Fellowship Spotlight: The Lab Fund
After getting her MBA at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Yscaira Jimenez created LaborX, a talent marketplace that connected hiring managers to vocational, boot camp, apprenticeship, and community college graduates. Then, in early 2021, LaborX was acquired by Opportunity at Work.
Yscaira’s entrepreneurial success story is not unusual among MIT business school graduates. In fact, MIT is a unicorn factory with startups launched by students and alumni enjoying a 75% success rate compared to the 10% industry average. Like many other historically underrepresented startup founders from MIT, however, she had a hard time getting early-stage funding.
“I started my company after I graduated, and it took me twice as long to raise half as much money. I realized that other founders of color were having the same experience,” Yscaira explains, “So I thought, you know what, I’m going to find Black and Brown alumni who want to fund other Black and Brown alumni, and want to take advantage of the great returns coming out of MIT.”
Thus, The Lab Fund was born, with a mission to create Alpha for investors by providing early-stage catalytic funding to promising startups founded by underrepresented minority MIT entrepreneurs.
Approach + Pipeline
The Lab Fund actively engages student founders in MIT’s entrepreneurship ecosystem including the 100K Entrepreneurship Competition, Legatum Center, MIT Sandbox, and the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Having gone through all of those ecosystems herself, Yscaira has intimate knowledge of how to identify the most exceptional founders. Moreover, she serves as a startup coach and advisor, so she has direct relationships with many of them.
“We will be investing in diverse founders who are building companies in billion dollar industries adopting or unleashing revolutionary technology out of the MIT ecosystem,” Yscaira says. She looks for founders “who have shown the hustle and grit to succeed either by winning competitions, early traction with customers, early revenue, and other such validators.”
An example of one such founder in The Lab Fund’s pipeline is Josue Lopez, of Kyber Photonics, who developed a LiDAR (light detection and ranging) sensor that allows autonomous vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently. These sensors are “right now about $10,000, and he brought it down to $200, which will then help the adoption of autonomous vehicles.”
How the VCI Fellowship Helped The Lab Fund
Yscaira values the insider advice and training the VCI fellowship provided. “My favorite parts of the curriculum were the fireside chats with a lot of very experienced individuals who would otherwise be very hard to get in front of. These folks showed up very intentionally to make time for us, answered our questions, and many made themselves available for follow up with 1:1s. That, I think, is tremendous value. That access to folks who have already done it and can share their lessons learned.”
“A challenge to starting a fund, particularly if you don’t come from the traditional investor track,” she adds, “is the seven years of experience that a lot of folks want to see and the up to 3% of the investment that you need to put up. So it’s been very heartening to see a lot of the folks who are supporting the fellowship talking about how they’re looking to create grants or investment opportunities for the GPs to help us overcome that hurdle.”
All of us at VCI look forward to watching Yscaira continue to build and grow The Lab Fund and help bring much-needed capital to outstanding startups launched by historically underrepresented founders. It’s exciting to watch her take the bull by the horns, not accept the venture investment gap, and be the change she wants to see in the world.
