Shaking Things Up For Urban Startups

Ensuring that cities are comfortable places to live for those growing numbers is tough. How best to house everyone? Get them to commute in eco-friendly ways? Provide families and children with fresh, healthy food?

Doing so—on a large scale—requires creative thinking and smart solutions. Two MIT Sloan alumnae, Clara Brenner GM ’12 and Julie Lein GM ’12, aim to fund such thinking with a new startup based in San Francisco.

Tumml, which launched this spring and which comes from a Yiddish word for “shaking things up,” arose out of a study the two women did while at Sloan. After surveying startups nationwide, they found that a mere 15% of those that focused on urban problems got seed funding.

Brenner and Lein think of Tumml as an “urban impact accelerator.” Calling attention to that low result in the venture capital community, the two alums aim to foster creative entrepreneurs who are eager to make city living better. Brenner’s background in real-estate and alternative financing has combined well with Lein’s background in urban education and nonprofit advocacy in forming Tumml.

“At the same time that more people than ever are living in cities, the fiscal climate means that cities are less able to provide certain services and quality of life,” Lein said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Entrepreneurs can shoulder that load. There is such a market opportunity here. This is where entrepreneurship should enter, there is so much they could do. We were curious why more entrepreneurs are not stepping up to fill the gap.”

Tumml’s first project will be hosting ten “promising, for-profit companies” to work in their San Francisco office, appropriately named The Hatchery. Each for-profit selected for the 12-week residency will receive $30,000 in free services along with office space as they conceive of and launch their solution.

At the end of each cohort, Tumml will work with startups to pitch their projects to investors, potential clients, or government agencies.

“There is not necessarily a place for entrepreneurs to go right now when they want to solve a problem in their own backyard,” Lein said. “We want to be the place that addresses those needs, and create a meaningful pipeline of urban impact entrepreneurs to prove that these companies have the ability to succeed, and people have the ability to shape our cities in important ways.”