Venture Catalyst

STAIR Grant Program

The UC President’s Entrepreneurship Network Council has developed a new initiative called the UC Proof of Concept Program with the goal to identify promising inventions for commercialization at each campus and to provide early-stage support for their development. Venture Catalyst is excited to launch the pilot cycle of the Fall Cohort of the Science Translation and Innovative Research (STAIR) Grant Program at UC Davis. This program is designed to support innovative research projects that have the potential to translate groundbreaking ideas into viable solutions and commercial applications.

The objective of this pilot cycle is to provide seed funding for early-stage research projects, enabling researchers to validate their concepts and explore their market potential.

Early-stage technologies from university research are often perceived as too uncertain or too risky to attract funding or partners to translate into commercial products or services. The lack of accessible funding creates a gap between basic research and early-stage commercialization efforts. The STAIR Grant helps bridge this gap by providing funding and resources to translate basic UC Davis research with commercial potential by demonstrating proof-of-concept and establishing market viability, thus de-risking the innovation. The STAIR Grant program will support new and innovative ideas and enable their transformation into impactful business ventures or make the funded projects attractive for licensing to industry and investors. The ultimate objective of the program is to develop technologies that attract entrepreneurs, industry, and investors willing to commercialize UC Davis technologies, resulting in societal and economic impacts aligned with our Land Grant status.

Successful projects will advance UC Davis technologies towards commercialization by achieving specific research and development milestones. Outcomes that might be enabled by STAIR Grant funding include, but are not limited to:

• Generating translational data or research results to create more robust foundational intellectual property (IP), therefore strengthening patent claims.
• Testing commercial and market feasibility.
• Building a working prototype or second iteration prototype to prepare for commercialization.
• Demonstrating scale-up development potential that would be compelling to external partners.
• Producing results that support more competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant applications and/or hitting a technical de-risking milestone that would make the technology more appealing to partners or investors.

Key features of the STAIR Program include: 1) targeted funding to bridge the gap between basic research and early-stage commercialization efforts, 2) project work conducted over a 12-month period, 3) a Review Committee consisting of industry representatives with corporate, investor, and entrepreneurial expertise, 4) feedback and guidance on commercialization from members of the Review Committee and the Venture Catalyst team, and 5) structured entrepreneurial training.

Impact Areas
Proposed projects will be awarded based on their focus on solutions applying to at least one of this pilot cycle’s four Impact Areas. These categories are chosen not only because they are areas of excellence at UC Davis, but because of their interdisciplinary nature. Applicants from all disciplines are encouraged to apply if they have translational research in one of these areas:

1. Sustainability and Climate
2. Food and Agriculture
3. Animal Health
4. Computing, Electronics and Information Systems

Eligibility Criteria
Projects eligible for STAIR grant funding will feature an early-stage technology, that meets one or more of the following criteria:

• Has advanced beyond the basic research stage, but requires early proof-of-concept data to show feasibility for commercial potential
• Has demonstrated successful results in the research environment and is poised for commercialization pending a specific, targeted demonstration, test result, or prototype
• Has reached a critical stage of technology development, whereby specific questions pertaining to commercialization feasibility can be answered within the resource constraints of the program
• Has identified milestones that would overcome a specific hurdle to commercialization, enabling a technology to become more attractive for either licensing to an existing company or enabling the formation of a startup company within 1-2 years of project completion

Anyone with Principal Investigator (PI) status at UC Davis is eligible to apply as a project PI. Postdoctoral scholars, university staff researchers and graduate students are eligible to submit applications as Co-PI with an eligible PI, pending appropriate “PI-exception” approvals paperwork to be submitted with the proposal.

Grant Terms and Amounts
All submitted proposals must be limited in scope of work and budget, such that work can be completed within a 12-month period. Up to $200,000 is available for the STAIR Grant Program for the 2024 Fall Cohort. Approved projects may be eligible for $50,000 (see Review Criteria in the RFP). The number of proposals will be category-agnostic (it is possible that one category could fund 2 strong proposals and one category could have no awards if those proposals are not competitive). Ultimately selection will be based on the quality of the proposals received, and the discretion of the UC Davis Innovation and Economic Development Office. Funds may be released to an awardee in one or more tranches, based on the work plan of the awardee and at the discretion of the STAIR Grant Review Committee and Venture Catalyst.

Venture Catalyst proof-of-concept programs (STAIR and DIAL) have awarded over $3.3 million of funding to 71 projects. These projects have resulted in 29 intellectual property agreements, including 21 startups launched around foundational technologies, and have been able to attract roughly $180 million of follow-on funding. View the executive summary for the 2022-23 cycle here.

Venture Catalyst will begin accepting applications for the twelfth cycle of the STAIR Grant program on July 29, 2024 with an application deadline of August 30, 2024 at 11:59 pm PDT. Applications can be submitted through Office of Research’s InfoReady grant application platform (Kerberos login required).

If you would like to request an overview presentation and/or a Q&A session for your department or unit, please email [email protected].

Aspect	STAIR Grant
Technology Focus	Category-agnostic
IP Consideration	Patent Potential
Project Budget	$50,000 (or less)
Funding Available for Fall 2024 Cycle	Up to $50,000
Download Program Materials for Fall 2024 Cycle	STAIR Grant-Fall Cohort 2024 Program Announcement
	STAIR-Grant-RFP-Fall Cohort 2024
	STAIR-Application-Form-Fall Cohort 2024
	STAIR-Grant-Fall Cohort 2024 Instructions

*Supplemental funding available from campus and industry partners

Questions? Please email [email protected].