NewHavenBIZ

16 n e w h a v e n B I Z | J u n e 2 0 2 2 | n e w h a v e n b i z . c o m New Yale fund seeks to seed startups outside of bioscience Engineering Success By Liese Klein U nlike many Yale donors, Will Roberts, class of 1990, wants to keep a low profile. e univer- sity won't release any biograph- ical 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 initia- tive – 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 intel- ligence and high-performance com- puting. e 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 capaci- ty in computer science and engineering. e 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 uni- versity's entrepreneurial efforts. "I think we are just getting started. We are just scratching the surface of what the potential of this market holds," Gebal- le 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 nec- essary 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 guid- ance, 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. "ere'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 moder- ator at the summit. Despite the enthusiasm, the ques- tion 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 re- cord-busting endowment gains to fund more faculty positions at the long-sidelined School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. e school will also gain more independence and its own budget line as of July, aer decades under the control of the university's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "e university is making a substantial investment in [the School of Engineering] so that it can even more aggressively pur- sue breakthrough research and collaborative innovation," Yale President Peter Salovey and Pro- vost Scott Strobel said in a joint statement. Research prioritized by the new funds will be in artificial intelli- gence, biological systems, materials science, mathematical modeling and "robotics for humanity," or the poten- tial of robotics technology to address human needs. e School of Engineering and Ap- plied Sciences will get 30 new faculty slots, a 30% boost in its tenure-track workforce, in part to bolster research PHOTO | LIESE KLEIN Donor Will Roberts (right) with Yale School of Engineering Dean Jeffrey Brock at the 2022 Yale Innovation Summit in May. Yale School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Dean Jeffrey Brock has been tasked with expanding the university's offerings in fields like robotics and computer science and encouraging entrepreneurship. PHOTO | CONTRIBUTED

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