Some of the region’s most successful companies began as startups created by UB faculty to accelerate the impact of their own discoveries. We partner with researchers every step of the way to help take your innovation to market, from launching a spinout with intellectual property protection, funding and lab space to connecting faculty founders with potential investors and customers.
Commercialize Your Technology
Our Technology Transfer office helps UB researchers protect the novel methods, materials or software and explore commercial application via a researcher-led startup. We’ll help connect you with opportunities ranging from material transfer and confidentiality agreements to research collaborations and licensing agreements.
Secure Funding
Funding is available for faculty to strengthen innovations for licensing, industry partnerships or launch as investible startups. Collaborative research and development grants support faculty researcher spinouts pursuing promising discoveries in life sciences, materials and manufacturing.
Commercial Viability Training
UB BEP partners with National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) to offer immersive training programs that enable scientists, engineers and inventors to accelerate academic research projects toward commercialization for broader economic and societal benefits. Courses cover entrepreneurial essentials to take innovations to market, including customer discovery and exploring a viable product-market fit.
Faculty spinout success stories
UB boasts an impressive roster of faculty spinouts – independent businesses created to commercialize their research and bring a new product or technology to market. Meet some of the faculty spinout companies we've supported.
![cancer cells.]()
This UB biopharmaceutical spinout is pioneering a novel drug class aimed at preventing the delivery of anticancer toxins to healthy cells.
![Wenyao Xu, left, and Wei Sun, right, examine the smartphone-controlled hearing test.]()
UB spinout advancing AI-powered hearing test to help older adults thwart cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease.
![portrait of Chemistry Professor, Janet Morrow and Patrick Burns, PhD of startup company Ferric Contrast in the Natural Sciences Complex.]()
Technology invented at UB was licensed to develop an injected contrast agent that’s effective for radiologists and safer for patients undergoing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).
![Krishna Rajan, MaterialsIn.]()
Utilizing an AI/machine learning-powered software platform, this UB spinout transforms materials discovery, streamlines production and drives sustainability.
![Founders of Neurovascular Diagnostics in the lab.]()
This UB spinout is developing a low-cost blood test to screen high-risk patients for intracranial brain aneurysms.
Innovative therapies developed at UB target devastating diseases like cancer with continued funding support and incubator lab space.
![blood vessels in brain.]()
Now preparing for FDA de novo submission, this UB spinout uses AI-enabled technology to guide brain surgeons and improve patient survival.
![UB researchers integrated a sensing system that mimics how nerves in our hands sense pressure and slipping while grasping objects onto a pair of 3D-printed robotic fingers that are mounted to a compliant robotic gripper developed. From left: Ehsan Esfahani, Vashin Gautham and Jun Liu pose with the robotic gripper in a lab in Bell Hall in July 2025.]()
With applications in manufacturing and beyond, UB spinout TouchTronix develops sensing technology for robotic hands to help solve soaring labor costs and worker shortages.
Additional resources for discovery and growth
Build your business and connect with a diverse network of entrepreneurs in our two business incubators—the Incubator @ CBLS downtown and the Incubator @ Baird near North Campus.
Get up to $100,000 in pre-seed startup capital and help from experienced entrepreneurs through the UB Cultivator.
Tap into legal services at our Entrepreneurship Law Center if you're not ready to engage outside counsel, but still need quality legal guidance.