The University Venture Studio Gap Is Real, and Here’s How We’re Closing It in Berkeley
Evan Allen from the 9.8 Collective recently posted something on LinkedIn that caught my attention: research universities are starting to build venture studios, and most of the ecosystem hasn’t noticed yet. His argument is sharp and worth reading in full. The core thesis is that universities sit on massive reserves of IP, technical talent, and infrastructure, yet lack a commercialization system that moves at market speed. Tech transfer offices license patents. Accelerators run cohorts. Neither builds companies.
A venture studio fills that gap.
He’s right. And we’ve been building toward exactly this at UC Berkeley, not by waiting for the institution to design a top-down solution, but by creating complementary structures that work together to move deep tech from the lab to the market.
The Problem We Kept Running Into
Berkeley is one of the most prolific research universities in the world. The campus generates an extraordinary volume of breakthrough science across energy, materials, biotech, AI, and more. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory sits in the hills above campus. NASA projects flow through the ecosystem. The talent pipeline is world-class.
But having great science and having great companies are two very different things. The gap between a promising research result and a commercially viable venture is enormous, and it’s a gap that traditional university infrastructure was never designed to close.
Tech transfer offices do important work, but they operate on licensing timelines, not startup timelines. Accelerators can help founders who already exist, but what about technologies that don’t have a founder yet? What about research that needs months of commercial validation before anyone can even assess whether it’s worth building a company around?
This is the zero-to-one problem. And it’s the hardest part.
Building the Deep Tech Innovation Lab
That’s why we created the UC Berkeley Deep Tech Innovation Lab (DTIL), housed at the Haas School of Business through the Tusher Strategic Initiative for Technology Leadership. The lab exists at the intersection of Berkeley’s engineering, business, and law schools, and its purpose is deceptively simple: evaluate the commercial viability of real-world deep tech projects before anyone writes a check or quits their day job.
Each semester, interdisciplinary teams of graduate students from engineering, business, and law are matched with projects from organizations like Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NASA, funded startups, and early-stage ventures. Whether it’s a national lab technology searching for its first market or a Series A company navigating a new vertical, our student teams help founders and researchers evaluate opportunities and risks at the intersection of business, technology, and law.
The frameworks they deploy have been developed by DTIL faculty over the past 25 years and go far beyond a standard business plan exercise. Our assessments include patent landscape analysis to map the IP terrain and identify risks and opportunities related to competitive moats, regulatory assessments that surface compliance hurdles before they become deal-breakers, and competitive technology analysis that benchmarks a venture’s technical differentiation against the state of the art. On the commercial side, teams conduct business model and market entry assessments, run customer discovery interviews to identify and acquire potential customers, and help founders evaluate both dilutive and non-dilutive funding sources, from federal grants and SBIR awards to venture capital and strategic partnerships.
Students gain real experience in deep tech commercialization. Projects get the kind of structured, multidisciplinary scrutiny that most university programs simply don’t provide. And the ecosystem gets an informed, evidence-based view of which technologies have genuine commercial potential and what it will take to get them there.
The lab doesn’t replace tech transfer or venture capital. It fills the analytical gap that sits between a scientific breakthrough and an investment decision, giving startups the kind of deep, interdisciplinary diligence that would otherwise cost tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees. It’s the commercialization intelligence layer that the university ecosystem has been missing.
From Evaluation to Execution: The Berkeley Gateway Accelerator
But evaluation alone isn’t enough. Once you’ve identified technologies and teams with real commercial potential, someone has to help build the company. That’s where the Berkeley Gateway Accelerator comes in.
The Gateway Accelerator is run by Future Frontier Capital and is not formally affiliated with UC Berkeley, and that independence is intentional. It allows us to move at market speed, make investment decisions, and operate with the commercial discipline that a venture studio model demands, while still drawing deeply on the Berkeley ecosystem.
Here’s how it works in practice. The Gateway Accelerator is a five-month immersive residency program based in Berkeley, designed to help deep tech startups establish a U.S. market presence and scale. Founders live in Berkeley with access to furnished housing and dedicated office space, and receive hands-on support across U.S. market entry strategy, customer discovery, IP positioning, and regulatory navigation.
Critically, each startup in the program is matched with full-time Entrepreneurial Fellows recruited from UC Berkeley’s top graduate programs. These fellows aren’t interns shadowing from the sidelines. They embed directly into the startup as core team members, executing on customer discovery, technical validation, partner outreach, and market analysis. This is where the talent pipeline from DTIL and the broader Berkeley ecosystem becomes a direct competitive advantage. We’re hiring the best students who’ve already spent a semester doing deep tech commercial assessment, and deploying them into startups that need exactly those skills.
We also invest opportunistically in companies through the program, including ventures that have gone through the Deep Tech Innovation Lab, though investment decisions are independent and driven by commercial merit.
Why This Architecture Matters
Evan Allen’s LinkedIn post draws an important distinction between accelerators and venture studios that university leadership often misses. Accelerators support existing founders with programming and mentorship. Studios create ventures from scratch, with dedicated teams, defined governance, and a thesis that maps to research strengths.
What we’ve built at Berkeley isn’t a pure venture studio in the classic sense, but it achieves something similar through a coordinated architecture:
The Deep Tech Innovation Lab provides the analytical foundation: rigorous commercial evaluation of frontier technologies, staffed by interdisciplinary graduate teams who learn by doing real work on real projects.
The Berkeley Gateway Accelerator provides the execution engine: a residency-based program with embedded talent, hands-on support, and capital deployment for ventures that demonstrate genuine commercial potential.
The talent pipeline connects the two. Students who cut their teeth on DTIL projects become the Entrepreneurial Fellows who help build companies through the Gateway Accelerator. The learning compounds. The network deepens. The quality of both the evaluation and the execution improves over time.
This is not a rubber-stamp innovation program. It’s an integrated system designed to do the hardest thing in deep tech: move promising science from zero to one.
Lessons from a Global Perspective
We’re not the only ones thinking about this. A fascinating piece by Cam Watson on Substack documents how Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University’s Entrepreneurship Campus (XEC) in China is building what may be one of the most ambitious university venture creation systems in the world, with 3,000 students actively engaged in venture-oriented work, dedicated prototyping facilities across industry-themed schools, and an in-house venture builder called X³ CoVenture that launched 30 projects in its first year and is doubling output in its second.
The XEC model is purpose-built and operates at a scale that’s difficult to replicate in the U.S. context, where university governance structures and funding models create different constraints. But the underlying insight is the same one Evan Allen identified: venture creation can be treated as a capability that is designed for, with structure, incentives, capital, and infrastructure aligned from the outset, rather than left to chance.
What’s encouraging is that the direction of travel is converging. Whether it’s a public-private joint venture model like the one Evan describes, a fully integrated campus system like XEC, or the complementary architecture we’ve built in Berkeley, the core recognition is the same: the biggest barrier isn’t capital. It’s institutional understanding.
What Comes Next
The universities that figure this out first will have a structural advantage that’s difficult to replicate. In Berkeley, we’re continuing to expand the Deep Tech Innovation Lab’s project portfolio, deepen our partnerships with national labs and research groups, grow the Gateway Accelerator’s cohort of startups, and build out the Entrepreneurial Fellows program as a direct bridge between the university and the ventures it helps create.
We’re not waiting for the ecosystem to notice. We’re building.
If you’re a deep tech founder looking to build in the Bay Area, a researcher with commercially promising technology, or a Berkeley graduate student interested in becoming an Entrepreneurial Fellow, we’d love to hear from you. Visit deeptech.berkeley.edu and futurefrontier.vc/gateway to learn more.
This post was created with help from Claude. Images were created by Midjourney.