$20 Million NYU Venture Capital Fund To Support Student Startups

As the much-buzzed about Diaspora, an NYU student-led project created to offer a privacy-oriented Facebook alternative, continues to take shape, NYU seems to have perfectly timed their move to offer support to similar startups. This school year marks the beginning of the NYU Innovation Venture Fund, a $20 million fund designed “to spur the commercialization of technologies developed at NYU and to provide seed funding for startup companies based on those technologies.” I sat down with Frank Rimalovski (pictured), Managing Director of the NYU Venture Fund, to learn more about the program and what exactly it’s doing to encourage entrepreneurship at NYU.

Rimalovski told me NYU has been highly successful with technology transfer — external licensing of patented technologies discovered by students and professors at NYU — and believes there is potential for those students to create their own startups. However, the infrastructure and support necessary hasn’t existed in the past. So, the Venture Fund was created to enable student and faculty-led startups to see the light of day. He hopes the Venture Fund will “create a whole generation of Dennis Crowleys.”