🔒Engineering Success: New Yale fund seeks to seed startups outside of bioscience

Unlike many Yale donors, Will Roberts, class of 1990, wants to keep a low profile. The university won’t release any biographical details about him, just that he is a “business leader.”

But Roberts’ recent $5 million donation to the school may have an outsized impact on the future of Yale’s latest university-wide initiative – to promote engineering and the applied sciences and spark innovation. It may also help seed a new industry cluster in the New Haven area.

Established this spring, the Roberts Fund for Innovation at Yale offers a pool of very early-stage funding for startups in data science, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. The goal is “commercialization of breakthrough inventions that solve real-world problems,” according to the university.

At the Yale Innovation Summit in May, a stream of university officials and industry leaders spoke of the transformational potential of the new Roberts Fund, in tandem with recent investments in building campus capacity in computer science and engineering.

The Roberts Fund, along with additional staff at the university’s tech-transfer office and a bigger budget for patents, will help Yale get to the next level with commercialization, said Josh Geballe, head of Yale Ventures. Announced earlier this year, Yale Ventures is the new umbrella for all of the university’s entrepreneurial efforts.

“I think we are just getting started. We are just scratching the surface of what the potential of this market holds,” Geballe said. He called the Roberts Fund “a new accelerator focused on our School of Engineering and Applied Science … that will surely produce more new innovation spinning out into startups.”

“I’m really excited about the Roberts Fund because it provides not just the seed funding, but also the necessary guidance and mentorship just to help the teams to go from zero to one,” said Sheng Liang, a Yale alumnus, tech executive and member of the fund’s advisory board.

Rapid change in the engineering and applied science fields, and the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of technology, offers Yale an opening to play a larger role beyond bioscience, Liang said.

“All it really takes is advice and guidance, so that we don't somehow waste the opportunity,” he said. “If I can see the Roberts Fund be able to play a role in that, that will be really marvelous.”

Speakers cited the success of the bioscience-focused Blavatnik Fund at Yale, which in its six years of existence has spun off 12 companies that have raised $250 million in venture funding, in the process developing three new investigational drugs.

“There’s a model there, and the Roberts Fund is going to try to help us replicate that,” said Frank Milone, a partner at accounting firm Fiondella, Milone & LaSaracina (FML), a moderator at the summit.

Despite the enthusiasm, the question remains to be answered: Can Yale make lightning strike twice when it comes to creating a vibrant industry cluster in New Haven?

New applied sciences focus

Yale has announced major boosts in funding for the applied sciences in the last year, using some of its record-busting endowment gains to fund more faculty positions at the long-sidelined School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The school will also gain more independence and its own budget line as of July, after decades under the control of the university’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

“The university is making a substantial investment in [the School of Engineering] so that it can even more aggressively pursue breakthrough research and collaborative innovation,” Yale President Peter Salovey and Provost Scott Strobel said in a joint statement. Research prioritized by the new funds will be in artificial intelligence, biological systems, materials science, mathematical modeling and “robotics for humanity,” or the potential of robotics technology to address human needs.

The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences will get 30 new faculty slots, a 30% boost in its tenure-track workforce, in part to bolster research and course offerings in its most popular department, computer science. Advanced materials science — research into composites, shape-memory alloys, ceramics and superconductors — will also get new faculty.

School of Engineering Dean Jeff Brock has already hired some top-ranking researchers, according to Geballe of Yale Ventures.

“He's basically got the green light to go fast,” Geballe said.

At the engineering school, construction as part of $2 billion in recent infrastructure investment has given students both the cutting-edge Center for Engineering Innovation and Design and the new standalone Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY).

A 12,500-square-foot, steel-and-glass structure abutting computer science hub the Becton Center, Tsai CITY is not even two years old but has already helped launch companies including Aspecta.ai, a recruiting startup that aims to disrupt hiring using artificial intelligence. Aspecta raised $2 million in a capital raise earlier this year led by ZhenFund, a Beijing-based firm that dominates China's early-stage venture capital scene.

Multidisciplinary innovation

The interdisciplinary focus of many of Yale’s recent initiatives reflects the breakdown of traditional walls as artificial intelligence and data science are increasingly used in fields across departments.

Interdisciplinary efforts also play a key role in “greentech,” a catchall term that incorporates any effort to address environmental issues through science and engineering. Among the university’s recent efforts in that regard are the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture and its Planetary Solutions Project, a larger initiative to address climate change.

Creating a greentech cluster in New Haven is one goal for those seeking the “next big thing” for the region, said Matt McCooe, CEO of Connecticut Innovations, the state’s quasi-public venture capital arm. Work is underway to create a greentech accelerator in New Haven modeled after one in Boston, he said.

Yale’s materials science work relating to energy storage could play a key role in forming a greentech cluster, McCooe said, along with research in AI, quantum computing and alternative energy.

CI plans to launch a dedicated greentech fund in the coming months that will focus on sustainability, water recycling, carbon sequestration, clean air and energy storage, McCooe said.

“We’re going to really try to make a push to capitalize on some of Connecticut’s strengths in those areas,” he said.

Beyond greentech, Yale’s recent investments in engineering and applied science will soon generate dividends in new startups, McCooe predicted.

“We’ve got an influx of talent and the research will follow,” McCooe said. “They will win grants from the Department of Defense and National Science Foundation and you'll see more funding coming in, which brings more students, which brings more innovation and intellectual property for Yale to spin out.”

Geballe of Yale Ventures said the university still has a ways to go to catch up to its peers in terms of the ratio of research dollars to commercialization, especially outside of the life sciences. Initiatives like the Roberts Fund at the School of Engineering — and new efforts likely to be announced in coming months — will help bridge the gap, he said.

“All of this should result in more of the groundbreaking research that we're doing here being translated into more new startups and partnerships that will bring those innovations to market, create jobs and opportunity here in Connecticut, and continue to establish this region as one of the top innovation ecosystems in the world,” Geballe said.