Venture Partners at CU Boulder — Record-Setting University Startup Creation Engine

Venture Partners, the technology-transfer and commercialisation office at the University of Colorado Boulder, helped researchers, postdocs, students and outside entrepreneurs launch 35 new companies based on university intellectual property in fiscal year 2024 — more than any other US campus that year, and the second-highest single-year total recorded by any US university, behind Stanford's 38 in 2022. In fiscal year 2025 the office set a new campus record of 36 startups.
The office runs several structured commercialisation pathways, including a simplified 'Licensing with EASE' agreement, the Lab Venture Challenge, and the Embark Deep Tech Startup Creator programme, which pairs vetted entrepreneurs with specific unlicensed university research. Startups launched through these pathways since 2024 include Mana Battery (sodium-based batteries), Flari Tech (breath-based disease detection using frequency-comb technology) and Mesa Quantum (chip-scale atomic clocks).
Independent business coverage corroborates the university's own reporting: from 2021 to 2025, CU Boulder startups are credited with $8.7 billion in national economic impact, $5.1 billion in Colorado state economic impact, and $3.5 billion in capital raised. The figures come from the university's commercialisation office and an industry ranking, not an independent third-party audit, so they should be read as a strong but self-reported commercialisation record rather than an externally evaluated outcome study.

Read the full analysis: https://www.colorado.edu/venturepartners/2025/09/15/internal-news/cu-boulder-ranked-1-launching-startups-based-university-discoveries