Announcing our first universities investing in Galileo
We’re proud to welcome Monash University and UTS as Galileo investors to support Australia’s next generation of entrepreneurs
We’re excited to welcome the first two universities investing in Galileo Ventures, announced this week in The Australian Higher Education.
Galileo is proud to be the first fund (to the best of our knowledge!) to receive funding commitments from a university to invest in primarily in students graduating as entrepreneurs launching their own startup.
We call these entrepreneurs emerging founders: they’re at the end of their university journey, but the start of their career and entrepreneurial journey and have a big ambition to make a impact on the world.
The first university to commit was Monash University — its startup program The Generator has been going gangbusters over the last several years thanks to the level of demand from students and great hustle from the Generator team. Monash is a university making big investments into fostering more students to become founders.
The Generator recently had its Demo Day, showcasing 9 startups selected out of 200 (!) applications. That’s in addition to their other on campus activity including a five-week validation program and a lot of outreach work — as all good founders know, you have to make sure you pay attention to the top of the funnel to get results at the bottom!
Alastair Hick, Senior Director at Monash highlighted the development of entrepreneurship activity at Monash:
“The demand we’re seeing is reflective of the change in students attitudes. More of them are interested in taking the plunge and having a go solving problems they’re passionate about. We believe the Galileo team is the right team to be doing this.”
In NSW, the first university to invest is University of Technology Sydney (UTS), who are seeing a sea change in attitudes of their students on campus. A recent survey found that over 40% of students at UTS are now interested in creating their own career paths, by creating their own startup or working in one.
UTS is rapidly ramping up their startup activity from a strong base in The Hatchery, their previous accelerator that has been running for 4 years now. They recently combined entrepreneurial activity across faculties and the university into UTS Startups, and they have ambitious plans to reach 50% of all UTS students within the next 5 years.
Margaret Petty, Executive Director Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UTS commented about how they see Galileo working within their growing ecosystem:
“No one is better placed to be seeding student startups than someone like James and Hugh so it makes real sense for UTS to work with them, to ultimately benefit our student startup founders. UTS recognises the incredible potential of Australian startup founders, so we’ve fully committed to supporting our students to start their own entrepreneurial journey.”
We’re excited to have two world-class universities onboard as we launch Galileo and even more excited to help the emerging founders on their campuses.
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