ISU Startup Factory to graduate first round of businesses

Iowa State’s Startup Factory is closing its first year at the ISU Research Park and preparing to graduate its first round of startup companies this week.

The first cohort of 10 companies has raised more than $4 million in funding from various groups during their year working in the park, Startup Factory director Bill Adamowski said.

He said most of the companies have also found their first customer, while all are planning to remain either in the Research Park or in the Ames area for the next few years.

“The fun part is seeing them go from ‘Here’s what we have’ to ‘Here’s what the customers are demanding from us’,” he said. “Last year at this time, you were wondering if you were even going to get a customer.”

The Startup Factory was launched last summer at the Research Park as a year-long intensive program to give entrepreneurs with early-stage ideas access to resources and mentors.

Adamowski said the biggest change in how he and others are planning to run the program with the next series of businesses will be making the program’s syllabus is more formalized among the entire group instead of shaping individual programs for each company.

The Startup Factory also adapted ideas from other collegiate startup incubators at Stanford University, University of Illinois-Champaign, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Adamowski and his fellow startup supporters are moving forward on supporting the Startup Factory’s second cohort of businesses and launching their third cohort despite not having a president at the helm of the university.

It’s unclear whether the next ISU president will take as aggressive a stance in favor of economic development as former president Steven Leath, but Adamowski is confident the Startup Factory and the Research Park as a whole will continue to grow under a new administration.

Adamowski said the Startup Factory’s next step is to grab the attention of larger companies that are more willing to fund, partner with or acquire startups working on ideas they’re interested in but not willing to pursue in their own research and development efforts.

“We want to grow local, but we also basically trying to get people that are more global in scale to work with us on some of these,” he said.

Read the full article at amestrib.com