Carnegie Mellon University highlights pipeline from research to startups - Pennsylvania Business Report -

As part of its flagship entrepreneurship event, Startup Week, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), highlighted the pipeline it has from research to business startups.

Startup Week brings together more than 3,000 founders, investors, corporate partners and university community members in Pittsburgh to get an early look at the technologies moving out of university laboratories to the marketplace. Themes for the week this year are how to transform advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, cybersecurity, health, energy and other fields into companies that can address existing and future challenges. Organized by the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, the university’s hub for entrepreneurship, the more than 35 events between Sept. 14 and Sept. 18 will connect faculty, students and postdoctoral researchers with investors and industry connections.

This year, CMU Startup Week is an anchor partner to StartUP PGH, a new effort to bring more than a dozen regional partners together for a week of events celebrating Pittsburgh as a technology hub.

“Pittsburgh has never lacked technical strength. What StartUP PGH adds is a galvanizing, coordinated regional effort. For the first time, more than 15 organizations across the region agreed that Pittsburgh should be known as a place where frontier technology gets built,” Meredith Meyer Grelli, inaugural vice provost for entrepreneurship and associate vice president, said.

Grelli and the Swartz Center team developed the week-long event and launched StartUP PGH during her tenure as the Swartz Center interim director.

“Our research strengths sit at unusually investable intersections, where AI, robotics and the physical sciences meet,” Grelli said. “Turning that into companies takes more than capital. It takes the right audiences, and StartUP PGH is deliberately bringing them here, including corporate partners from around the world who can be a startup’s first customer or eventual acquirer. That is a critical and often overlooked part of the equation.”

Since its launch, the Swartz Center and other CMU entrepreneurship programs have helped start more than 400 companies. Officials said, the CMU community has produced 67 affiliated unicorns — privately held startups valued at more than $1 billion — including companies like Duolingo and Skild AI.

“At Carnegie Mellon, entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful ways we translate bold ideas and pathbreaking research into technologies, companies and economic opportunity,” Theresa Mayer, vice president for research. “The Swartz Center is the hub that connects our faculty, students and alumni with the expertise, talent and investment needed to build. Startup Week brings the full strength of that ecosystem together and gives Pittsburgh and the world a view of what is coming next.”