David Krane is in an enviable position. As the CEO of GV, the venture firm that is funded entirely by Google to the tune of $1 billion a year, his team of roughly 100 gets to make a lot of bets ' with just a couple of notable restrictions. During a TechCrunch StrictlyVC event in San Francisco earlier this month, Krane said GV has invested in a stunning 800 companies across the last five years and invested more than $10 billion across its 15-year history. None has received as much in one shot as Uber, whose $258 million Series C round was funded solely by GV way back in 2013. Still, GV still goes big at times, for example, plugging $140 million into the data infrastructure startup Cribl back in August as part of a $319 million Series E round. In fact, because GV invests purely for financial returns, Krane says, there are few limitations on how it can operate. To date, that has meant that GV has mostly invested in the U.S., with roughly half a billion invested in its second-biggest market, Europe. That has meant splitting half its time focused on life sciences, health care, and biotech, and the other half on an all-encompassing 'digital' category....
From a new Institute-wide effort aimed at addressing climate change to a collaborative that brings together MIT researchers and local hospitals to advance health and medicine, a Nobel prize win for two economists examining economic disparities and a roller-skating rink that brought some free fun to Kendall Square this summer, MIT faculty, researchers, students, alumni, and staff brought their trademark inventiveness and curiosity-driven spirit to the news. Below please enjoy a sampling of some of the uplifting news moments MIT affiliates enjoyed over the past year. Kornbluth cheers for MIT to tackle climate changeBoston Globe reporter Jon Chesto spotlights how MIT President Sally Kornbluth is 'determined to harness MIT's considerable brainpower to tackle' climate change.Full story via The Boston Globe MIT's 'high-impact' initiative The MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative is a new effort designed to 'spur high-impact discoveries and health solutions through interdisciplinary projects across engineering, science, AI, economics, business, policy, design, and the humanities.' Full story via Boston Business Journal...
The year 2024 saw MIT moving forward on a number of new initiatives, including the launch of President Sally Kornbluth's signature Climate Project at MIT, as well as two other major MIT collaborative projects, one focused around human-centered disciplines and another around the life sciences. The Institute also announced free tuition for all admitted students with family incomes below $200,000; honored commitments to ensure support for diverse voices; and opened a flurry of new buildings and spaces across campus. Here are some of the top stories from around the MIT community this year. In February, President Kornbluth announced the sweeping Climate Project at MIT, a major campus-wide effort to solve critical climate problems with all possible speed. The project focuses MIT's strengths on six broad climate-related areas where progress is urgently needed, and mission directors were selected for those areas in July. 'The Climate Project is a whole-of-MIT mobilization,' Kornbluth said at a liftoff event in September. 'It's designed to focus the Institute's talent and resources so that we can achieve much more, faster, in terms of real-world impact, from mitigation to adaptation.'...
Frida Polli, a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, investor, and inventor known for her leading-edge contributions at the crossroads of behavioral science and artificial intelligence, is MIT's new visiting innovation scholar for the 2024-25 academic year. She is the first visiting innovation scholar to be housed within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Polli began her career in academic neuroscience with a focus on multimodal brain imaging related to health and disease. She was a fellow at the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Group at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School. She then joined the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT as a postdoc, where she worked with John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences. Her research has won many awards, including a Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. She authored over 30 peer-reviewed articles, with notable publications in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Neuroscience, and Brain. She transitioned from academia to entrepreneurship by completing her MBA at the Harvard Business School (HBS) as a Robert Kaplan Life Science Fellow. During this time, she also won the Life Sciences Track and the Audience Choice Award in the 2010 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship competition as a member of Aukera Therapeutics....