Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) has partnered with the University of Washington’s (UW) Foster School of Business to launch CDL-Seattle, its third United States location, this fall.
With the move, CDL aims to expand its reach to the Seattle region, which the organization referred to as a hub of tech commercialization.
The area of focus for CDL-Seattle’s first stream is set to be computational health.
Founded in 2012 at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, CDL is a not-for-profit program focused on “massively scalable” seed-stage science and tech companies that aims to pair founders with experienced entrepreneurs and investors.
CDL currently offers its accelerator program in nine cities, five of which are in Canada: Toronto, Halifax, Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver. CDL-Seattle is set to become CDL’s 10th accelerator, and the organization’s third United States location. The hub already offers its services in Atlanta, which it expanded to in 2019, and Wisconsin. CDL also has two locations in Europe, in Oxford and Paris.
The area of focus for CDL-Seattle’s first stream is set to be computational health. Ajay Agrawal, CDL’s founder, said the growth of new machine learning applications focused on enhancing human health, plus innovations in sensor tech “has created a flood of new entrepreneurial opportunities that will benefit society.”
Emer Dooley, site lead at CDL-Seattle, said Washington state has “incredible cloud computing, AI, and ML expertise and a vibrant biotech sector,” adding that the region needs to bring the two closer together.
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The new location will be a partnership between Microsoft, the UW College of Engineering, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and CoMotion, UW’s collaborative innovation hub.
“I view CDL as an engine for scaling and funding deep tech companies, which supports our brand of having an ‘innovation mindset,’” said Frank Hodge, dean of the UW Foster School of Business.
Applications for the nine-month CDL program are open now, and chosen ventures will begin this fall.
Photo from the University of Washington via LinkedIn