Young Ventures Adds Caltech to Its Scouting Network

Editor’s note: Camilla is a co-founder of Young Ventures and serves as its Caltech partner.

Young Ventures is a venture capital platform run by students at nine universities. It launched publicly on September 1 with Caltech as one of its partner schools. The others are Stanford, Harvard, NYU, Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, ETH Zurich and Bocconi. Davide Franchini founded the platform, and each campus has one student partner.

The idea is to find university spin-offs earlier than most investors do. Research-based startups often come to venture firms’ attention only after they incorporate, pitch or get press coverage. By then, valuations have often gone up. Young Ventures thinks its campus partners can spot these projects sooner because they work alongside the researchers building them. A student in a department may hear about a promising project months before it becomes a company. The platform also takes direct applications and referrals from the funds it works with.

According to Young Ventures, its team reviews more than 500 projects a year across the nine campuses. It invests about €100,000 per company on average, usually alongside one of the 25 established funds it co-invests with. About 60% of its capital goes to Europe, 35% to the United States and the rest to Asia. Its sectors include deep tech, biotechnology, environmental technology, advanced materials and digital technology.

At Caltech, the platform expects to hear from students and researchers at an early stage. That could be a SURF project that has grown beyond its original scope, a graduate student thinking about a spin-out or a postdoc interested in commercializing their work.

The platform’s first investment is Cortirio, which makes a wearable headset that images the brain using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, a portable alternative to fMRI. The device is meant to detect traumatic brain injury in under two minutes without a CT scanner or a hospital visit. Five more portfolio companies are listed on the Young Ventures website as upcoming.

Caltech undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs working on projects with commercial potential can contact the platform. It prefers to talk with founders before they incorporate, and having a company already is not required. More information is at youngventures.vc. The Caltech partner can be reached through Fleming House or at camilla@youngventures.vc.

Young Ventures logo. (Credit: Camilla Fezzi)