Why support Founders?
We are dedicated to nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship while supporting Purdue students, alumni, and faculty. Our values are anchored in three foundational pillars: Networking, Building, and Raising. Sponsorships play a crucial role in realizing these goals, offering vital resources to propel our community forward.
Networking
We are improving the way investors, alumni, and student founders connect with each other. In the coming months, we are launching 2 databases: the startup vault and the alumni database.
The startup vault is a list of all early stage companies at Purdue. If any alumnus/investor wants to connect with a specific startup, all they need to do is email us.
The alumni database is a consolidated list of all industry leaders Purdue affiliated domain experts in the startup world. As student founders need support, they reach out to us and we connect them with the appropriate alumnus willing to help.
Sponsors enable us to organize impactful networking events and workshops, bringing together students, alumni, and industry leaders. This also ensures our community remains connected globally, year-round.
Building
We are actively working to supply students with the necessary tools, knowledge, and support to transform their ideas into successful companies. We are building 2 systems to efficiently distribute these resources: hosting flagship events and building a resource hub.
Our flagship events are designed to be a space where founders can do what they do best: build, launch, pitch, and iterate. This past March we hosted Catapult, Purdue's first STEM x Business Challenge. We built Catapult as a 24 hour incubator to find a problem, build a solution, and pitch it to judges. We anticipated less than 100 students participating in the challenge, but were quickly met with over 300 applicants as well as 38 unique pitches at the event. We simply cannot keep up with the demand.
Additionally, the resource hub is our database packed with cutting-edge technology and software tools accessible to all members. We recently launched a program to use ChatGPT+ for a fraction of the traditional price and were overwhelmed with the number of requests to get access.
Sponsors enable us to run more large scale events and keep up with the growing demand from Purdue students to have an environment to build things people want. This also ensures our community has the best resources to help them create value.
Raising
Now that we have built a stable foundation at the top of the entrepreneurship funnel, we are seeing an increase of startups in need of capital to scale fast. We are working to build a deal flow system to provide early stage funds across the nation access to the most promising startups Purdue has to offer.
Through sponsorships, we would also be able to host pitch competitions. This opens up new avenues to inject a small amount of capital into a handful of startups and see how far they can go. This April, we are hosting our very own Demo Day as a way to connect founders with investors.
