
- Lida Kourita, EMBA 16, chief business officer at neuroFit, which uses eye movement to scan, predict, and enhance brain health. neuroFit, spun out of the NASA Ames Research Center in 2016, received an I-Corps grant, funding “that was invaluable to neuroFit as we sought to understand and validate our value proposition,” Kourita said.
- Amy Fan, MBA/MPH 19, co-founder of women’s healthcare access and equity provider Twentyeight Health. Last year, Twentyeight Health announced $8.3M in preseries A funding.
- Hiroki Koga, MBA 17, who founded vertical farming startup Oishii, which is moving into the sake market after raising a $134 million Series B funding round led by Japanese telecom giant NTT in March.
- Hannah Weber, MBA/MPH 23, co-founder of HOPO Therapeutics, which recently landed a contract of up to $226 million from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to advance development of a heavy metal poisoning related drug.
- Tushar Misra, MBA 20, who co-founded startup Grido at Haas and pivoted after graduation to co-found transportation startup AtoB. The company, focused on improving trucking industry payment systems, has raised $230 million and ranked No. 7 on the Poets & Quants 2024 list of 100 highest-funded MBAs.
I-Corps has also trained Berkeley and Haas alumni teams through a free virtual program that runs three evenings a month. “Not every winning idea happens as a student, so the program has served as a valuable resource for alums and other community teams to learn entrepreneurship basics, partner with current students, and test the market desirability of their ideas,” Shrader said.