StartX Celebrates 10 Years Helping Stanford’s Top Tech and Medical Entrepreneurs Solve Real-World Problems

“StartX has proven that as a nonprofit, it can create an ecosystem that empowers the Stanford community to mentor successful entrepreneurs, who in turn contribute to society through groundbreaking technology and medical innovation,” stated Jerry Yang, Stanford Board of Trustees Member and Co-Founder of Yahoo. “StartX not only has energized Stanford students and alumni, but also over 50 tenure-track Stanford faculty as well. It’s inspiring to see how StartX and the Stanford entrepreneurship ecosystem continue to grow, while remaining true to its mission of taking no equity from its entrepreneurs.”

Founded by Cameron Teitelman in 2009 as a student-run organization, StartX has grown to be a self-sustaining, professionally-led organization with a mix of highly-successful serial entrepreneurs, Professor-in-Residence founders and industry-leading Stanford alumni founders building companies to solve real-world problems. Located down the street from the Stanford University campus is the StartX campus, where approximately 700 companies got their start and now have a combined valuation in excess of $19 billion. Among the many innovative brands to emerge from the StartX community are Arterys, Branch, Eko, GenapSys, Kodiak Sciences (IPO), Life360 (IPO), Lime, Patreon, Poynt and hundreds more.

“It has been humbling to see the growth of the StartX community over the past decade to more than 1300 startup founders starting with my time as a junior working out of Old Union, whiteboarding the strategy and supporting our first team,” said StartX Founder and Chairman, Cameron Teitelman. “Our hypothesis — that our strength would come from a self-supporting community of founders helping each other — has played out better than I could have imagined. StartX founders are making a huge impact across so many industries, thanks to the tremendous support from the Stanford community, Stanford Administration and our network of Silicon Valley’s top founders and industry leaders volunteering their time to serve as mentors.”

StartX continues to be a unique startup community compared to accelerators and incubators and does not take equity in companies for admittance into its programs. What’s more, the university is able to avoid IP ownership conflicts because StartX is a separate nonprofit organization. In addition to working with various departments across campus, 54 tenured professors at Stanford have taken their own entrepreneurial startups to market as StartX founders.

John Hennessy, Stanford’s 10th President (2000-2016), Chair of Alphabet, and Director of Knight-Hennessy Scholars, congratulated StartX on a decade of growth, stating, “StartX has shown impressive, measured success throughout its 10-year history and continues to add value to the Stanford entrepreneurial community through collective intelligence and a proven platform of trusted experiential education for Stanford alumni, faculty and students. We congratulate the StartX community on this 10th Anniversary celebrating entrepreneurship at Stanford.”

StartX is fortunate to have the incredible support of Silicon Valley’s tech industry leaders in its mentor program, including founders and executives from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Twitter, Yahoo and more, providing coaching and tech advice alongside tenured Stanford professors. Additionally, StartX startups on average raise approximately $11M in funding and continue growing through access to StartX’s network of Silicon Valley’s top investor and venture capital firms.

“This is a community with all the supports to bring founder visions to life, including mentorship from top industry leaders, access to capital, and tapping into one of the most powerful and innovative networks in the world, the Stanford University alumni entrepreneurship network,” said Joseph Huang, StartX CEO. Huang, a Stanford alum, also founded his company, WifiSLAM, at StartX- which was acquired by Apple for $20M in 2013. Like all founders in the community, Huang gives back to future founders by supporting the educational environment through mentorship. He also donates his StartX CEO salary back to the organization annually.

In addition to top tech entrepreneurs coming out of Stanford, StartX Med entrepreneurial scientists are changing the world with medical breakthroughs and successful life-saving research trials, including an average of more than six FDA approvals per year. Working alongside other StartX founders, StartX Med offers specialized resources including wet/dry lab space, clean rooms and access to millions of dollars’ worth of lab equipment, as well as instruction on med-tech IP and the FDA approval process. More than 181 medical companies have gone through StartX Med, raising in excess of $2 billion in cumulative funding across medical fields including Med Devices, Biotech, Digital Health and Diagnostics. Clinical partners of StartX Med companies encompass more than 250 hospitals, 30,000 care centers, 50,000 physicians and 65 million annual patient visits.

About StartX

StartX is a nonprofit organization advancing the development of Stanford’s top entrepreneurs through experiential education, access to thousands of VCs and investors, and a Who’s Who of industry leaders and serial entrepreneurs providing mentorship. The founder community consists of a diverse mix of 1300+ well-funded Growth-Stage Founders, tenured Stanford Professor Founders, and highly-successful Stanford Alumni Founders. Collectively, StartX companies have raised $7.9 billion in funding with a combined valuation of more than $19 billion to date. StartX’s Corporate Innovation program helps global corporations quickly test market-ready technology from Stanford alumni founders through structured co-creation and pilot programs. For medical tech founders homegrown at Stanford, having intimate access to domain experts and care environments has been fundamental to their success.

Ranked as a number one accelerator nationally by MIT’s Seed Accelerator Rankings Project, StartX venture funded companies have a 93% survival and acquisition rate in a wide range of industries from consumer Internet and retail products to enterprise software, biotechnology and medical devices. StartX and StartX Med, the medical entrepreneurial vertical, includes accomplished founders ranging from undergraduates and masters students to post docs, professors and Stanford alumni being mentored by top Silicon Valley industry leaders. Applications for the Spring 2020 cohort are now open. Founders can apply here.

Media Invited to Attend the 10^th Anniversary StartX Expo. Please RSVP to: Laurie Peters, Laurie@StartX.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190924005395/en/