ICAN, the International Collegiate Angels Network, connects investors with campus-born ventures. This means startups founded by current students, faculty members, or recent alumni, where the idea emerged through coursework, research, or campus activity. ICAN operates globally and mobilizes capital for this promising – but often overlooked – asset class.
The network aims to solve two problems at once: founders can access early capital from investors who understand university innovation, and universities can participate in long-term value creation without directly holding equity. As a way to keep the flywheel turning, ICAN returns 10% of any realized gains to the campuses where the ventures originated.
A path to campus innovation “that just kind of happened”
ICAN was founded by Tom Duening, an entrepreneur and educator with more than 35 years of experience in early-stage startups and university innovation programs. Tom’s path to founding ICAN was neither planned nor conventional. He started his first company in 1984 while he was a graduate student, despite having no formal business education. “I’d never been in a business classroom in my life,” he says. The experience nonetheless set the direction for what followed.
After completing a PhD in education, he was recruited to become assistant dean of the 6000-student University of Houston College of Business Administration. At the same time, the college was launching one of the first campus-based entrepreneurship programs in the United States. Because he had started a company, he was a natural fit as a founding faculty member in the program, even though he wasn’t an entrepreneurship scholar and had never studied entrepreneurship. “I kind of fell into entrepreneurship on campus. It just happened, unintentionally,” he recalls.
From that point on, Tom’s career repeatedly combined entrepreneurship, education, and early-stage investing. He started a few more companies, including an ed-tech venture in India, and worked with universities to develop entrepreneurship programs.
At Arizona State University, he saw a clear gap in the local startup ecosystem. Despite being part of a metropolitan area of nearly nine million people, the Phoenix-Tempe metroplex had no strong, dedicated angel investor group. “I said, well, let’s just start one on the campus,” he explains.
In 2005, Tom founded an on-campus angel group at Arizona State University known as Arizona Tech Investors and built it organically through personal networks and referrals. The idea was unique for that time. “We just sat around and thought – what does the campus need and how to make it happen,” describes Tom.
They quickly realized there wasn’t enough deal flow, so they expanded the group to the wider region and, eventually, the entire state. Within a few years, it became the most active angel network in Arizona. Two decades later, it is still operating and investing, long after Tom stepped away. “I take a lot of pleasure in the fact that it’s still operating today,” he says. “Anytime you do the startup thing, it’s just really, really hard. There’s a lot of politics, and I’m not good at politics; I’m good at ideas. But I’m willing to go through all the pain and negativity, because I’m a startup guy.”
Launching a grant-based startup attraction program
From Arizona, Tom moved to the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where he was appointed a chaired professor. A smaller community turned out to be more politically complex than he expected: “My personality is a little bit impatient. I try to get things started that I believe are right. But I ran into pushback and political challenges I’d never encountered before.”
Tom “retreated” to being a traditional academic for a while, but then stumbled upon a program in St Louis, Missouri. “It was an economic development program where they gave $50,000 grants to companies that would relocate to the downtown area of St Louis. It was called the Arch Grants, named after the great Gateway Arch in St. Louis. And it was hugely successful. So I said, I'm going to do the same in Colorado Springs.”
He created a similar grant-based startup attraction program, named the Torch Grants after the headquarters of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee in Colorado Springs. The program, now in its fifth year, was designed to bring early-stage companies into the local ecosystem and support their growth. “We give them fifty thousand dollar grants to do that, and they have to set up shop for at least one year in the community,” explains Tom.
Seeing the systemic gap
Tom’s career had always focused on economic development and very early-stage startups. And with his energy, it was no wonder that when he officially retired, he couldn’t step away from his mission entirely. “I can’t retire,” he thought. “I’ve got to find something else to do.” Using his decades of experience building campus-based entrepreneurship and investment programs, he began working on what would become ICAN: a global network designed to help campuses connect their startups to early-stage capital and to benefit from the long-term outcomes of that innovation.
ICAN was the result of repeated patterns Tom had observed over nearly four decades. Campuses consistently produced ideas, research, and founders capable of building viable companies, but lacked two critical elements: a reliable source of early-stage capital and a mechanism for the university to benefit from the value they helped create. Arizona group’s success made the picture especially clear – the problem was not a lack of investor interest, but the absence of a clear entry point and ongoing deal flow for early-stage innovation.
ICAN was created to bridge that gap – on a global level. The initial idea behind ICAN was direct: help campuses establish their own angel investor groups focused on ventures emerging from their institutions. Tom had done this before and knew it could work. He began reaching out to universities worldwide, offering hands-on support, proven structures, and tools to help them set up campus-based investor networks. The response was almost nonexistent. “I sent out all kinds of emails to campuses all over the world,” he says. “Absolutely zero response.”
The lack of traction did not surprise him – Tom was well aware of how difficult it is for academic institutions to adopt new, riskier models. “They just don't know how to respond to inbound messaging from somebody that looks like they're trying to sell them something – even though they’re actually trying to enable,” describes Tom. Rather than abandoning the idea, Tom reframed it.
Pivot to a global deal flow network
Tom shifted his focus from institutions to deal flow. He created a dedicated ICAN deal room explicitly for what he called “campus-born ventures.” To qualify, a company had to be founded by:
- a current student with a meaningful equity stake,
- a faculty member with significant ownership, or
- a recent alumnus within three years of graduation, with a demonstrable link between the venture and campus research, coursework, or activity.
The response exceeded expectations. With minimal promotion on LinkedIn, applications began piling in. “Within a month, we had hundreds of applications from all over the world,” Tom says. ICAN got a clear validation that there’s a real supply of campus-born founders.
Now, companies enter the network through the ICAN deal room, where they’re screened for eligibility. From this pool, ICAN curates a small number of companies for each investor cycle.
These companies are invited to present at ICAN investor days, where founders share their business, fundraising goals, and the specific allocation they are offering to the ICAN network. Each participating company signs a memorandum of understanding committing to reserve at least $250,000 of the round for ICAN investors.
Individual investors can commit amounts as small as $5,000, which ICAN aggregates into a single investment vehicle. But getting over the $250,000 threshold in time can be a challenge.
The missed opportunity of Finally Quiet
One early example illustrates both the opportunity and the discipline of the model. At ICAN’s first investor day in August, a company called Finally Quiet presented a dental technology designed to eliminate the high-frequency noise that causes hearing damage for dentists and patients.
The solution was a specialized earphone system worn by both dentist and patient. It selectively cancels the harmful high-frequency sound while allowing normal speech to pass through, enabling real-time communication during treatment. The company was raising capital at a $5 million valuation and offered ICAN a $250,000 allocation.
The network didn’t close the round in time, and the company went on to raise additional funding within weeks at a $20 million valuation. “We would have made four times our money within weeks,” Tom notes. The experience both demonstrated the quality of campus-born innovation and the need to have enough investors ready when such opportunities arise.
How does Tom find the winners?
Having worked with early-stage founders for decades, Tom says he knows how to find the winners. One of his key evaluation tools is ICAN’s podcast, Why Should I Invest, where selected founders are interviewed in depth.
This serves a dual purpose. Publicly, it gives founders visibility. Privately, it allows Tom to assess how they think. “By doing the podcast, I learn which of these entrepreneurs really seem to have something going on,” he explains. “They don’t know I’m evaluating them, but the questions I ask and the way they answer are very revealing.
What Tom listens for is not a rehearsed pitch, but clarity of understanding. “Ultimately, it’s about the people,” he says. He looks for founders who can clearly articulate their market, define their niche, understand the difficulty of selling into that niche, and explain what makes their position defensible. He says that these signals are “easy to tease out” when a founder truly understands the problem they are solving and the business they are building.
For example, ICAN is currently working with Cartwheel (gokartwheel.com), founded by Joanna Shu, an experienced entrepreneur. Joanna bought the technology from a university professor, who didn’t know what to do with it, and built a company around it.
Cartwheel addresses a common and persistent problem: head lice in schoolchildren. The product is already commercially validated, with an order from Walgreens, one of the largest pharmacy chains in the United States, to place the product in approximately 6,000 stores nationwide.
“Even though her formula is pretty reproducible, she has a nice brand that is very friendly to moms, school nurses, etc. She’s going to get acquired probably within a couple of years,” describes Tom. That’s exactly the type of opportunity the network is designed to support.
Dealum: the operational backbone of ICAN
After deciding to build a central deal room for campus-born ventures, Tom needed infrastructure immediately. He wanted a platform that could support deal flow and investor participation, and work professionally without requiring a large team. “Right now, ICAN is just me, one other guy soon coming on board, and my advisory board,” he says. “That’s it.”
Dealum was all that and more – and quickly became their operational backbone. ICAN can accept applications from founders, onboard angel investors, manage deal flow, and organize investor days through a single platform.
“Dealum is a lot of things. It’s a wonderful deal flow. But it’s also a beautiful platform, which gives me a brand and credibility. One of the things I always used to tell my entrepreneurship students was that when you're starting up, you want to look bigger than you are. You want to look like a big company even though you're a little company, right?” explains Tom. “Dealum gives us an appearance of a much larger, sophisticated organization.”
The philosophy behind ICAN: the flywheel of future innovation
Tom is explicit that his motivation is broader than financial returns or personal gain. “I love innovation, and I love being connected to smart people,” he says. “I love just being a part of prosperity worldwide.” That outlook is reflected in ICAN’s structure, particularly the commitment to return 10% of realized gains to the campuses where ventures originate. The intent is not charity, but sustainability – ensuring that success feeds future innovation.
It’s a central part of Tom’s vision that universities should be able to benefit, over the long term, from the innovation they help create. In the United States in particular, changes in public funding have increased financial pressure on higher education institutions. Federal support has been reduced, and universities have limited room to continue raising tuition. As a result, campuses are being forced to look for new, sustainable sources of income.
Tom is convinced that one such source lies in the commercial success of campus-born ventures. When universities can participate in the financial outcomes of the companies that originate from their research and students, it creates an incentive to reinvest in entrepreneurship and innovation, creating a virtuous cycle.
Tom is clear that campus innovation does not produce immediate outcomes and that meaningful results often take years. “You have to have a long-term perspective,” he says. “Some of these deals take four or five years” before they reach an outcome. ICAN is built to accelerate and strengthen the flywheel of campus innovation globally and in the long term.
To learn more about ICAN, its model, and current opportunities, visit the ICAN website.
