UPCOMING EVENTS
Tuesdays at 3:00 PM: April 21 & 28, 2020
“A crisis is an opportunity riding the dangerous wind.”
Join virtual accelerator, Silicon Valley in Your Pocket for a crisis management webinar to help startups support, navigate, and triumph over this pandemic. Upcoming discussions will cover:
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Alternate Funding (4/21): Is your business is sound, what are the different approaches to financing it?
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We Have a Better Future (4/28): Futurists and entrepreneurs come together to share a look at the future of now.
Register here to join the free series.
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Virtual Screening on Zoom
Join Hustle Hunters for a screening of The Real Moms of Silicon Valley. This documentary interviews a diverse set of moms in the local tech industry and the challenges they face. A discussion of the balance (or non-balance) that many parents have to face, as well as an opportunity for solidarity, education, and above all a community building experience will follow the screening. This film is free and open to everyone.
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Friday, May 1, 2020
3:00-9:30 pm
LAUNCH is designed to transform early-stage University of California startups into fundable companies. From 120+ applications this year, judges selected 22 of the most promising startups in the UC system. LAUNCH's virtual demo day will feature 10 of the UC Berkeley LAUNCH accelerator's top startups pitching to win over $40K in total prizes.
Get your tickets now. Investor passes for Demo Day are currently selling at a special discount of $25, which ends today (Monday 4/20).
RESOURCES & DEADLINES
Application deadline: Friday, Apr 24, 2020
Online classes are May 11, 13, 18 @ 6-9pm
The Bay Area Regional I-Corps Node offers a one-week course based on Steve Blank's Lean LaunchPad (Business Model Canvas + Customer Discovery). The three evening sessions will teach you to identify and refine your Value Propositions and Customer Segments, which are essential to de-risking your idea and achieving product-market fit. Outside of class, you'll do at least 15 interviews with potential customers as part of the customer discovery process. Teams that complete this course with instructor endorsement may qualify for the National I-Corps program which includes a $30k or $50k grant for customer discovery.
Apply today. If you have any questions, contact Eugene Noh.
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As business owners and leaders in our region, we need you to provide crucial information about the COVID-19 impacts to your businesses so that the City of Berkeley-- and East Bay region--can effectively advocate for resources that can address your most important needs.
Take the East Bay EDA Recovery Survey now.
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The Berkeley Lab's Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Development Unit (ABPDU) is a collaboration facility that works with industry at the early stages of manufacturing process development for new bioproducts. ABPDU can rapidly develop bioprocesses to generate novel COVID-19 therapeutics and accelerate the timeline to take your bio-innovation to market. The ABPDU has the infrastructure to help industry through bioprocessing methods such as fermentation or chemical catalysis and purification.
To learn more about how ABPDU can assist your efforts in developing new bioproducts that can assist in the COVID-19 response, email ABPDU.
Visit the QB3 Jobs website to see current listings from hundreds of life science companies.
If you would like to post a job listing, please contact QB3 with your name, email address, company name, and website URL. QB3 jobs are cross-posted on Glassdoor and Nature Careers California.
LOCAL ENTREPRENEURS MAKING NEWS
SkyDeck is the latest example of a Berkeley accelerator going remote in the new reality of COVID-19. Orientation began March 30 for 110 very early stage startups in SkyDeck's incubator program and 24 startups in its accelerator program, which provided $105,000 investment, as well as mentorship and UC Berkeley resources. Given the tight turnaround required to transform a physical program into a remote incarnation, SkyDeck will take a trial-and-error approach, starting with “virtual coffee sessions” between mentors and founders and online special interest groups on specific subjects.
See the latest press on SkyDeck in the San Francisco Business Times and on VentureBeat.com
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Squishy Robotics Selected for Capitol Hill Start-up Showcase
Squishy Robotics, Inc. was selected to participate in the 2020 University Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) Showcase in Washington, D.C., scheduled for September 2020. The third annual event will feature 20 top university-affiliated startup companies from across the nation to highlight the important role of federally funded university research in driving high-value entrepreneurship, startup technology, and the U.S. innovation economy. Squishy Robotics is part of the Spring 2019 SkyDeck portfolio and provides lifesaving, cost-saving information in real time through rapidly deployable mobile sensor robots.
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Berkeley's Rigetti Computing, an integrated quantum systems company, has been awarded $8.6 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as part of a larger collaboration with the NASA Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) and Universities Space Research Association (USRA), to develop a full-stack system with proven quantum advantage for solving real world problems. The work will address complex scheduling problems that remain hard or impossible for classical computers to solve.
Learn more about Rigetti's award from Yahoo! Finance.
Berkeley-based Pivot Bio teamed up with the Future Farmers of America (FFA), an intracurricular student organization for those interested in agriculture and leadership, to encourage students to continue their agricultural education with a fun video challenge. FFA students self-produced and posted video on Facebook or Twitter highlighting their agricultural education projects. The deadline for video submission is 4/30/2020.
Check out the #ffavideochallenge posts on Twitter and Facebook.
Researchers are scrutinizing COVID-19 genome sequencing data for insight into the disease by using supercomputing resources at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). NERSC is a member of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium and has reserved a portion of its Director’s Discretionary Reserve time on Cori, a Cray XC40 supercomputer, to support COVID-19 research efforts.
Learn more about the Computing Sciences Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Keep in Touch
To submit information or questions about the Berkeley Startup Cluster contact: oedmailbox@cityofberkeley.info
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