Bain Capital Ventures, a venture capital and growth equity firm, has launched StartUp Academy, an initiative to provide students with exposure to entrepreneurship and insights on how to build a business and work with innovative technologies.

Through the StartUp Academy programme, Bain Capital Ventures will seek elite technical talent from top-tier undergraduate, masters and PhD programmes throughout the US, including Duke, Harvard, MIT, University of Michigan, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, USC and University of Waterloo. 

The programme seeks to place individuals who are looking make an impact at a startup by placing them in engineering and product management positions at startups funded by Bain Capital Ventures.

An inaugural 2012 StartUp Academy class was selected during a nine-month pilot of the program. BCV received 779 applicants of which 21 students, or less than three per cent of the original applicants, were selected to participate. The participating portfolio companies are expected to continue to hire aggressively through the programme. Recruitment for the 2013 StartUp Academy class will begin in the autumn.

Upon joining the programme, the students will join a full-time or intern level position at one of BCV's growing portfolio companies. Participating companies include BloomReach, Nomis Solutions, Rent the Runway, Sneakpeeq, Survey Monkey, TargetSpot, TellApart and Tokbox.

"The goal of the StartUp Academy is to create a fertile ground to develop the next generation of entrepreneurs," says Ajay Agarwal, a managing director at Bain Capital Ventures. "We are an entrepreneurial-focused firm and this program demonstrates our commitment in developing our portfolio companies and providing them with the opportunity to tap into top talent. This uniquely opens doors for companies to benefit from the high-level energy and 'out of the box thinking' that college students bring to the table.  At the same time, this programme offers a unique opportunity for the students to learn and develop key skills in an entrepreneurial, startup environment."