Rice University operates One Giant Leap Ventures Fund I, an early-stage institutional venture fund that accepts capital from both equity limited partners and philanthropic donors. The fund reached its first close in August 2026 and quickly backed Motif Neurotech, a Rice spinout led by faculty member Jacob Robinson. Motif is developing a minimally invasive neurostimulator for treatment-resistant depression. The fund invested alongside established institutional funds.

The fund invests up to $500,000 in Rice-affiliated companies. These include start-ups founded or led by alumni, students or faculty, and start-ups built on intellectual property licensed from Rice. Under its rules-based model, a startup qualifies for review by the fund’s Investment Advisory Committee only after securing a qualified lead investor. Ventures from the Liu Idea Labs for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s Innovation Fellows and Summer Venture Studio, and from the Rice Alliance Business Plan Competition, are eligible to apply.

Adrian Trömel, Rice’s interim chief innovation officer, serves as managing director, and Nafisa Istami serves as investment manager.

The fund draws on Rice’s alumni for diligence and mentoring and involves students as venture scholars.

Image: Rice University

The Valley of Death. It sounds horrifying – and to a researcher who has put heart and soul into creating a new technology, it is. Because this is the stage where promising research can die before it has the chance to find commercial success.

“There comes a point where federal dollars will no longer support a technology, but you don’t quite have the data that you need for an industry partner to say, ‘Yes, we want to license this and take over further development of it,’” says Colleen Cassidy, Director of Innovation, Funding, and Program Management for the University of Pittsburgh’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “So, there’s that gap there. People typically refer to that as the valley of death, where they’ve gone as far as they can from a basic science perspective, but they don’t have the funding to get industry really interested.”

Bridging the Valley of Death is the goal of many university commercialization funds, money set aside to address the gaps in funding for innovation and technology translation.

“These programs are designed for technologies that have moved beyond initial feasibility testing and need critical data to de-risk them, both technically and commercially,” Cassidy says.

Fund Uses Vary

Universities with commercialization funds don’t all fit the same mold. When setting up a commercialization fund, the key is to identify where money can best be used to push a technology over the gap.

“You need to clearly define the objective,” says Bin Yan, Associate Vice President for Research and Director of the Office of Technology Transfer for Penn State University. “If this is commercialization-driven, it’s not another research fund. If that is the goal, then it is designed to de-risk promising projects.”

Heather Walsh, Assistant Vice President, Technology Ventures at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago, agrees.

“You have to understand what the most important gap for you to fill is,” she says “Are your companies getting stuck very early? You don’t want to create some kind of VC fund or large innovation fund where you’re providing hundreds of thousands of dollars to companies if your companies are never going to reach that stage. You really have to understand where the gaps are for you and fill the gap that is most critical and time-sensitive for your portfolio.”

Excerpted from “The Valley of Death is Real. Fear Not! Gap Funds Can Carry Projects Through It.” by Lori Fairchild in the latest issue of TechInsight.

James Madison University (JMU) becomes Virginia’s first R2 university to join Lab-to-Launch, a statewide commercialization program of the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC). JMU President Jim Schmidt and VIPC President and Chief Executive Officer Joe Benevento signed a ceremonial memorandum of understanding in Richmond.

VIPC launched the program in 2025 with Virginia’s six R1 universities: the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, George Mason University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Old Dominion University and William & Mary.

Through Lab-to-Launch, JMU gains access to Virginia’s first Fast-Track License, a standardized agreement that makes intellectual property licensing faster and cheaper for founders spinning out start-ups. VIPC’s new Lab-to-Launch grant program backs the license. VIPC also supports Entrepreneurs-in-Residence at JMU and will work with JMU to pursue corporate partners, investors and public-private funding.

Anthony Tongen, vice president of JMU’s Division of Research, Economic Development and Innovation, says the initiative aims to move more JMU discoveries to market.

Image: James Madison University 

InflammaSense, a startup incubated at the University of California San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute (QI), receives a subaward of up to $3.9 million to track immune responses in more than 200 sepsis patients. Its VITALx-patch, a wearable sensor developed with UC San Diego-licensed technology, noninvasively reads magnetic and electrical signals from neck nerves, and an algorithm groups patients by how their immune response evolves.

The funding flows through a contract of up to $38 million over up to five years from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to the University of Vermont (UVM). The UVM-led project builds patient digital twins to simulate possible responses to approved medications.

Chief executive officer and co-founder Imanuel Lerman, a UC San Diego clinical professor of anesthesiology, bases the company on his vagus nerve research exploring why patients respond differently to the same treatment.

Based in the QI Innovation Space, InflammaSense builds on about $4.5 million in prior support from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and National Institutes of Health, plus a $1.4 million seed investment.

Image: The University of California San Diego

It’s not always comfortable to talk about your own accomplishments. But sometimes you’re the person best positioned to explain what you’ve done, why it mattered, and what changed because of it.

That’s why self-nominations aren’t just permitted for the TechPipeline Impact Awards, they’re encouraged.

If you’ve developed a better way of doing things, led an initiative that made a meaningful difference, or contributed something important to your institution or the technology transfer profession, we’d like to hear about it.

Now in their third year, the TechPipeline Impact Awards recognize exceptional contributions across six areas of technology transfer. Whether you nominate yourself or a colleague, we’re interested in the ideas, accomplishments, and measurable impact behind the nomination.

The nomination form asks you to describe your contributions over the past five years and the difference they’ve made. You can download the nomination template in advance, gather your thoughts, and submit the completed nomination when you’re ready.

Nominations close October 30.

NOMINATION FORM →

M. Parans Paranthaman, Ph.D., a Corporate Fellow and UT-Battelle Distinguished Inventor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), holds 65 U.S. patents and more than 110 inventions. Fourteen companies license technologies he helped develop, including Samsung Electronics and 3M. His buffer-layer design for rolling-assisted biaxially textured substrates (RABiTS) helped enable kilometer-length superconducting tape. SuperPower, an ORNL licensee since the 1990s, now supplies that wire for fusion magnets.

In 2024, Fort Worth-based Element3 licensed seven ORNL lithium-recovery technologies. Its Midland, Texas, plant held its ribbon cutting in February 2026. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott described it as the first U.S. facility to make lithium carbonate from oilfield waste. ORNL is also negotiating a rare-earth recovery license with Momentum Technologies, a Dallas battery and magnet recycler. Gallium and germanium are next on Paranthaman’s list.

Paranthaman says commercialization that took 10 to 15 years in the 1990s can now take two to three. One reason is that Department of Energy (DOE) projects let ORNL carry technologies to pre-pilot scale before companies take over.

Image: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Department of Energy

Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) are committing more than $1 billion to artificial intelligence (AI) in Atlanta, with Emory contributing about $600 million and Georgia Tech more than $575 million. Emory’s AI.Health institute, which targets cancer, kidney disease and other conditions, has contributed to three spinoff companies and 40 licensed technologies. Georgia Tech’s Tech AI pairs researchers with industry and government partners to speed adoption. This month Georgia Tech launches Nexus, an AI supercomputer backed by the university, industry and the National Science Foundation.

Nearly half of Emory’s investment supports recruiting and retaining experts, while its AI.Humanity initiative spans more than 250 faculty in eight schools and colleges. Georgia Tech also leads Georgia Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing (Georgia AIM), a statewide effort with nearly $100 million in federal, state and private backing.

An invitation-only AI Summit at Avant South this fall aims to turn regional research into new companies.

Image: Emory University