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Finalists (including Nick Feamster, pictured) made their pitches to the Innovation Fund Advisory Board, made up of advisors, entrepreneurs and industry experts.
The George Shultz Innovation Fund (Fall 2023 Cycle) awarded $200,000 to NetMicroscope and $150,000 to CellCipher to further develop their research.
The George Shultz Innovation Fund, managed by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, will co-invest up to $250,000 in early-stage technology ventures from the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab, and the Marine Biological Laboratory. provide funding.
Apply for the Spring 2024 Innovation Fund Cycle by February 12 >>
// NetMicroscope ($200,000) – Co-founded by CEO Nick Feamster, Neubauer Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Chicago, and Chief Technology Officer Francesco Bronzino, the startup revolutionizes network performance monitoring with a cutting-edge machine learning-driven approach doing. This solution integrates network performance metrics from a variety of data sources and unifies them to provide network operators with intelligence about the performance of specific applications within their networks.
“NetMicroscope is grateful for the support from the George Shultz Innovation Fund. This funding will enable us to build our initial product offering toward developing a customer-based recurring revenue stream,” Feamster said. Masu.
“As we continue to develop our go-to-market products with potential customers, this funding will help us accelerate both our technology capabilities and market channels as we build out our technical and product teams. “We are also progressing with the application process for invention disclosure, and with support from the Innovation Fund, we will be able to deepen our intellectual property portfolio,” he added.

Catherine Rose introducing CellCipher at the Innovation Fund finals.
// CellCipher ($150,000) – Co-founded by Yoav Gilad, dean of the Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the University of Chicago, and Katherine Rhodes, a staff scientist in Gilad’s lab – The startup studies the environmental and chemical exposure of human cells. To do so, we developed a process to apply single-cell RNA sequencing to embryoid bodies, thereby generating population-scale data to enable drug discovery and personalized medicine.
“CellCipher is honored to receive funding from the George Shultz Innovation Fund. This investment will support our next phase of growth and continue both commercial and scientific development,” said Rose. said.
“We plan to use this funding and other investments to expand into the commercial lab space and sign our first customer contracts for toxicity testing,” she added. “We will also continue to enhance our toxicity predictive classifiers with additional single-cell data and begin collecting a diverse and expansive cell biobank that will power future efforts in precision medicine.”
Both startups were also participants in the Polsky Center’s I-Crops program, which is currently accepting applications for the spring 2024 cohort. (Please apply by February 12th>>)
“The I-Corps program helped us refine our own thinking about our technology and its potential impact, which in turn changed the way we communicate our value to others.” Rose says Mr.
Jackson Finks, a member of the CellCipher team, said that as a Booth student, I-Corps was a tremendous opportunity to participate in an exciting early venture project at the university that he would not have had access to otherwise. . “I listened to a lot of pitches and was able to pitch myself to entrepreneurs whose technologies and businesses I was interested in,” Finks said. “Although the classes at Booth are special, I found the opportunity to research and develop business through I-Corps and others to be most valuable to me.”
With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and an affiliate of the Great Lakes Regional I-Corps Hub, the Polsky I-Corps Program is a program that supports the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields.
// For more information, contact Ellen Zatkowski at ellen.zatkowski@chicagobooth.edu.
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