Purdue Foundry to Showcase First Accelerator Cohort
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe Purdue Foundry is set to unveil its first cohort for the Double Down Experiment, which includes nine high growth businesses the organization says are ready to reach the next level.
The Purdue Foundry is co-hosting The Big Show, to showcase the innovators and business builders selected for the program.
Organizers invited investors, other startups, and members of the Purdue community to the event to see how ideas are being transformed into "world-changing companies."
“The Big Show is a way for us to showcase the bigger picture of what’s going on in the Purdue ecosystem when it comes to startups and technology,” said Scott Henderson, vice president and chief entrepreneurial officer for Purdue Research Foundation. “There’s just a lot happening here. We wanted to tell this story to outsiders who don’t live and breathe in the minutiae of daily life at Purdue.”
Henderson says the organization has helped 253 companies during its six years in operation.
Of that list, the team narrowed the list to the nine business concepts that it feels has high potential for success. The selected members of the Double Down Experiment range from precision agriculture to medical devices to education.
“We’re going to focus our mentoring and resources to help them grow, in terms of how many people work for them, their customer revenues, and they’re outside investors, investment dollars,” said Henderson.
Members of the team help guide entrepreneurs through what can be a difficult path of company formation, market analysis and business model development.
Henderson says during the first six years, the Purdue Foundry focused on forming and launching companies. Now, the organization is putting equal weight toward growing those companies.
“So that they can reach as far and as wide as possible, making a difference in the world by taking that idea to societal impact through the marketplace,” said Henderson.
Kicking off Thursday’s program is a panel discussion called Alpha Girls: Women in Stem, Business, Entrepreneurship. The panel includes Purdue alumna M.J. Elmore, one of the first venture capitalists on the west coast. She was profiled in a book called Alpha Girls, about women who took on the broadly male culture in Silicon Valley.
The Big Show is produced in partnership with Purdue University’s College of Science and Purdue Research Foundation’s Office of Technology Commercialization.
You can click here to pre-register.
Henderson says the startups have great ideas that the Purdue Foundry can help develop and get into the marketplace.