About The Entrepreneurship Hatchery

Unlike a conventional accelerator that primarily supports startup companies already formed, the Hatchery helps create the company itself. We source opportunities, assemble capable founding teams, define the business, test its investment potential, support qualified founders with equity-free seed funding, and connect the venture to follow-on capital.

• For U of T: Translate research into real-world impact, generate new research questions and collaborations, and develop students and alumni as founders and operators.
• For Canada: Create innovation-driven companies, intellectual property, highly skilled job creation, and sustained economic activity.
• For investors: Create a pipeline of opportunities that have undergone structured business definition, expert review, and founder-readiness assessment.

FEEL™—Formative Experiential Entrepreneurial Learning—is the Hatchery’s venture-formation framework. Founders do not study entrepreneurship as an abstract exercise: they learn by defining and building a real company around a meaningful problem.

The methodology uses the progressive construction of a house as its organizing logic. Each element of the venture must support the next; weak assumptions and missing evidence become visible before significant time and capital are committed.

FEEL ™ is evidence-driven and iterative. Teams are expected to question their initial idea, engage potential customers and industry experts, revise assumptions, and return to earlier elements when new evidence changes the business.

The objective is to produce a coherent, credible venture blueprint that founders, mentors, the Investment Committee, the Faculty, and future investors can evaluate.

The questions every Hatchery venture must answer

• Problem: What consequential problem exists or is envisioned, for whom, and what evidence demonstrates that it is urgent and worth solving?
• Customer and beachhead use case: Who experiences the problem, who influences adoption, who pays, and which first market offers the clearest path to entry?
• Solution and value: What must the venture deliver, why will the customer change current behaviour or adopt new ones, and what measurable outcome makes the solution compelling?
• Innovation and defensibility: What is differentiated today, what research or technology must still be created, what is the intellectual property strategy and what barriers can protect the company’s position?
• Business and market entry: How will the company reach customers, generate revenue, build partnerships, and overcome technical, regulatory, procurement, or adoption barriers?
• Execution and economics: What people, milestones, fixed and variable costs, funding, and time are required to reach first sales and build a scalable company?

1. Business Identification and Share Your Problem. The Hatchery conducts year-round outreach to researchers, students, investors, and industry partners to identify meaningful societal, technical, and commercial problems. Share Your Problem and Idea Market sessions make those opportunities visible and invite the U of T community to engage. A venture can begin with a venture capitalist sourced problem, a research insight, an emerging technology, or an unmet industry need—but it must ultimately be anchored in a problem worth solving.
2. Team Formation. Build-A-Team connects opportunities with motivated individuals who bring complementary technical, commercial, and leadership capabilities. The Hatchery’s network of 5,000+ individuals helps ventures find co-founders and contributors. Team formation is not treated as a staffing exercise: the aim is to assemble people with the commitment, skills, and mindset to become a high-performing founding team.
3. Business Definition through FEEL ™. Teams enter the program best suited to their starting point and use FEEL ™ to define the business. With guidance from advisory boards, staffed with mentors, industry and technology experts, and the Hatchery team, founders develop and test the problem, customer, solution, barriers of entry and differentiation, market-entry, cost, and execution assumptions that form the venture’s blueprint. Ventures are not expected to begin with a proprietary dataset, model, or prototype already developed; they must define a credible path to creating or acquiring the capabilities that will make the company attractive for investment..
4. Seed Funding and Go-To-Market. High-potential ventures may be invited to the Go-To-Market stage following rigorous review. Completion of a Hatchery program does not automatically trigger funding. Advancement depends on the clarity of the business, strength of supporting evidence, readiness of the team, and the founders’ commitment to build the company full-time after completing academic obligations. The Investment Committee—composed of independent professional investors and domain experts—provides an investment recommendation to the Faculty. Subject to approval, equity-free seed funding gives eligible student founders the time and runway to execute the defined plan. The Hatchery First Employee Program can also provide U of T students with paid, hands-on venture experience leveraging U of T’s Work-Study program.
5. Follow-on Investment and Scale. The Hatchery’s work continues beyond initial funding. Teams refine milestones, validate the market, demonstrate progress, and prepare for conversations with venture capital firms, angels, strategic investors, and other sources of risk capital. Securing follow-on investment is a pivotal outcome: it enables the company to execute its plan, build capacity, enter the market, and scale beyond the University environment.

The FEEL ™ framework converts assumptions into decision-ready materials. Each venture develops a concise business plan, a cash-flow model supported by explicit assumptions to represent the journey to acquire first paying customers, a one-page company overview, and a six-minute investment presentation.

These are working management tools, not academic assignments. Founders, mentors, and investors use them to identify gaps, define milestones, allocate resources, and judge whether the venture is ready for investment.

• NEST: A summer bootcamp program for the broader U of T community. ↗
• LaunchLab: For graduate- and faculty-led, research-driven ventures. ↗
• Start@UTIAS Hatchery: For aerospace-focused student, graduate, and faculty ventures. ↗
• Alumni: For U of T Engineering alumni building companies with current students ↗

• 2,000+ applications to our programs
• 480+ startups served
• 1,540+ individuals served
• 1,200+ jobs created by Hatchery startups