Strong interest in AU Launch grant to boost entrepreneurial ambitions among researchers and students

12 November 2024 by Lonni Klitgaard

It is time to raise the ambitions of a number of entrepreneurial researchers and students who have just received financial support from Aarhus University.

Through the AU Launch grant, 11 startups founded by researchers and four student startups will receive capital for their entrepreneurial journey for a total amount of DKK 2.5 million. The funds, which comes from the innovation grant from the Research Reserve and from the Salling Foundations, are earmarked to commercialise new technologies or strengthen companies' ability to become attractive to investors and future funding.

AU Launch was launched in August 2022 and offered for the second time in August this year to accommodate younger AU companies that find it difficult to raise so-called venture capital to develop their business. This challenge arises from the fact that research-based business ideas are often founded on untested concepts or fledgling technologies, complicating the assessment of the commercial potential. External capital is therefore crucial for companies to grow large and contribute to the number of Danish jobs and growth.

One of the startups that has received funding from AU Launch is Azpire Capital, which was founded by three students and graduates from the Master of Science in Economics and Business Administration programme in Finance. They started Azpire to ensure responsible investment in emerging markets, and they appreciate the financial support:

"We are very grateful for this recognition and confidence in our project. This is an important milestone for us at Azpire Capital, which strengthens our foundation and gives us a better framework to build on our company. We look forward to leveraging the opportunities that the support gives us and continuing our work to create a fund that enables you to be invested in crypto responsibly."

The researchers behind Cacto Health are also lucky recipients of the grant. They are behind the development of a digital platform that gives women with a history of breast cancer the opportunity to monitor their lymphedema at home and detect lymphedema at an early stage:

"This grant will help us push product development one step closer to clinical trials."

Diversity in the field of applicants

Applications have come from all faculties at Aarhus University, with a success rate of over 40 per cent everywhere. This year, more applications have been received from teams composed of more genders than from teams consisting of just men or women.

Head of the business developers at The Kitchen, Jonas Brandt, sees this as an advantage:

"Diversity is an important parameter in entrepreneurship. It is about academic breadth in the team, where aspects such as age and gender are important. Nevertheless, the startup field is dominated by a predominance of younger men, and professionally many of them come from the STEM area. In recent years, The Kitchen has therefore focused on gender diversity, just as we are collaborating with our own Arts faculty and the other Danish universities on a special effort towards SSHA (Social Sciences, Humanities & Arts). We are thrilled to see this effort bear fruit in the field of applicants for AU Launch."

In total, almost DKK 5 million was applied for. And the need for a financial injection among the start-up entrepreneurs indicates that AU Launch has once again hit an important vein in the study and research environments.

"We have again been surprised by the high number of applications - 41 applications for a total of almost DKK 5 million. Many of the applications have also proved to be worthy of support, so we're pleased that we've been able to help 20 projects make progress in their journey to bring knowledge from AU out into the world," Jonas Brandt says.

The AU Launch grant will be offered again in 2025.