The University Venture Fund is an independent venture fund that leverages the innovation of students from around the country. UVF promotes entrepreneurship by creating a forum of students to be directly involved in venture capital. It is a collaboration between students seeking an entrepreneurial education and professional venture capitalists to search out high tech and consumer trends with potential. Many of the budding businesses they research and back are founded by entrepreneurs the students age.

A real-time, real world curriculum in entrepreneurship is difficult to create in a traditional classroom setting. The University Venture Fund solves this problem by creating a means for students to learn valuable entrepreneurship skills through real-time, real world business experience. Student associates use real money to invest in real private equity deals and are mentored by the industry.

The private equity world has the distnict advantage of allowing the investor to examine all parts of a small business. With students acting as investors, they are able to see through the curtain of real startup enterprise and are able to learn from the experience of successful entrepreneurs to identify what makes a business succeed.

The mentors to the student associates at the University Venture Fund are markedly successful, and work closely with the students to mentor, educate and train. These individuals bring industry expertise in venture capital and entrepreneurship across a wide array of vertical industries.

The University Venture Fund has multiple distinctions from other private equity firms.

With the hundreds of students involved in UVF across the country, students are in touch with innovation at a grass roots level. The program attracts students doing new and interesting start-ups. Students are immersed in an environment that allows them to recognize and act on social and consumer trends, allowing them to identify and connect with potential investments that may otherwise go unnoticed by the venture capital world.

As partner in an investment, UVF also brings value to its portfolio through an engine of due diligence and research by the interested students. The research that the University Venture Fund provides for their portfolio and its co-investment may be in-depth analysis and provide opportunities that may otherwise not occur.

The University Venture Fund is comprised of graduate and undergraduate student associates from the University of Utah, Brigham Young University, Westminster College in Salt Lake City, as well as the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University.

Student associates come from diverse educational backgrounds; everything from medicine and science to engineering to business and economics. This allows for the University Venture Fund to be an industry-agnostic fund and gives the ability to look at industries such as nanotechnology with the same depth and understanding as consumer goods companies.

Students perform extensive due diligence research. Associates evaluate technologies, financials, management teams and marketing strategies of companies. This process not only provides value to the Fund and its partners, but also provides a well-rounded entrepreneurship education to the students.