Organization:Dorm Room Fund
Overview
Dorm Room Fund (DRF) is a five-year-old venture capital firm that invests in student founded companies. The firm, backed by First Round Capital, invests in companies where at least one founding member is a student, undergraduate or graduate. DRF’s investment teams consist of small committees of students on campuses in the New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area. Each investment team is given $500,000 to invest in student-run startups in order to bring their ideas from the “dorm to the market.”
The Program
Once accepted into the program, founders are given access to all of the resources at DRF. On top of providing $20,000 of capital, DRF investment partners meet regularly with founders to help them learn fundraising, launch strategy, growth, and hiring. In addition, DRF connects founders to a vibrant community of talented entrepreneurs, world-class advisors, investors, industry leaders, and mentors to help them solve their key problems.
Stats
- DRF has invested in 150 startups that have gone on to raise over $300 million in additional funding from Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Union Square Ventures, Sequoia Capital and more. Here are a few of those startups:
- DRF represented the largest community in Y Combinator's Spring 2017 batch with 8 startups.
- Over $1 billion in value has been created by DRF companies. With multiple portfolio companies raising rounds of over $10 million within the last 6 months alone, students are rapidly building some of the most promising companies in the country.
- Student founders come from schools all across North America:
How to Apply
Student founders can submit an application to the DRF website with the option to include a pitch deck. The website stresses the importance of two main components in an application. The first thing partners look for is a strategy for how the company plans to grow either capital or users quickly and effectively. The second thing they look for is where the ideas are coming from. DRF partners want to have faith in the success of the people they are investing in. Based off of these criteria, the investment partners decide whether or not a startup should join DRF's program.
