University of Colorado Boulder is climbing as a hub for forming new startups.

The university announced a record 35 startups launched in the fiscal year of 2023 to 2024 out of the school using its research in fields like clean energy and biotechnology, according to a news release Thursday.

It beats the 2020-2021 record when 20 startups came out of CU Boulder.

The record puts CU Boulder in the league of other top startup-creating U.S. colleges such as Stanford University in Silicon Valley, Columbia University in New York City and MIT in Boston – but is doing so at a lower cost, according to CU Boulder.

The national record for new startups launched in a year is Stanford’s 38 startups launched in 2022 and MIT with 32 startups in 2020, according to data provided by CU Boulder from AUTM, a nonprofit tracking how many startups come from university institutions. Full data from all universities in 2024 has not been released yet.

“Universities spinning out similar numbers of startups have significantly larger research budgets feeding their innovation pipeline,” Bryn Rees, associate vice chancellor for innovation and partnerships, said in a release.

Columbia University is churning out between three or four startups for every $100 million in research funding. Other leading schools are closer to creating two new ventures.

But CU Boulder has spurred closer to five startups for every $100 million.

“That is a top result among leading universities and a real credit to our approach,” Rees said

Some of the budding companies out of CU Boulder are Mana Battery, a sustainable energy company developing sodium-based batteries, Flair Tech that uses Nobel Prize-winning research to detect diseases with breath analysis and 3D-printing company Vitro3D.

Camila Uzcategui, the 31-year-old CEO of Vitro3D who got her Ph.D. in material sciences at CU Boulder, began her startup in 2022 and raised more than $4 million, so far.

Her company is preparing to bring their 3D printers to market later this year toward life science uses such as dental aligners and tissue generation.

The 3D printers can print items 100x faster like a “Star Trek replicator,” she said. Her doctorate research focused on how light changes materials and her team came up with an algorithm to predict how materials transition and it was implemented into the machine. 

For example, most dental aligners need molds of patient’s teeth to be manufactured since most 3D printing technology struggles with complex, transparent materials. Vitro3D can print liners without the use of molds since they can mold the transparent materials with light beams, she said. 

When she began looking into patenting the technology, she said she learned about CU Boulder’s Venture Partners program that helped her navigate going from the academic world to entrepreneurship.

“I knew that I’d wanted to start a company in my career,” Uzcategui said. “I didn’t realize that I was going to have an opportunity to do it so early on.”

And she’s still adjusting her company to best take her research to the marketplace. 

The name of the startup itself comes from wanting to revolutionize the 3D in-vitro cell culture space and get rid of animal testing by creating 3D-printed cell samples for drug companies to experiment on.

But she said Vitro3D is currently considering a new name since their initial hopes for the company would have faced many regulatory hurdles and its actual implementation would be “so far in the future,” she explained. 

“We found some shark bite problems versus mosquito bite problems that we probably could address sooner rather than later,” Uzcategui said.

Rees told The Denver Gazette in an interview that CU Boulder has many great scientists and researchers who have little experience in business, so the institution helps invest in them through its Venture Partners program that gets funding from the National Science Foundation and the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade.

“They have tremendous potential in the field of entrepreneurship, but they need support to do that,” he said. “It’s just an entirely new trajectory for them.”

CU Boulder’s commercialization of its research generated $8 billion to the national economy — about $5.2 billion within Colorado itself — between 2019 and 2022, according to a CU Boulder Leeds school of Business report published in 2022.

Rees said CU Boulder’s 2024 achievement was years in the making and they’re wowed by the large influx of startups in the last year, especially as the tech industry struggles with raising money due to high interest rates, inflation and economic uncertainty following the pandemic.

“It’s a challenging time to raise capital,” Rees said. “But it’s really a testament to not just the quantity of companies that we’re spinning out, but the quality in how much venture capital they’re raising.”