Rev: Ithaca Startup Works
The numbers are trickling in for 2024, another successful year for the founders, employees, and investors of Rev: Ithaca Startup Works 32 member startups. Success looked different for our Rev members as some accepted new partnerships, some closed rounds of seed funding, and others continued to innovate. Regardless, Rev’s community continued to grow and scale their businesses while positively impacting the Ithaca region and beyond.
The Fuzehub 2024 Commercialization Competition during the New York State Innovation Summit had seven prize winners, five of which are Cornell-supported entrepreneurs. Of the five, four have participated in multiple hardware accelerators at Rev: Ithaca Startup Works and the grand prize winner is a current Center for Life Science Ventures member, a former Life Science Technology Fellow and Ignite Fellow.
In response to the 2014 opening of Rev: Ithaca Startup Works, CNN Business ran the headline: “Can this Small Town Compete with Silicon Valley?” While Ithaca has made headlines for its oversized number of startups per capita and having the highest R&D expenditures in New York state, 10 years later, it’s clear Rev: Ithaca Startup Works is not interested in competing with Silicon Valley, but in imagining an entrepreneurial ecosystem entirely its own. Over the past 10 years, Rev’s member startups have created over 1,000 jobs and generated over 100 million dollars in revenue.
Inventing a new product that you can hold in your hands and bring successfully to an eagerly awaiting market is sometimes likened to childbirth: If we knew from the outset how hard it was going to be, fewer of us would do it.
Rev: Ithaca Startup Works launched applications for the business incubator’s new Protofacturing Hardware Accelerator — a program connecting the existing Prototyping and Manufacturing Hardware Accelerators and helping entrepreneurs refine their prototypes.
Bolstered by a new MedTech track and increased capacity to support entrepreneurs, Rev: Ithaca Startup Works is now accepting applications for its free Prototyping Hardware Accelerator.
Rev: Ithaca Startup Works is set to expand its hardware accelerator programs thanks to a new $2 million “Build to Scale” grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration. A local matching fund of $2 million, including $1 million from Empire State Development’s Division of Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR), brings the total award amount to $4 million.
A cannabis product from Rev member Florist Farms was the very first one to be sold in New York, at the grand opening of the state’s first adult-use cannabis dispensary, Housing Works Cannabis Co.
In recognition of Women’s History Month, Rev: Ithaca Startup Works is shining a light on the female founders throughout our ecosystem.
