Applications for Cohort 2022 Are Open
We’re expanding our fellowship to accelerate impact and meet growing demand.
Since our founding in 2015, the Activate Fellowship has been an immersive, two-year experience that provides emerging science entrepreneurs the funding, knowledge, network, laboratory access, and camaraderie they need at the early stages of their ventures. Those core elements work: collectively our fellows have founded category-leading companies that have attracted more than $370 million in follow-on funding, hired more than 360 employees, and launched products that can reinvent our economy to be sustainable, resilient, and equitable.
Many of our fellows say their companies would not exist without our support.
So as we launch applications for Cohort 2022, we are holding tight to those core elements—the why, when, and what of the Activate Fellowship. But we’re expanding the where and the how as we charge ahead toward our goal of supporting 100 new fellows each year, across the U.S.
New: Activate Anywhere and Activate New York
The number of scientists and engineers driven to solve big technical problems—the kinds that have limited society’s response to climate change and other urgent challenges—has always far exceeded our capacity to support them in one region. So we knew that launching a second community, Activate Boston, in 2019 would be a lynchpin for scaling further.
Indeed, it was. Activate Boston showed us that our fellowship model works outside Berkeley and that we can gain traction in a new ecosystem quickly. And while the pandemic put major stresses on the fellow community, it also highlighted new ways fellows can deeply connect from afar. In August, we announced that we’ve expanded the Activate Fellowship not just to another U.S. city but to all of the U.S., via Activate Anywhere.
We’ve designed Activate Anywhere to empower fellows in their local ecosystem, where each will work from a qualified host laboratory while plugged into Activate’s mentorship, education, community, and network. Activate Anywhere’s dedicated fellowship team will support Activate Anywhere fellows, who will benefit from the experience of Activate’s national network of industry leaders, investors, and philanthropists, and join the tight-knit nation-wide fellow community.
Why New York? We’ll be sharing more details about this community in early November. And in the meantime, we’re excited to share the following:
New York State has always been the home to the third-largest Activate applicant pool (following California and Massachusetts). So we’re heeding that demand signal and empowering science entrepreneurs in New York.
Activate New York will support fellows who are developing technologies across all of our target industries, with a focus on climate tech.
Identifying Imperatives, Amplifying Impact
We’ve implemented a new framework for highlighting specific, timely, and critical opportunities for outsized impact. We call these Activate Imperatives, and our inaugural trio of imperatives are carbon dioxide removal, advanced manufacturing, and microelectronics:
Along with our long-standing funding partner, the Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office, we have always supported fellows whose innovations can improve the efficiency and productivity of the U.S. manufacturing sector. But with the Advanced Manufacturing Imperative, we are doubling down on industrial decarbonization and circularity.
We launched the Carbon Dioxide Removal Imperative along with a coalition of climate leaders, to identify, fund, and support Activate Fellows whose innovations show strong potential to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at volumes, timescales, and efficiencies adequate to meet aggressive climate goals. This imperative includes a landmark partnership with Stripe, which will offer fellows meeting this imperative carbon removal procurement contracts of up to $500,000 each.
In partnership with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), we created the Microelectronics Imperative to support Activate Fellows whose innovations advance microelectronics, which are fundamental to meeting technological needs within the defense ecosystem but also underpin commercial products for markets and impact outside national security, including energy-efficient computing systems and autonomous transportation.
Same As It Ever Was: Fellows First
Fellows have always been and remain at the core of everything we do, and none of the hows or wheres will ever change that. They motivate and inspire us, and their commitment to impact stokes our own.
Applications for Cohort 2022 are open now through November 30. If you know someone who would benefit from the Activate Fellowship, let us know through this nomination form. If you are a scientist or engineer on the path to impact and want to apply for Cohort 2022, learn more here. We’re holding events over the coming weeks—including a live Q&A panel with current and alumni fellows—where you’ll learn more about the fellowship experience and the benefits of joining our community.
When asked why she decided to apply for the fellowship during a Q&A panel this summer, Cohort 2020 fellow Leah Ellis said, “I did it for the YOLO!” But it wasn’t a whim. She explained that joining the community helped her battle imposter syndrome while giving her the tools and knowledge she needed to turn her vision into a detailed market approach, backed by technoeconomic analysis to chart Sublime Systems’ course.
“Activate accelerated my growth as a hardtech CEO,” says Ellis. “I learned from the successes and failures of those who preceded me down this path while passing on my own learnings to those who are following in my footsteps.”