The Third Coast Foundry just took a massive step forward in the American innovation landscape.
During the week of June 2026, San Francisco set the stage for an event that brought together the most exciting players in the Deep Tech startup world from the American Midwest.
A total of 40 companies were showcased, more than 200 people filled the audience, and the investors in the room collectively manage around $110 billion in capital.
You don’t see numbers like that in a single room every day. 🚀
The event marked the official launch of an innovation hub created by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago, alongside seven other partner universities from the American Midwest. The goal is to connect founders and researchers from the region with the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
And the result? An evening that proved, in real time, the enormous untapped potential still waiting to be discovered outside the traditional Bay Area spotlight.
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What is the Third Coast Foundry and why it matters
The Third Coast Foundry is a joint initiative from eight Midwest research universities that decided to do something different: instead of each one nurturing its own ecosystem in isolation, they came together to build a shared support structure for founders and researchers developing cutting-edge technologies. The idea is to give these talented individuals a new pathway to build relationships with investors and partners in the Bay Area, leveraging a shared physical presence in San Francisco.
The official launch came complete with a ribbon-cutting ceremony that brought together leaders from all eight universities and even featured San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie. He made a point of highlighting how important academic institutions are to the city. Universities bring incredible energy, the mayor said. They bring new ideas and new people to our city, strengthen the culture of innovation that has defined San Francisco for generations, and that is exactly what we want more of here in the heart of the city.
Samir Mayekar, managing director of the Polsky Center, also laid out the spirit of the initiative clearly. According to him, the Third Coast Foundry exists to create new opportunities for university-backed founders and researchers from the Midwest to build relationships with investors and partners in the Bay Area. The universities bring deep research expertise, talented founders, and strong startup ecosystems, and this shared presence in San Francisco offers one more pathway to connect and grow.
The core mission of the program is to solve a real, well-documented problem: many of the best research breakthroughs and emerging technologies coming out of universities in the heartland end up dying before they ever become real companies, simply because founders lack access to the right networks of capital and mentorship. The Third Coast Foundry steps into that exact gap, providing structure, connections, and visibility so these ventures can gain traction in the market.
Another point worth paying attention to is the timing. The Deep Tech market is in a strong growth phase, driven by advances in artificial intelligence, biotech, quantum computing, and advanced materials. Global investors are paying closer attention to opportunities outside the traditional hubs, especially after it became clear that the model of extreme concentration in a handful of geographic hotspots has its limits. The Midwest, with its world-class research universities and more accessible operating costs, has landed on the radar of anyone watching for the next cycle of innovation.
The startups and what they represent for the Deep Tech sector
Later that same evening, the Midwest Deep Tech Demo Day put all 40 startups face to face with Bay Area investors at the INSEAD San Francisco Hub for Business Innovation. The companies presented are backed by the eight universities that make up the Third Coast Foundry, including the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern University, The Ohio State University, Purdue University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Washington University in St. Louis.
The solutions on display covered an impressive range of fields: advanced materials and manufacturing, cleantech and energy, semiconductors, robotics and space tech, quantum computing, healthtech and medtech, artificial intelligence, and more. What makes it even more interesting is the diversity of where these ventures originate, with companies founded by students, alumni, faculty, and researchers. These are precisely the sectors where Deep Tech makes the most sense: longer development cycles, high technical barriers to entry, and potentially massive impact, both in scale and in relevance to real problems society faces every day.
What sets these companies apart from more conventional startups is exactly the technical depth of their solutions. While a lot of what circulates through innovation ecosystems still revolves around apps, marketplaces, and distribution-driven business models, Deep Tech companies are building genuine intellectual property, developing technologies that take years to mature and that, once they hit the market, are incredibly hard to replicate. That completely changes the conversation with investors, who need patience and long-term vision to bet on this type of company but who also stand to reap proportionally bigger returns when the technology proves itself.
The presence of more than 200 people in the audience, with
The role of universities in this innovation ecosystem
The eight universities that make up the Third Coast Foundry share something that goes beyond geographic location: all of them have highly active research labs and a scientific output that has been fueling entire industries across the United States for decades. What was missing was a structured bridge between that academic production and the venture capital market. Creating a joint program was the approach they chose to gain enough scale and relevance to compete with the country’s major innovation hubs.
Event host Victoria Vic Woo of the INSEAD San Francisco Hub for Business Innovation helped reinforce this idea during the event. She highlighted the strength of the Midwest as a region known for building durable, high-growth companies. The Midwest is one of the most important regions in the United States, Woo said. It is full of builders, entrepreneurs, and operators who create things built to last and scale, and that is exactly what we need right now.
University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos also took the stage and spoke directly to the investors in attendance, emphasizing the rare level of cooperation among major research institutions. It is not every day that eight universities come together like this, he said. We have come together with a deep spirit of cooperation because we know we can bring to the Bay Area a caliber of founders that is going to get you excited. Alivisatos also had an encouraging message for the entrepreneurs: To all the founders here, we are so excited about what you have come to present. I have been in your shoes. Sometimes you have to make a few pitches, but we are all rooting for you.
This kind of coordination between universities and the entrepreneurial ecosystem is nothing new globally. Silicon Valley itself has deep roots in Stanford and UC Berkeley. Boston owes much of its biotech strength to MIT and Harvard. What the Third Coast Foundry is doing is applying that same logic to a region that has the academic assets it needs but historically has not had the same level of organization to turn research into companies. The San Francisco event was, in that sense, an important symbolic milestone: a public declaration that this region wants to and can compete at the highest level.
For the participating startups, the university seal of approval also represents a concrete advantage when talking to investors. There is a technical credibility baked into that association that helps shorten the path to first serious meetings. On top of that, access to research infrastructure, emerging talent, and international scientific networks are real differentiators that very few private accelerators can match with the same depth. The hybrid model between academia and the market seems to be exactly what this Deep Tech segment needed to grow on solid footing.
What lies ahead for the ecosystem
Both the ribbon-cutting ceremony and the Demo Day were part of an intense week of launch activities, offering a preview of what the new San Francisco hub was designed to make possible: connections between Midwest founders and the investors and partners they need to accelerate their growth. As Mayekar put it, the Third Coast Foundry was built to make these connections more consistent, more intentional, and more impactful. The events show the strength of what universities can accomplish together and the caliber of founders emerging from the Midwest.
For the innovation ecosystem as a whole, initiatives like this are a welcome development. Excessive geographic concentration creates distortions: it drives up costs, narrows the diversity of perspectives, and leaves out a huge amount of talent that simply cannot relocate to San Francisco or New York. When a program like the Third Coast Foundry starts firing on all cylinders, it does not just benefit local founders — it enriches the entire ecosystem with new approaches, new problems, and new ways of thinking about technology and the market.
Midwest Deep Tech is on the map. And with $110 billion in capital in the room paying attention, it is hard to ignore what is coming next. 🌎
