Mentorship & Funding
Receive developmental and financial support for your ideas
Whether it's receiving mentorship during office hours or being awarded seed funding to kick off your idea, The Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship helps you and your business idea grow.
Become a mentor and give back to the CMU community!
Mentorship Programs for Students, Faculty and Staff
Entrepreneurs-in-Residence
The Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship is honored to have entrepreneurs from around the community in-house to provide guidance through their expertise. Mentors include successful CMU alumni, angel investors, business leaders and innovators whose depth of knowledge covers all aspects of the startup experience and entrepreneurship culture.
McGinnis Ventures - Feedback & Coaching
The McGinnis Ventures Competition not only provides an opportunity to pitch an idea, it's also an excellent venue to collect feedback on your approach, presentation and ideas. Competitors are also assigned a coach — distinguished entrepreneurs, investors and CMU alumni — to help guide them through the competition.
Learn more about the McGinnis Ventures Competition
Project Olympus Office Hour Experts
Come in to get insights from experts on better ways to design your product, devise a sales strategy, overcome a startup milestone and more. Visit the Project Olympus Office Hours listings to find an Office Hour that matches your specific hurdle.
Go to listings
VentureBridge
An initiative of the Swartz Center to help early stage Carnegie Mellon alumni founders develop their startups into fundable seed stage ventures. This effort is outside of the traditional education model and serves as a bridge between the many different ecosystems that Carnegie Mellon University alumni live and work.
Learn more
Funding Opportunities
99 Tartans
99 Tartans is an angel investment network of CMU alumni. If you are an early-stage CMU alumni startup, apply to 99 Tartans for investment consideration.
McGinnis Ventures - Funding
In addition to being a great platform to receive mentorship, the McGinnis Ventures Competition at CMU allows winners to ignite their startup ideas with up to $60K in investment funds.
VentureBridge
The VentureBridge Summer Accelerator is a 10 - week program hosted in the San Francisco Bay Area each summer. The program is designed to create networks with mentors, customers, and early stage investors. Sessions include: Mentor matching, investor feedback, founder dinners, and more. The university invests $25,000 in each company. Companies also receive many other in-kind services.
Learn more
Open Field Entrepreneurs Fund
OFEF is a new, groundbreaking model for providing early-stage business financing to CMU alumni who have graduated within the past five years. The OFEF is not a business plan competition in which only entrepreneurs with the best ideas receive funding. Instead, it's open to recent CMU graduates who have the desire to become entrepreneurs and to contribute to the university’s innovation ecosystem.
Project Olympus - Spark Grants
The Olympus Spark Grant Fund helps Olympus PROBE students kick-start their business ideas. Every semester, students submit proposals and pitch their ideas to investors, with winning PROBEs going on to receive funds. The funds are provided by charitable gifts from alumni and other community donors.
Gap Funding
The Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship may have opportunity for startup funding outside its competitions and traditional funding programs. Please contact the Swartz Center to learn more.
Campus Partners
Thank you to our Swartz Center Patrons
