Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship Expands the MIT delta v Summer Accelerator to New York City and the Cornell Tech Campus

New York, NY, August 7, 2018—The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship (Trust Center) today announces the expansion of its MIT delta v summer accelerator for student-founded ventures to a second location in New York City. This new home mirrors the capstone entrepreneurial experience based at MIT in Cambridge, MA, and is hosted at the Two Sigma Ventures Collision Lab, located at Cornell Tech, home of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute on Roosevelt Island.

The new delta v accelerator speaks to MIT’s recognition of the important role the New York entrepreneurial community can play in fostering these student ventures into successful companies, especially in certain vertical industries. The venue also adds another top international academic institution to Roosevelt Island and allows MIT students to be immersed in a peer environment with students and faculty from Cornell and the Technion and benefit from this growing hub of innovation.

The MIT delta v cohort in New York City features seven teams taking part in a proven, rigorous, three-month educational and mentorship-based accelerator. Teams applied and were vetted and selected based on their interest and ability to take advantage of New York’s unique entrepreneurial community. Specifically, the seven participating student teams are launching businesses in the Real Estate, FinTech, Crypto, Insurance, Direct-to-Consumer, and Media industries. 2018 is the first year the program is being held under the MIT delta v name following a pilot program last summer.

Led by founding managing director Carly Chase, teams will fully immerse themselves in New York City’s entrepreneurial and technology communities, receive direct guidance from mentors, local alumni, and other inspiring speakers, and gather feedback from mock advisory boards, while also taking guidance from Trust Center Entrepreneurs in Residence back at MIT.

“We are thrilled to bring back the Trust Center’s unique approach to entrepreneurship education to New York City for a second time,” said Bill Aulet, Managing Director of the Trust Center. “It is important to provide students the opportunity to launch their businesses in a safe environment where they can learn from successes and failures. Our students had a phenomenal learning experience last summer and affirmed the educational benefits of being based in New York. We are excited to build our presence in the city, specifically this year amongst all the innovation happening on Roosevelt Island, and look forward to continuing this program and achieving even greater results both this second year and beyond.”

The MIT delta v expansion is possible thanks to Two Sigma Ventures, who hosted the pilot class in its own offices last summer and is partnering with the Trust Center to provide a home for the students in their new Collision Lab in the Tata Innovation Center building at Cornell Tech. Colin Beirne, Partner at Two Sigma Ventures, said, "We are huge believers in the tech ecosystem in New York City, which benefits from the diversity of companies, industries, and people that make NYC such a vibrant community. So we are thrilled to host delta v, both in our SoHo office last year and now at our Collision Lab at Cornell Tech. MIT has brought an exceptionally bright group of diverse founders to New York, which can only benefit our local startup ecosystem."

“Cornell Tech is excited to welcome MIT’s summer accelerator program to the Tata Innovation Center, a first-of-its-kind building that is home to cutting-edge companies, Cornell Tech students and faculty, and alumni-founded startups,” said Dan Huttenlocher, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech. “Our campus is all about collaboration and innovation, bringing together students, faculty, entrepreneurs, researchers, and industry practitioners to develop new software and digital technologies that help address human needs. The MIT summer program fits right in.”

“The MIT delta v summer accelerator is consistent with the vision of the Technion-Cornell partnership, to make Cornell Tech a hub of entrepreneurship in NYC,” said Adam Schwarz, Senior Executive Vice President at the Technion and Chairman of the Board of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute. “MIT students will benefit from interaction with unique programs – such as the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute Runway Postdoc program – while Cornell Tech will likely benefit from the approach to entrepreneurship education that is at the heart of MIT’s Trust Center.”

Last summer, nearly 100 local MIT alumni and successful entrepreneurs supported the students by giving their time as mock board members, as mentors to a specific team, or by providing feedback and advice during workshops geared to the entire student cohort.

Teams from last summer’s New York-based program have continued to build momentum from their time in the accelerator and have gone on to participate in programs such as Y-Combinator, Blue Ridge Labs @ Robin Hood, and the Urban-X Accelerator in Brooklyn. These teams and other delta v alumni companies located in NYC will be on hand to offer support to this summer’s cohort of teams.

“I am delighted to have the opportunity to continue building the delta v program at the MIT Trust Center NYC Startup Studio,” said Chase. “As an alum of the New York City Economic Development Corporation who was there when the Cornell Tech campus was just a plan on paper, I couldn’t be more excited to work at this world-class facility and help bring one of the world’s best educational institutions to NYC.”

“The MIT School of Engineering is excited to expand our collaboration through the MIT Trust Center NYC Startup Studio,” said MIT School of Engineering Dean Anantha Chandrakasan. “I am very enthusiastic about opportunities in many areas, such as machine learning, quantum computing, data analytics, and blockchain, and look forward to having many more potential use cases to apply these technologies through the readily-accessible, vibrant New York City ecosystem. I am confident this will enhance our educational offerings, accelerate our knowledge creation, and increase our impact. We are eager to be part of this collaborative effort.”

“The MIT Sloan School of Management has a half century legacy of studying entrepreneurship as a serious academic field, but we have never been content to have it as just an academic field,” said MIT Sloan School of Management John C. Head III Dean David Schmittlein. “We strive to bring our knowledge to practitioners – and the MIT Trust Center NYC Startup Studio offers us a new venue to do this as well as a lab to enhance and apply that knowledge.”

“This program represents the type of innovation and collaboration we envisioned when we launched Cornell Tech,” said NYCEDC President and CEO James Patchett. “We hope others are inspired by initiatives such as the MIT delta v program at the NYC Startup Studio, which supports the City’s efforts to foster entrepreneurship and create jobs, and will only further cement New York City as a tech leader.”

The summer program will culminate with Demo Day on September 12, where teams from both MIT and New York will have the opportunity to present their businesses to an audience of investors, customers, alumni, mentors, and more.

MIT delta v Demo Day details:

Wednesday, September 12, 5:15pm doors, 6:00pm start
Wilmer Hale, 7 World Trade Center
Event is by invitation only and also features a keynote from Fred Wilson of Union Sq Partners.

About the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship

The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship educates students in innovation-driven entrepreneurship in a manner that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. Our focus is to provide MIT students with proven frameworks, courses, co-curricular programs, state-of-the-art facilities, advisory services, and processes that create a rigorous, practical, customized, and integrated educational experience. It also holds a leadership role in advancing the field of entrepreneurship globally. Founded in 1990 by MIT Professor Edward Roberts, the Martin Trust Center serves all MIT students across all schools and all disciplines.

About the MIT Trust Center NYC Startup Studio:

The MIT Trust Center NYC Startup Studio is a rigorous three-month educational student venture creation accelerator based in New York City and run by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. The Studio was founded in 2017 to extend the reach of the successful MIT delta v accelerator program that provides a capstone educational opportunity for MIT students to pursue their entrepreneurial interests with funding, structure, support, and space over the summer. New York City was selected as the first beachhead to expand MIT delta v because of its vibrant community of specific industries. For summer 2018, the Studio is bringing seven diverse, student-led MIT startup teams to NYC to enhance the students' educational experiences and viability of their ventures through the proven delta v process, but, in this case, as a fully resident member of the NYC ecosystem.

About Cornell Tech

Cornell Tech brings together faculty, business leaders, tech entrepreneurs and students in a catalytic environment to produce visionary results grounded in significant needs that will reinvent the way we live in the digital age. The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute embodies the academic partnership between the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Cornell University on the Cornell Tech campus.

From 2012-2017, the campus was temporarily located in Google’s New York City building. In fall 2017, 30 world-class faculty and about 300 graduate students moved to the first phase of Cornell Tech’s permanent campus on Roosevelt Island, continuing to conduct groundbreaking research, collaborate extensively with tech-oriented companies and organizations, and pursue their own startups. When fully completed, the campus will include two million square feet of state-of-the-art buildings, over two acres of open space, and will be home to more than 2,000 graduate students and hundreds of faculty and staff.

About Two Sigma Ventures

Two Sigma Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund that leverages the resources of a world-class data and technology-driven asset management firm to invest in transformative companies that are harnessing information and computing power to change the world.