New SURAfund Pairs Venture Capitalists with University Innovations

The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) has established a new initiative to increase the amount of seed capital available to its member universities. The new initiative called SURAfund http://www.sura.org matches venture capitalists with innovations from SURA’s 62 research universities. Target areas include nanotech, biotech, information technology and communications.

Every quarter, eligible startups (new ventures associated with a SURA university) submit mini-business plans of no more than five pages to SURA. SURA conducts initial review and categorization of submitted proposals, then conducts due diligence on all plans of interests. Funding ranges from $100,000 to $500,000.

For more information, contact Matt Thomas at [email protected].

(Thanks to Southern Compass for passing this article along. Does your region have a similar effort underway? If not, it may be something that should be developed. Russ)