OMAHA, Nebraska (December 9, 2025)—A new incubator program for innovative University startups is now accepting applications to join its first cohort.

A product of a winning grant application through the Small Business Administration’s Growth Accelerator Fund Competition, the program—called The Furnace—will be housed in the Omaha Catalyst building, formerly Omaha Steel Castings. The $75,000 Capital formation grant will help establish The Furnace for the first year.

“Too many of our startups have promising technologies and services but don’t have any capital, so they have to fight an uphill battle in just getting going,” UNeMed’s Business Development Manager, Tyler Scherr, PhD, said. “The whole goal of The Furnace is to help them build a compelling business plan around their technology to effectively communicate the opportunity for capital to find them.”

The Furnace will accept three or four fledgling startups in each of three planned cohorts.

In partnership with the Nebraska Business Development Center and CQuence Health, The Furnace will train and mentor each startup on how to build successful small business grant applications while refining their approach and pitches to private investors and venture capital groups.

Each cohort will run about three months, with NBDC leading the weekly grant-writing workshops. CQuence Health, a company built on providing strategic advice and investment capital for innovative startups in healthcare, will add regular training modules to help inventor-entrepreneurs refine their business plans, presentation skills and other important elements for raising funds.

In the end, each graduate of The Furnace is expected to have completed an SBIR/STTR grant application, created a sound “go-to-market” strategy, refined their “pitch deck,” and assembled a strong team of advisers.

Participants in The Furnace will also have access to the membership of the state’s bioscience trade association, Bio Nebraska; the industry relations and customer discovery services of UNeTech Institute; and the educational programming and extensive entrepreneurial network of the Nebraska Startup Academy.

“One of the more valuable things, in my mind,” Dr. Scherr said, “is every entrepreneurial team in The Furnace will officially become part of the startup ecosystem here in Nebraska. That means they get plugged into all the meetings, all the groups, all the entrepreneurial support organizations, all of it. That alone should help open a lot of doors for these companies.”

To apply for The Furnace, use the embedded form below or direct your browser here: https://forms.gle/3gP8sDYRTkgMN9aq8.