Team: Network Partners

M13
Our integrated approach means you never start from zero. Instead, you’ll tap into the full power of M13’s unfair advantages—the institutional knowledge and networks that set you up for better day-to-day decision making and drive step-change growth. So while other founders may be learning the ropes or dealing with limited resources, you’re already pulling ahead.
m13.co

Vinetta Project
Female ambition will fuel the next billion dollar business and our initiative is more practical than it is philanthropic. We are creating the largest deal flow pipeline of Seed – Series A companies globally. We are sourcing and supporting founders based on stage, sector and geography. And we are setting our founders up with resources and connections at key inflection points in their business. Vinetta is here to level the playing field through access to Capital.
vinettaproject.com

Innovia
Over the last 30 years Innovia has become a multiple-award winning, Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Business Central consulting firm known for delivering innovative technology systems while providing exceptional client-focused service. By adopting a collaborative, pragmatic approach focused on getting the job done, Innovia has received five Microsoft Dynamics Customer Excellence Awards and membership into Microsoft Dynamics President’s Club. These honors rank Innovia in the top echelon of Microsoft’s global network of value-added reselling NAV partners. Innovia knows NAV/ BC so you don’t have to.
innovia.com

Radicle
Radicle is a botanical term for the embryonic root and ultimately serving as the foundation and nerve center for the plant structure. We work on each relationship on trust and strive to ensure that everything we do makes our client’s foundation stronger and contributes to the nerve center of the client’s business.
radicle.vc

EY
We use the EY “7 Drivers of Growth” to help leaders of aspiring companies think differently about the enablers of growth. Looking at these drivers can help business leaders assess where they are today and plan the right path forward to accelerate growth.
- People
- Technology
- Operations
- Customer
- Finance
- Transactions
- Risk
ey.com

PreScouter
Over the past nine years, PreScouter has established a global network of aspiring and accomplished scientists, engineers, economists, analysts, and developers who share a common ambition: to apply their academic knowledge and problem-solving skills to challenges faced in industry. As the company has grown—having delivered over 4,000 projects to more than 500 clients—this global network has also grown to include over 2,500 SMEs and Advanced Degree Researchers from five continents, representing the top research universities in the world.
prescouter.com

Oakland Innovation
We help inspire and accelerate innovation for business and R&D leaders in the consumer, health, medical and industrial sectors. From new investment opportunities to deep technical challenges, we deliver incisive, impartial advice that creates real value for your business. Our highly collaborative approach combines scientific expertise with deep market knowledge and a network of the best minds in industry and beyond. It’s a powerful mix that helps you cut through complexity to uncover new opportunities.
oaklandinnovation.com

Pitchbook
Founder John Gabbert was pursuing an idea his former employer nixed—a database that covered private equity. In 2009, we launched PitchBook Desktop. With each new dataset and feature, we‘ve expanded and improved. Now, PitchBook tracks every aspect of the public and private equity markets, including venture capital, private equity and M&A. Our focus has always been—and will always be—our clients. What data matters most to them? What would make their jobs easier? How can we help them make informed decisions? Now part of Morningstar, we continue to give our clients the data and tools they need to be successful.
pitchbook.com

Resolute Innovation
Our mission is to help innovators quickly and efficiently find their next breakthrough. ResoluteAI makes your search experience easy, dynamic and empowering, through a user-friendly interface and developer-friendly APIs. Using state-of-the-art machine and deep learning algorithms, we enable the instant development of an all-inclusive search and analytics platform with turnkey data products and search engine solutions including data visualization, AI-automated classification, semantic search functionality and much more.
resolute.ai

CB Insights
CB Insights’ machine intelligence platform, intelligence analysts, and global network of executives and startups empower people to articulate compelling answers to difficult questions—about growth, about the competition, and about technology. We aggregate and analyze massive amounts of data and use machine learning, algorithms and data visualization to help corporations replace the three Gs (Google searches, gut instinct and guys with MBAs) so they can answer massive strategic questions using probability not punditry. With backing from the National Science Foundation and venture capital investors, we mine terabytes of data and knowledge contained in patents, venture capital financings, M&A transactions, market sizings, startup and investor websites, news sentiment, social media chatter, and more. Our software algorithmically analyzes this data to help our clients see where the world is going tomorrow, today.
cbinsights.com

Future Shape
We put our money where our mouth is: we invest, so that we can be your mentors. We want to be involved early, so that we can get it right from the start. We’ve seen what works and can help you replicate success. Just as much as we’ve lived the pitfalls and can help you avoid mistakes. We’ll help you identify the inflection points. We’ll help you prioritize what you need at each stage of the journey. And we’ll get you the answers at the right time, saving you months and expensive mis-steps.
futureshapellc.com

Cintrifuse
We leverage our venture fund to access cutting-edge technologies, generate strong financial returns, and create investment pools for entrepreneurs. We help the largest corporations in our region discover the innovations—and innovators—that they need to grow and lead their industries. And we work with entrepreneurs to start up new businesses. Then, we connect them with global. industry-leading customers right here in our own backyard. The great news is that this model is working—and expanding. We have more than $90 million in venture capital invested and at work. We have more than 600 startups in our pipeline—more than half of which are already attracting seed and later-stage investments. We have dozens of major companies working with us to accelerate innovation. And we’re building a reputation that has corporate leaders, startup founders, and venture capitalists talking about Greater Cincinnati as the place to invest, grow and live.
cintrifuse.com

H Venture Partners
We are consumer specialists. We have a history of investing early in consumer brands—and leadership of brands over $1 Billion in Global Sales. Collectively, we’ve worked on over one hundred consumer brands representing every major consumer category. We offer access at a $50,000 minimum investment. We believe that quality venture capital options for individual investors have been limited until now, with high investment minimums at big firms. 85% of consumer purchasing is done by women. 90% of venture investors are men. Morgan Stanley calls this the Trillion Dollar Blindspot. We believe this gives us an advantage.
h.ventures

University of California
Guided by Berkeley Haas faculty member and former entrepreneur and venture capitalist Jerry Engel, the Venture Capital Executive Program gives participants unprecedented access to learn from the inside out. Over five days, you will get a comprehensive overview of the venture capital investing cycle and attend panel discussions from over 20+ top Venture Capital investors from the world’s premier innovative cluster: Silicon Valley.
universityofcalifornia.edu

Northwestern University
There are three main components to the mission of the Heizer Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital:
- Research – It is the role of the center to fund academic research on the PE/VC industry. Research is the foundation of today’s top business schools. By funding basic research by Kellogg faculty, we are able to build a foundation of understanding into how the industry functions and the role the PE/VC industry plays in our economy. Knowledge creation is the first mission of the center.
- Education – Our second mission is knowledge dissemination. The Heizer Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital is the home to Kellogg’s educational efforts in private equity and venture capital. This starts with an understanding of the basic disciplines. As a school well known for strength across departments, this is the foundation upon which our students build. The Finance Department and the Heizer Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital offers a set of advanced courses in private equity and venture capital. They include traditional classroom based courses as well as experiential courses where students apply their knowledge and learn new skills inside PE or VC firms.
- Alumni Outreach – The third mission of the Heizer Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital is to reach out to our alumni, inform them of current projects, and incorporate them into the processes of creating and disseminating knowledge. Many industries depend upon relationships; this is especially true in the PE/VC industry. The Center aspires to strengthen the Kellogg PE/VC alumni network. Strong support from our alumni is what makes Kellogg and the Heizer Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital possible.
northwestern.edu

Stanford University
The Venture Capital Initiative brings together faculty, staff, students, and practitioners to advance and promote research and teaching on innovation and venture capital. Our goal is to advance understanding of venture capital and innovation ecosystem through conducting research, collecting high quality data, and developing teaching methodology. We aim to bring together leading academics and practitioners to help solve the problems that are highly relevant to entrepreneurs, financiers, policymakers, and researchers worldwide.
stanford.edu

Imperial College
The Imperial Venture Mentoring Service (IVMS), launched in September 2017, is Imperial’s flagship mentoring programme to support our innovators and entrepreneurs. IVMS is an advisory service for any student or staff member showing a clear entrepreneurial intent and wishing to realise their entrepreneurial idea via the development of a startup company. IVMS uses team-based mentoring where two to three mentors work with a startup for an open-ended period. Team mentoring offers a unique opportunity to advise the leader of a venture and to selectively lend the mentor’s wealth of contacts and experience to the venture.
imperial.ac.uk

Plug and Play
Our programs are industry themed to ensure that our startups and corporate partners make the most meaningful connections for their business. We empower specific business units by pin-pointing their business challenges and matching them to the startups with the right solutions. We invest in over 250 startups a year and have connections to 300 of the world’s best VCs. If you’re looking to raise a round, we have the perfect ecosystem for you to do it.
plugandplaytechcenter.com

Aging 2.0
Founded in 2012 by Stephen Johnston and Katy Fike, Aging2.0 strives to accelerate innovation to address the biggest challenges and opportunities in aging. Aging2.0’s international, interdisciplinary and intergenerational community has grown to 40k+ innovators across 20+ countries. Our volunteer-run chapter network, which spans 80+ cities, has hosted more than 550 events around the world. Aging2.0 is run by a “small-but-mighty” team out of San Francisco, California and Chapter Ambassadors in more than 80 cities around the globe.
aging2.com

SOSV
SOSV is a global venture capital firm providing multi-stage investment to develop and scale our founders’ big ideas for positive change. We invest in 150 companies every year through our world class vertical accelerator programs. Our intensive 3-6 month programs provide startups with seed capital, a specialized global staff of engineers, designers, and scientists to accelerate product development, mentors with deep market and technical expertise, and an unparalleled infrastructure of fully outfitted laboratory and maker spaces.
sosv.com

AARP Innovation Labs
The Hatchery, an AARP innovation lab, is an innovation accelerator that works with start-ups and investors to discover big ideas and bring them to scale to change how people live as they age. AARP is committed to supporting the Washington, D.C. region’s thriving entrepreneurial community, driving economic development and creating bold services, products and solutions for people 50-plus. It’s all about delivering on AARP’s purpose to empower people to choose how they live as they age.
aarp.org

Techstars
Grow Your Network: From a large pool of mentors, find your top 3-5 mentors who will be committed to helping you with product development, market fit, and who will also provide valuable introductions to help grow your company—fast.
Gain Traction: Go deeper with your lead mentors, work with your Managing Director, gain traction and hit your milestones—whether that’s a prototype, building out the next phase of your product, finding your first customer or hitting $50M in revenue.
Accelerate Your Business: Determine your fundraising strategy and prepare to meet with investors. Learn how to communicate your vision and prep
techstars.com

Idea Farm Ventures
With a focus on consumer lifestyle businesses, Idea Farm Ventures straddles and melds the lines between entrepreneurship and early stage investing. At times, we are entrepreneurs and at others we are investors—most of the time, we are both. Ideas are the crux of what we do. We conceive them, seed them, nurture them and eventually set them free. And with very few exceptions, we do all of this in-house. We call ourselves a consumer lifestyle incubation fund. We don’t think about our sector focus in the traditional sense of the term. We want our ideas to touch, change and shape your day-to-day life and so boxing our ventures into neat little industry groups is a tad bit difficult. Our focus is your lifestyle or what we call the consumer lifestyle space.
ideafarmventures.com

Prehype
We focus on building products and companies through collaboration with corporations and venture capitalists. The firm allows large companies to benefit from the energy and creativity of entrepreneurship without losing the organizational domain expertise and control. The firm provides angel investments and access to a network of talent including entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, and developers.
prehype.com

H Human Ventures
Founded in 2015, the “startup studio” has become an established model for building, funding and launching high-growth, innovative companies. Human Ventures started to help builders build. We decided that more than just capital was needed in the beginning stages of creating valuable businesses. The most influential factor of success or failure for a startup in the early days is directly related to the interconnected network around them. In other words, it’s all about the people. We collaborate with experienced founders in a dynamic environment to concept-test, validate, and build-out their next company. We then activate our deep network of other founders, advisors, investors, and talent to continue to support the founders throughout the life of the business.
humanventures.co

Archimides
Acceleration describes a process very similar to Incubation but with a key difference. An existing team has brought their idea/prototype/team to Archimedes and wishes to engage us in helping bring their vision to fruition. This may involve engineering advice, product advice, business advice or partnership and financing advice, or all four. Incubation always has played a big role in determining the direction of a product. Incubation is really the same as early stage experimentation. It is where we play with concepts, ideas, features and products before subjecting them to any real market pressures.
archimedes.studio

Springboard Enterprises
Springboard’s mission is to accelerate the growth of entrepreneurial companies led by women through access to essential resources and a global community of experts. It is the leading network of influencers, investors and innovators dedicated to building high-growth companies led by women who are transforming industries in technology and life science. The measure of our success is in the results. Since 2000, over 750 Springboard portfolio companies seeking investment of financial and human capital for product development and expansion have raised $9.5 Billion, created tens of thousands of new jobs and generated billions in annual revenues. With 190 exits to strategic acquirers and 19 IPOs, Springboard entrepreneurs are transforming industries.
sb.co

Newcastle University
Newcastle University is a red brick university and member of the Russell Group, an association of prestigious research-intensive UK universities. The university has one of the largest EU research portfolios in the UK. Teaching and research are delivered in 24 academic schools and 40 research institutes and research centres, spread across three Faculties: the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; the Faculty of Medical Sciences; and the Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering. The university offers around 175 full-time undergraduate degree programmes in a wide range of subject areas spanning arts, sciences, engineering and medicine, together with approximately 340 postgraduate taught and research programmes across a range of disciplines.
ncl.ac.uk

Cambridge Innovation Center
At CIC, we believe in the entrepreneur. We recognize that invention propels innovation, density spurs collaboration, and a shared purpose drives a thriving community. As we race forward into an age of exponential growth and transformation, CIC provides a home from which to work, allowing innovators to easily access resources and create substantive, positive global impact.
CIC works with powerful, local partners to develop the critical networks that entrepreneurs need to grow effectively. For almost two decades, we have focused on strengthening vibrant communities, building collaborative work environments, and creating impactful programming to attract and support the very best entrepreneurs and their teams.
cic.com

MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Institute is a land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant university, with an urban campus that extends more than a mile along the Charles River. The Institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Bates Center, and the Haystack Observatory, as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad and Whitehead Institutes. Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, MIT adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength, making it one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world.
mit.edu

UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley is one of the 14 founding members of the Association of American Universities and had $789 million in R&D expenditures in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2015. Today, Berkeley maintains close relationships with three United States Department of Energy National Laboratories—Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory—and is home to many institutes, including the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Space Sciences Laboratory. Through its partner institution University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Berkeley also offers a joint medical program at the UCSF Medical Center.
berkeley.edu

University of Florida
The University of Florida is the only member of the Association of American Universities in Florida. The university is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity.” After the Florida state legislature’s creation of performance standards in 2013, the Florida Board of Governors designated the University of Florida as one of the three “preeminent universities” among the twelve universities of the State University System of Florida. For 2020, U.S. News & World Report ranked Florida as the seventh (tied) best public university in the United States. The university is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). It is the third largest Florida university by student population, and is the eighth largest single-campus university in the United States with 54,906 students enrolled for the fall 2018 semester. The University of Florida is home to 16 academic colleges and more than 150 research centers and institutes. It offers multiple graduate professional programs—including business administration, engineering, law, dentistry, medicine, pharmacy and veterinary medicine—on one contiguous campus, and administers 123 master’s degree programs and 76 doctoral degree programs in eighty-seven schools and departments.
ufl.edu

University of Michigan
A public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The university is a founding member of the Association of American Universities. Considered one of the foremost research universities in the United States with annual research expenditures approaching $1.5 billion, Michigan is classified as a Doctoral University with Very High Research by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. In 2019, it ranked 8th among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings. As of October 2019, 25 Nobel Prize winners, 6 Turing Award winners and 1 Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the University of Michigan. Its comprehensive graduate program offers doctoral degrees in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) as well as professional degrees in architecture, business, medicine, law, pharmacy, nursing, social work, public health, and dentistry. Michigan’s body of living alumni comprises more than 540,000 people, one of the largest alumni bases of any university in the world
umich.edu