Brown Venture Launch Fund

The Brown Venture Launch Fund (BVLF) serves the Brown community by encouraging student entrepreneurs to take their ideas and make them into new ventures. The fund is a collaborative project involving the Office of the Dean of the College, the Brown Entrepreneurship Program, and the Social Innovation Initiative. The Brown Venture Launch Fund will provide seed money for new ventures at the earliest stages when funding is so difficult to secure from investors. The fund offers promising ventures the opportunity to apply for three levels of progressively increasing funding using a gated award system. At the first level funding and support will be used to test assumptions or prove hypotheses embedded within venture plans. The second and third stages of funding will be used to bring products and services to market and assist ventures in achieving scale and impact.

The Brown Venture Launch Fund is not a business plan competition. Applicants with strong ideas will have an opportunity to further refine their venture plans via Peer Critique sessions and other resources available at Brown University. All that is required of applicants at the first level is clear understanding of a problem or opportunity, a vision or plan for a project or venture to fill this need, and a readiness to take action. Eligibility criteria, requirements/expectations of grant recipients, and the funding structure are outlined in more detail bellow.

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