StartX (Stanford-StartX Fund)

StartX is a nonprofit community of serial entrepreneurs, industry experts, tenured Stanford professors, and well-funded growth-stage startups. It also provides founders with educational programming, a three-tier mentoring system, office space, access to a talented network of industry partners, and other resources. StartX itself is an independent nonprofit from Stanford University, to ensure that there is a clear separation of intellectual property between any research at Stanford and the work teams are doing to bring impact to real patients and industry. StartX is industry and stage agnostic and looking to fund and support founders in solving problems in any industry, including biotechnology, medical device, hardware, clean technology, and consumer and enterprise IT.

StartX believes that entrepreneurs can achieve more as a community than they can as individuals. It helps companies to hire elite talent and secure funding and works to help companies find creative ways to collaborate and create longer term impacts on the world.

StartX also offers a talent network that allows participating companies to tap into the Stanford University Alumni Network, which collects resumes from every career fair on Stanford Campus and makes them available for to StartX companies through its online jobs portal and a concierge service that matches student talents to company needs. Further, StartX also tracks a list of vetted entrepreneurs who have since exited a previous company and are looking for a new company.

Partners of StartX's program include financing partners, commercial partners, technology sponsors, legal sponsors, and resource sponsors. These include organizations such as Daikin, Stanford University, AstraZeneca, AWS, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Fenwick & West LLP, F-Prime Capital Partners, Eight Roads, Total, Mercury, Figure, Sequoia Capital, Goodwin Proctor, Orrick, SerotteLaw, Capshare, ContractSafe, DocSend, Eden, GoDaddy, Google Cloud, Gusto, Heroku, Hubspot, and Intercom.

The StartX program was developed through $8 million in grant funding from the Stanford University and Stanford Health Care to offer support to the Stanford entrepreneurship ecosystem. Stanford University, Stanford Health Care, and the Kaufmann Foundation have deployed a combined $200M to ensure the StartX community and StartX organization could be self-sufficient in perpetuity. Further financial support has come through grants, donations, and corporate sponsorships, which have been necessary as StartX does not take equity in accelerator companies as a nonprofit organization.

The goal of making the StarX program self-sufficient was realized in 2019, when it was announced that Stanford would cease funding the StartX program as it had reached self-sustainability financially. Previously, as part of the program, the Stanford-StartX Fund would invest in Stanford-affiliated startups through StartX, but this fund announced it would stop making investments. Besides StartX's self sufficiency, the other reason they decided to stop investing was due to the companies participating in StarX's program ability to raise, on average, $9.3 million through completion of the program, which, in 2019 was up from the $1.1 million raised on average (which had been the previous decade's norm).

StartX Med is a medical vertical of StartX that focuses solely on the development of Staford's medical entrepreneurs. This portion of StartX focuses on meeting the unique challenges of medical startups and companies. Which includes additional resources such as wet and dry lab space, animal testing facilities, clean rooms, and specialized instruction on medical technology, intellectual property, and the FDA approval process for medical companies and medical technology. This is to provide facilities for research in biology, chemistry, and medicine.

StartX Med Labs, which provides the necessary on-site facilities for research activities, is a community-operated portion of StartX and is structured as a nonprofit cooperative. This is a portion of the StartX Med cooperative that works to serve companies in the medical focused vertical of the accelerator program.

StartX Med has seen more than 135 companies in the program, which have raised over $920 million in funding across all medical fields. Further, many of these companies are used by or include among their customers the top global pharmaceutical companies.

StartX's Student-in-Residence (SIR) is a scholarship and financial aid program to support students building a company while completing their degree. This program is only open to actively enrolled Stanford students and PhDs in good academic standing, and these students are required to have a significant equity stake in the company.

Those awarded the SIR scholarship are also offered access to StartX's networks of mentors, previous StartX entrepreneurs, Stanford faculty and alumni, and also receives customized coaching as needed from coaches and domain experts. Furthermore, as StartX is a nonprofit organization, they take no equity in student companies, nor do they require the awardees of the SIR to pay any fees.

Each eligible team is awarded $4500 upon acceptance and a further $4500 upon graduating from Stanford and passing acceptance interviews from the StartX Community. As well, all companies receive $1.2 million in free resources, such as drop-in office space or legal advice.