Astound Research, an online platform for scientists and industries including foundations, nonprofits and non-governmental organizations, has grown to $300 million in active available funding for research in less than two years.
The Birmingham-based company is the catalyst in matching the expertise of university researchers with corporations and nonprofits who have research and development needs.
“Corporate spending on sponsored university research is approximately $8 billion globally and over $4 billion annually in the U.S. alone,” said Astound founder Dr. Joel Berry, a retired biomedical engineering professor from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Astound provides a platform that makes it easy and fast for companies to find and sponsor research relevant to their product development goals.
“Ultimately, our mission is to be a catalyst for advancing science and technology.”
Astound CEO Morgan Cole said the company is deeply involved in biomedical research as “a broad-based platform” with a number of partners in food science, weather modeling, and engineering. The platform can also be used for aerospace and defense research.
Research institutions rely on federal grants for most of their funding with researchers spending up to 40% of their time applying for federal research grants.
Cole said federal research money has been “flat over the last 10 years. The pie (federal research dollars) isn’t getting any bigger.”
Meanwhile, spending by industry on research and development is growing at a rate of 3.7% a year with nonprofit corporations spending increasing by 4% annually.
“We are America-based so we have been focused on America, but we have had talks with international research institutions,” Cole said. The company is talking with corporations in Europe about joining the platform to help them fund research.
Cole said some of the pharmaceutical companies on the platform have research and development budgets of “not $5 million; but $50 million or $500 million.”
“We want every company” to use the platform, he said. “When we talk with research institutions, they are surprised that something like this did not already exist.”
“There is never enough” federal grant dollars to keep every research lab working, Cole said. But even institutions that are primarily federally funded will benefit from adding corporate partners to their work.
“Ideally it is a company that they can partner with long-term,” Cole said, “The federal government wants return on investment. (It) is looking for proof that there is going to be a return with products going to market because the researcher is closely partnering with an industry counterpart.
“Every lab and every university ought to have a strategy on how to land corporate research dollars.”
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