Campus Announcements
A new biotech laboratory, another lofty national ranking for an accelerator, and changes to a coding school’s expansion plans are among these recent headlines from Wisconsin’s innovation community:
—Milwaukee-based Wantable raised more than $2 million from investors, according to a regulatory filing. The startup ships curated boxes containing clothing, makeup, accessories, and other items to a mostly young, female customer base. The new financing brings the total amount Wantable has raised to more than $4.3 million.
Los Angeles accelerators Amplify.LA and MuckerLab, as well as Techstars of Boulder, Colo., which runs a local healthcare accelerator on behalf of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, have been ranked as top accelerators by an academic study.
Two Los Angeles seed accelerators ranked among the best in the country, according to an academic survey. Amplify.LA and MuckerLab both made the “platinum” tier of the Seed Accelerator Rankings Project. Also topping the list was Techstars, the Boulder, Colo., accelerator that helped get the Disney Accelerator up and running and partners on a healthcare accelerator at Cedars-Sinai.
A project created to rank startup accelerators, has put three, Southern California startup accelerators among the top programs in the U.S. for startup accelerators, according to results released at SXSW over the weekend.
Gener8tor, a start-up training program that operates in Milwaukee and Madison, was named one of the top 16 accelerators in the country Friday by the Seed Accelerator Rankings Project at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.
The annual rankings are compiled by Yael Hochberg, an entrepreneurship professor at Rice University and researcher at MIT, and colleagues at the University of Richmond and MIT. They are an important measure used by high-potential start-ups to determine which programs they want to aim to join.
The School of Professional & Continuing Studies has named a director and hired a program coordinator to lead Partners in the Arts, Richmond’s premiere creativity-in-education integration program.
Health Wildcatters got recognized for the first time in an annual report ranking seed accelerators. It scored a Silver ranking while Healthbox attained a Gold in the Seed Accelerator Rankings Project.
Hubert Zajicek is the head of the Dallas-based Wildcatters accelerator, which has been around since 2012. It has 32 portfolio companies and is currently looking for applicants for its Fall class later this year.
Researchers from Rice University, MIT and the University of Richmond took another stab at determining which accelerator programs do the best for their founders in rankings announced at South By Southwest this year in Austin.
It's no surprise that the Bay Area, home to six of the programs named in the study, had the greatest number of highly ranked startup launch pads in the country.