The University of Alberta (U of A) is enlisting the help of a US venture capital firm to guide its staff in moving deep tech research from the lab to the marketplace.
The news: The U of A announced a partnership with Celesta Capital on Oct. 14. The aim is to bring Celesta’s expertise to the U of A’s students and staff with training on entrepreneurship, patents, commercialization, intellectual property, and more. The partnership will also include industry and venture capital summit events held at the university.
From the source: “The U of A produces research with global reach, and our job is to move that work into the world where it creates companies, jobs, and impact,” associate vice-president of innovation, knowledge, mobilization, and partnerships Darren Fast said in a statement. “Partnering with Celesta gives our researchers and founders direct access to investors and operators who have built deep tech companies at a global scale.”
The context: Celesta’s partnership with the U of A comes at a time when Edmonton’s startup ecosystem is betting on deep tech as the city’s next flashpoint. The news comes on the heels of an announcement by Edmonton Unlimited that it will launch a Deep Tech Foundry program early next year with the specific goal of meeting the unique demands of commercializing deep tech.
Programming under the Celesta-U of A partnership will launch later this month with Scientific Entrepreneurship Day. Coordinated between Edmonton Unlimited, Celesta, the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and the U of A, the day will feature a curriculum designed to cover fundraising, intellectual property strategy, market validation, team building, and more.
Final thought: Celesta partner Charles Lespérance said Alberta broadly has the ingredients needed to develop a world-class deep tech ecosystem, including research expertise, technical prowess, and ambitious founders. But deep tech has historically faced unique hurdles to commercialization, including greater technical risk, high capital costs, and long research and development cycles.
That has created trepidation for some investors. Speaking at the NACO Summit this past summer, Émilie Boutros of TandemLaunch said deep tech companies often fail not on their technology, but due to a lack of business coaching. Celesta’s partnership with the U of A brings that coaching together with the resources Edmonton’s deep tech community already has.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy Jeffrey Beall on Flickr. Shared under CC BY-SA 2.0.