We are usually your first investor and most often help when a company is moving from tackling early science or engineering challenges, to building and shipping products to address a real market need, moving from using your scientist brain to using your founder brain.
Coming from the belief of being a positive contributor to the community's health, we donate a large portion of our profits to MIT. We like to joke that while we are named after the Media Lab building at MIT (Building E14), one day soon, the building will be named after us.
It’s never too early to talk with E14 Fund, and no request is too small. Whether you’re considering the real-world translation of your work, an alumnus who’s thinking about a startup hoping to connect with industry leaders, or looking to become a partner or a customer, E14 Fund is here to help. E14 Fund does not invest in student but we are happy to share advice. Not sure you’re a fit? Just ask.
This has meant billion dollar startups from MIT, year after year after year, for decades. More recently, we’ve seen this pace only increase as researchers have embraced company-building as the best way to scale their impact and the cost and complexity of building a deep tech startup has gone down.
So in 2013, with the hypothesis that stakeholders across the community could use support in scaling new ventures, MIT Media Lab launched an experiment that tested different models of financial and non-financial support. Four years later, having been embraced by the whole community and made investments in successful, fast-growing companies, we launched E14 Fund with a new and dedicated team to grow what worked.
With our first fund in 2017, our second fund in 2020 and our third fund in 2023, E14 invests in MIT startups tackling big, meaningful challenges. These startups have some core, differentiated science or engineering that provides a sustainable advantage. Their business models are typically focused on selling products to enterprise customers. In other words, we focus on where we think the resources and relationships across the MIT ecosystem can be the most helpful.