Partnering with student founders to build the future now.

Students helping students succeed on their entrepreneurial journeys.

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We are Stanford’s premier student-founder community. Cardinal Ventures brings together Stanford’s best student founders, fostering a robust community of entrepreneurs by connecting our global network of mentors, investors, and industry experts — all without taking equity. Our initiatives include a startup accelerator program, a deeptech fellowship, and the College Ventures Network.

In the past 7 years we’ve graduated over 150 companies.
Our companies have raised over $1 billion from: 

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Testimonials
Firefly
Firefly

Winter 2018 Cohort

“As a start-up, Firefly was stealth for a long-time before we decided to scale. Cardinal Ventures nutured the necessary time and space to innovate. This time was essential at the beginning and helped build our foundation.”

—Kaan Gunay, CEO and Co-Founder, Firefly

Unum ID
Unum ID

Spring 2017 Cohort

“Cardinal Ventures exposed us to a lot of people that have started companies and scaled companies. We started to understand the mindset of those people and how they approached solving problems. That was the single biggest impact that it had for us. It takes a very long time to internalize what it’s like to found a company, the right questions that you have to be asking, and how to simplify things down so that it’s manageable day-to-day.”

—Aidan McCarty, Co-Founder & Co-CEO

Nova Credit
Nova Credit

Fall 2015 Cohort

“Cardinal Ventures gave Nova Credit the start that has helped the business scale to where it is today. The support, mentorship, and strategic advice that we received in those early days gave us a strong foundation and helped us refine our business model to be investor- and market-ready. As first-time founders, that experience was invaluable.”

—Misha Esipov, Co-Founder & CEO

We’re backed by the best.

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