E14 Fund

Franklin Templeton

United States

BRELYON

E14 Fund is the early stage venture capital firm from and for the MIT / Media Lab startup community. Our mission is to serve the whole community; our business model is investing in a subset of the community. We invest in scalable, deep tech startups and donate a portion of profits to MIT.

We’re usually your first investors and most often help when a company is moving from tackling early science or engineering challenges to building and shipping product to address a real market need, moving from using your scientist brain to using your founder brain.

Whether you’re a researcher considering the real-world translation of your work, an alumni who’s thinking about a new idea or a startup looking to connect with industry leaders who might have valuable feedback, become a partner or a customer, E14 Fund is here to help. Brainstorming, spitballing, looking for connections and resources within or outside of MIT.

Built from the common culture of the polytechnic university model at MIT, our community has always married discovery with application, invention with purpose. This has meant billion dollar startups from MIT, year after year after year, for decades. More recently, we’ve seen this pace only increase as researchers have embraced company-building as the best way to scale their impact and the cost and complexity of building a deep tech startup has gone down.

So in 2013, with the hypothesis that stakeholders across the community could use support in scaling new ventures, MIT Media Lab launched an experiment that tested different models of financial and non-financial support. Four years later, having been embraced by the whole community and made investments in successful, fast-growing companies, we launched E14 Fund with a new dedicated team to grow what worked.

With our first fund in 2017 and our second fund in 2020, E14 invests in MIT startups tackling big, meaningful challenges. These startups have some core, differentiated science or engineering that provides a sustainable advantage. Their business models are typically focused on selling products to enterprise customers. In other words, we focus on where we think the resources and relationships across the MIT ecosystem can be the most helpful.

E14 also hosts programs, workshops, alumni get-togethers and other events in Boston, New York, San Francisco and wherever the MIT / Media Lab community is.

Portfolio

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E14 Fund

Funding Rounds

Co-Investors