Entrepreneurship

In SCS, we believe that groundbreaking research doesn’t end in the lab — it begins there.

When we pair world-class research with entrepreneurial spirit, the result is a network of startups and spinoffs that carry ideas from early stage innovation to real-world application. These companies contribute significantly to the economy and offer huge benefits to society.

We’ve been at the heart of computer science innovation for more than 70 years, with companies like Adobe, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft Research boasting strong ties to our faculty and alumni. That spirit of entrepreneurship has only grown, with more recent companies like Duolingo, Abridge and others following in their footsteps.

Two people work on what appears to be a robotic or prosthetic hand.

Project Olympus

Some of our boldest ideas take flight with the help of Project Olympus. Founded in 2007 by former SCS professor Lenore Blum, this incubator has fueled more than 1,600 startups, giving students, faculty and alumni the support — and space — they need to turn their research and ideas into companies. Open to CMU entrepreneurs at any stage, Project Olympus helps founders find product-market fit and develop business models that work.

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Two people sit in chairs on a stage in front of a "Lab to Market" banner.

Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship

The Swartz Center works with partners to bring CMU’s cutting-edge research and ideas to the global marketplace, accelerating commercialization and helping new founders tap into a vibrant network of alumni entrepreneurs.

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A group of people stand in front of a Duolingo sign during its IPO on NASDAQ.

Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation

CTTEC is CMU’s dedicated center for the transfer of intellectual assets to the commercial marketplace. The center evaluates commercial potential, licenses new technologies developed by faculty and staff, negotiates and executes commercial tech transfer agreements, manages the IP protection process and more.

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A Culture of Innovation

The list of spinoffs and major tech companies founded by CMU faculty and students would fill a large volume. Here is a selection of some notable ones, past and present.

Historical photo of four men leaning on giant CRT monitors in a room full of workstations. — **Sun Microsystems Founded**
Alums Andy Bechtolsheim and Vinod Khosla co-found Sun Microsystems, a pioneering computing company known for creating the Java programming language (designed by alum James Gosling), advancing open-source software and developing the Network File System.

Portrait of Rick Rashid. — **Microsoft Research Founded**
Faculty member Rick Rashid co-founds Microsoft Research alongside Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. The industrial research lab remains committed to an academic approach that benefits humanity and advances state-of-the-art computing.

Archival photo of a man sitting with a 1990s era workstation that's displaying the Lycos homepage on its screen. — **Lycos Created**
SCS Ph.D. student Michael Mauldin creates Lycos, the first large-scale internet search engine.

A Chevy Tahoe covered in sponsor logos, CMU branding, and computer vision equipment. — **Pioneering Self-Driving Technology**
CMU's Tartan Racing wins the DARPA Urban Challenge with Boss, an autonomous SUV that paved the way for today's self-driving technologies. Team member Chris Urmson went on to lead Google's self-driving car project (now Waymo) and later founded Aurora, a pioneer in autonomous trucking.

Close up of the end of a robotic scope device. — **Medrobotics Gets FDA Approval**
CMU spinoff Medrobotics receives FDA clearance to market its modular surgical robots for medical use.

Posed shot of Severin Hacker and Luis von Ahn. — **Duolingo Becomes a Unicorn**
Duolingo, a CMU-spinoff founded by alums Severin Hacker and Luis von Ahn, achieves unicorn status — reaching a value of more than $1 billion as a privately owned company. That’s a first for a Pittsburgh company.

One man shakes the hand of a bipedal robot while another man looks on. — **Skild AI Founded**
Robotics Institute faculty members Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta co-found physical AI startup Skild AI with the goal of building the first unified robotics foundation model.

Leading Transformation Across Industries

Today, as computing reaches into every corner of society, SCS graduates are expanding the footprint of computer science well beyond the traditional tech sector. Education, transportation, human health — wherever there are complex problems, our alumni are at the nexus of efforts to solve them.