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Although Jacob Becraft had two swings and two misses when he first tried to become an entrepreneur as a graduate student, the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program allowed him to keep at it. This especially benefited cancer patients, as Becraft went on to co-found Strand Therapeutics: a $550-million firm whose programmable mRNA drug has shrunk tumors in patients who had exhausted all other treatment options.
Stories like Becraft’s took center stage at the recent 10-year anniversary celebration of the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program, where student founders, alumni, mentors, and university leaders gathered to reflect on a decade of empowering student entrepreneurs. Speaking at the event, Becraft referred to Strand as "our third swing at the plate," explaining that the Sandbox model gave him "the freedom and ability to fail fast" — letting previous venture ideas "blow up in our faces" before moving on.
For Strand, Becraft says, MIT Sandbox helped him and his co-founder, Tasuku Kitada, to "get out, do some travel, some market research, meet with experts in the field, meet with mentors who could help us build the company — and eventually find investors who were going to back this big vision to transform medicine."
MIT Sandbox was launched in 2016 by Ian Waitz, then-dean of the School of Engineering and now MIT's vice president for research, to lower the barrier for students to try entrepreneurship. The concept of a new program focused on student-led entrepreneurship was developed in consultation with internal MIT leaders and supporters of MIT, including Alan Spoon, a life member emeritus of the MIT Corporation. From its inception, MIT Sandbox has been open to all MIT students, from undergraduates to PhD students. Teams are awarded between $500 and $5,000 to begin their process, and they are matched with two mentors and connected with other expert advisors.
As they make progress, students can go before the program’s funding board to ask for up to $25,000. Supported entirely by alumni, corporate sponsors, entrepreneurs, and investors, the program has grown to include about 350 teams each semester, some of which are new and some continuing their participation according to their own timelines.
Anantha P. Chandrakasan, MIT provost, explained in the program's decade-in-review report: "Since its inception 10 years ago, MIT Sandbox has been a defining part of MIT's innovation ecosystem, ensuring that every student with the curiosity to explore entrepreneurship has the resources, mentorship, and community to take their first steps."
MIT Sandbox is a "home," where students can "explore, seriously test assumptions, talk to customers, build prototypes, fail, pivot, learn, and grow," says Jinane Abounadi, founding executive director of Sandbox. "And they can do that with a lot of support — and I don't just mean financial support. I mean a lot of support from a lot of people."
For Samuel Udotong, co-founder and CTO of Fireflies.ai, early funding was the difference between an idea and a company. "I think largely because we had gotten a little bit of Sandbox funding, we were actually able to take the risk to move out to San Francisco and try to build the company," he says. "But it would have been really a money barrier if we hadn't gotten the initial $5,000 from Sandbox."
Startup investor and advisor Sophie V. Vandebroek says, "MIT has extraordinary students from around the globe as well as faculty who are top experts in their fields. What’s often lacking," she says, "is confidence. That is where Sandbox plays a vital role. Sandbox enables every individual student to believe that they can be an entrepreneur."
At the anniversary celebration, Fred Parietti, co-founder and CEO of Multiply Labs, recounted how his early product prototypes were developed on his kitchen table and had to be moved regularly according to the dictates of his grad school housemates. Those prototypes wouldn't have been built at all, he said, without MIT Sandbox.
The first funding he received was minimal, "but it wasn't zero, and zero represented my resources as a student. That belief in us and the possibility to build a prototype were game-changers," Parietti said.
Multiply Labs, with 60-plus employees, has raised $36 million and develops robotics technology to manufacture biological drugs safely and economically. The firm supplies pharmaceutical customers including AstraZeneca and Kyverna Therapeutics, whose chief medical and development officer, Naji Gehchan, is an MIT Sandbox mentor.
That same willingness to back an unconventional approach helped AeroShield get off the ground. "One of the things that enables me to stand here today is that Sandbox created a safe environment where it was encouraged to look at this problem backwards, rather than from the nanostructure up," says Elise Strobach, CEO and founder of AeroShield.
The anniversary celebration speakers also included Ross Finman, CEO and founder of Augmodo; Laureen Meroueh, CEO and founder of Hertha Metals; and Daris Bunadar, chief scientist at Lightmatter. All were working on their PhDs when they started exploring commercial applications of their research. All recognize the critical role that MIT Sandbox, in addition to other programs — such as the MIT I-Corps Program, the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS), and the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program — played in their development as entrepreneurs. These programs offered the space to explore the possibility of not only founding a deep tech company, but also taking on an executive role as their ventures raised venture capital and grew into substantial companies. Today they all have big ambitions for the growth and impact of their companies — ambitions that are made possible only thanks to innovative technologies and an entrepreneurial drive.
Over its decade of existence, MIT Sandbox has supported over 4,000 teams, representing 8,000 participants associated with a wide range of industries and nonprofit endeavors. It has disbursed more than $11 million in non-dilutive funding, meaning the program takes no stake in the resulting ventures. MIT Sandbox has been involved in the creation of 475 companies in more than 30 countries, and companies that were started in the program have raised $8.7 billion in venture funding.
MIT Sandbox collaborates with other programs across MIT — including the Martin Trust Center, VMS, Kuo Sharp Center, MITdesignX, the PKG Center for Social Impact, the MIT Climate Project, I-Corps, and others — and its teams have excelled in innovation accelerators and competitions. Nine out of 10 winners of MIT's $100K Entrepreneurship Competition have been MIT Sandbox participants.
Apart from the program's impressive results, MIT Sandbox aims to first and foremost serve as a great educational tool, developing the innovators themselves.
"From an educator's perspective, this is just another incredible way to teach," said Abounadi at the anniversary celebration. "MIT Sandbox is a place where students can start seeing themselves as people who can create a meaningful impact in the world," she said, "and that is really what innovation and entrepreneurship are all about."
Paula T. Hammond, School of Engineering dean and Institute Professor, echoed the same sentiments: "What I find most compelling, year after year, is not only what students build, but how they change. They gain confidence, learn to refine before they scale, and begin to see themselves as people who can create meaningful impact, strengthening not only their own trajectories, but the broader MIT community."
