Venture Studio
Let's Build What's Next, Together
Translating Intellectual Property
From Lab to Market
The NJII Venture Studio is a co-founding partner for researchers, universities, research institutes,
and corporations ready to bring their most promising innovations to market.
What We Do
Breakthrough research deserves more than a licensing deal. The NJII Venture Studio partners with institutions and intellectual property (IP) holders at the earliest stage, before a company exists, to build startups from the ground up. We bring capital, operational leadership, and a proven commercialization infrastructure to turn protected IP into venture-backed companies.
What We Look For
We partner with institutions and IP holders whose innovations meet the following criteria:
Protectable IP
Your technology is grounded in defensible intellectual property: a patent, patent application, or proprietary method developed through a university, research institute, corporation, or independent research. You’ve developed a working prototype that demonstrates commercial relevance.
The strength and defensibility of the IP is the foundation of everything we build together.
Pre-Formation or Early Stage
We want to be involved from the beginning. We look for innovations that have not yet been incorporated into a company, or where a company has only recently been formed without significant outside capital or a pre-built executive team. The earlier, the better.
A Real Problem with a Real Market
The technology should address a clearly identifiable problem for an identifiable customer. You have begun performing market validation research and customer discovery to confirm that the underlying need is real.
A Path to a Major Milestone in 18 Months
We build toward a meaningful financial inflection point within 18 months of investment, whether that's profitability, a high-value commercial contract, future financing, etc. Sectors with multi-year development cycles and/or complex regulatory pathways are not the right fit for our model.
How We Build
We launch 2–3 new ventures each year, selected from a pipeline of 100+ ideas. Every company we build gets capital, founding leadership, a home base at the Profeta Center in Newark, and hands-on support through an 18-month build phase. Our full evaluation process (from initial review through customer discovery and business strategy) can take up to six months. We move deliberately and methodically because the decisions made at this stage determine everything that follows.
Source
We scout protected IP and pre-incorporation innovations from universities, research institutes, corporations, and independent inventors across New Jersey and beyond.
Hypothesize
We conduct rigorous commercial due diligence: assessing IP defensibility, market opportunity, regulatory considerations, and the realistic path to a financial milestone.
Engage Partners
We identify and align corporate partners early as co-builders, anchor customers, or strategic funders, to de-risk the venture before launch.
Build the Business
We drive business planning, financial modeling, customer discovery, and go-to-market strategy in partnership with the IP holder.
Form & Fund:
We incorporate a new C-Corp and invest up to $1M as a co-founding equity partner.
We take a meaningful founding stake not as a passive investor, but as an active builder.
Accelerate:
We provide back-office infrastructure, legal, financial, and operational support through the build phase so the founding team can focus on customers and product.
Let's Build, Together.
Whether you're a founder, funder, or technologist, there's a place for you in the NJII Venture Studio.
Corporate Partners
Looking for R&D co-builds, spinouts, or early access to innovation in your vertical? Let’s collaborate.
Entrepreneurs & Executives
Want to run a venture-backed startup in Newark? Join us as a founding CEO.
University Researchers
Have IP and want to bring it to life? Let's turn it into a company.
Tech Transfer Offices
Looking for a commercialization partner with funding and execution capacity? That's us.
Ready to build?
If you're holding the next big idea in AI, healthcare, or advanced manufacturing — or want to run one — we want to meet you. Let’s talk
A New Model for Commercialization, Powered by Partnerships
About NJII
The New Jersey Innovation Institute (NJII) is a 501c3 organization wholly owned by the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). As an independent corporation, NJII is uniquely positioned to be agile, entrepreneurial, and opportunistic. NJII is focused on accelerating technology and fostering innovation in order to have a positive economic impact in New Jersey. To date, NJII has generated over $330M in revenue during its ten years of operation across its four divisions (Healthcare, Defense, Continued Learning, Entrepreneurship) and today has a team of 120 staff. Learn more.
Launch a Startup
with the NJII Venture Studio
Whether you're a founder, researcher, or corporate partner, your responses are the first step you need to take to help us explore how we might work together.
We'll be in touch if it's a good fit.
Let's build what's next, together.