The BioInnovation Lab is a proud partner and contributor to the UC Davis student entrepreneurial landscape. Student start-ups are welcome to use the BioInnovation Lab begin to build their innovations.
Student entrepreneurs who have utilized the BioInnovation Lab have come from the Student Startup Center, iGEM, the Mike and Renee Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Big Bang! & Little Bang! competitions), or students directly reaching out to the lab with their own ideas.
Our lab provides student innovators safety training and mentorship to help students develop their ideas. We've highlighted some of our previous student entrepreneur groups below:
Ambercycle
Ambercycle's mission is to end waste in the fashion industry. The Ambercycle™ Ecosystem enables the consolidation, regeneration, and reintegration of end-of-life textiles back into supply chains, reducing the extraction of finite resources from the planet. Inspired by work from the 2012 UC Davis iGEM Team, Shay Sethi and his partner Moby Ahmed performed some of their initial experiments in the BioInnovation Lab in 2014-2015. Amercycle recently announced $21.5 million in investments in January of 2022.
Ravata Solutions
From their ideations in the dormitories of UC Davis, Ravata Solutions founders Gurkern Sufi and Arshia Firouzi developed a novel platform to perform IVF, disease model generation, and transgenics. The BioInnovation Lab served as an important resource to refine and recalibrate their initial ideas into the technology they have today.
Visit the Ravata Solutions Website
3D-OPS
The team of Haley Noelle, Avery Williamson and Preston Vanderpan developed the idea for 3D-OPS in the basement of Shields Library in 2019. To continue the development of their idea, they successfully applied to become a student-run research team within the BioInnovation Group and started developing their ideas in the BioInnovation Lab. Since then, their innovations have shown tremendous promise, have a publication in the Journal of Student Research and have won multiple awards (both at UC Davis and nationally - see image below) for their innovations.
(Title banner photo curtesy of Ambercycle.)
BioInnovation Lab support of these projects have been made possible by a grant from Venturewell.