Two BU students, Kanav Dhir and Alexandrea Mellen, were appointed to Dorm Room Fund Boston.

“Dorm Room Fund (DRF) is a student-run venture firm that invests in student-run companies.  Our team is composed of students from many universities around Boston and our mission is to inspire and support more careers in the startup industry.  We believe that a relatively small amount of capital can help student founders take their ideas from the dorm room to the market.  We are laser-focused on working with the best student talent in the world.  We’re backed by First Round Capital,” said Dhir.

“We’re students that invest in other students,” said Dhir. “We’re not the typical VC [venture capital] firm — we don’t treat ourselves that way. We’re very much a peer-to-peer connection.”[1]

DRF has 24 student investors serving 191,725 students in Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco Bay Area, and Boston.

“My job is to look and find people at BU and other schools who have a passion, who have a drive, who really want to pursue some type of realistic startup and help them with that,” Mellen said. “I see a lot of students around campus who have ideas, but they don’t really know how to pursue them any further.”[2]

DRF undergraduates come from multiple majors:  computer science, philosophy, and chemical engineering.

“Both of us have the same circles and more technical aspects helps us try to bounce ideas off each other about which companies are coming out of BU or which students are working on cool projects that we can approach,” Dhir said. “There’s a sense of building and pushing entrepreneurship in this initiative, and Alexandrea and I being there really helps our potential to find interesting companies.”[3]

Dorm Room Fund RAs, or mentors, consist of 60 veteran entrepreneurs with combined 450 years of startup experience.  Thus far, mentors have raised over $1.3B in funding and have produced over $2.7B in company exists, including 1 IPO (Bazaarvoice; NASDAQ:BV).

For more information go to www.dormroomfund.com