Two Stanford students, Roman Scott and Itbaan Nafi, say they’ve raised $2 million for a new accelerator program, Breakthrough Ventures, built to back startups started by college students and recent graduates across the U.S.
The idea took shape after the duo began hosting Demo Days at Stanford in 2024. Those events drew strong attendance, and as participating founders started showing “measurable success,” Scott and Nafi decided to scale what had begun as a campus initiative into something national.
From student Demo Days to a nationwide accelerator
Nafi framed the raise as a shift in what the program can promise founders long-term: the new fund, he said, “turns Breakthrough from just being a seasonal accelerator into a lifelong partnership with our founders.”
Early last year, the founders brought in Raihan Ahmed to lead the accelerator and then moved into formal fundraising. The backers include Mayfield and Collide Capital, along with several Stanford founder alumni, to support startups across AI, health, consumer, deep tech, and sustainability.
Scott’s pitch is that the program is built from the inside out, “for student founders by student founders.”
What Breakthrough is offering founders?
Breakthrough will run a hybrid model, mixing in-person meetups at leading venture capital firms with virtual programming, and ending in a Demo Day at Stanford.
Participants are set to receive:
- Grant funding up to $10,000
- Compute credits through Microsoft and the Nvidia Inception program
- Legal support and mentorship
- A chance at a $50,000 follow-on investment at the end of the program
Nafi argues the structure is deliberate: “We’ve nailed the student-founder experience to a T,” he said, adding that students respond because the team understands their constraints and pace.
Why they think the gap is real?
Student accelerators aren’t new, UC Berkeley runs Free Ventures, MIT has the Sandbox Innovation Fund, and Stanford hosts multiple accelerators, including StartX, LaunchPad, and Cardinal Ventures.
But Scott says Breakthrough is built to tackle what still blocks student founders outside the most networked ecosystems: “Breakthrough’s purpose is to fill in the funding and opportunity gap… because students have historically lacked access to capital and the networks required to launch their entrepreneurial pursuits.”
What comes next for Breakthrough Ventures?
The founders plan to deploy the fund over the next three years and aim to incubate at least 100 startups.
They’ve also opened applications for the latest cohort. And their ambition, Nafi said, goes beyond outcomes for any single company: they want the program to lift stories that inspire more young people to try entrepreneurship “to change their communities” and build “economic stability for themselves and their families.”
Also Read: What Is Difference Between Republic and Democracy?
