The 3,500-square-foot hub, dubbed Third Coast Foundry, is located inside of a century-old brick and timber office building at 625 Second St. that was abandoned by Github in 2023. The space will now host university-founded startups, workshops, and investor events — reflecting San Francisco’s growing pull not only in Bay Area venture capital circles but across the national startup ecosystem.
The initiative brings together several research powerhouses — Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Purdue University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Washington University in St. Louis. They collectively invest nearly $10 billion annually in research and educate more than 300,000 students.
The plan is to give these universities access to the investors, talent and infrastructure they need to accelerate startups.
While the lease on Second Street has been finalized, details about when Third Coast Foundry will activate the space are not yet known.
“We are very excited about the opportunity to build a pipeline from San Francisco to the Midwest and Vice Versa,” said Greg Keenan, a partner with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which supports the commercialization of technologies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “When you look at the amount of capital that’s available and willing to invest in San Francisco, it’s a really important place for us to be present.”
“Carnegie Mellon founders are building companies in some of the most important technical areas shaping the future — vfrom robotics and AI to biotech and advanced computing. A significant number of those companies ultimately grow in the Bay Area, which remains one of the world’s most dynamic venture ecosystems,” said Meredith Meyer Grelli, interim executive director of the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has made reviving the city’s vacancy-riddled downtown a priority since taking office in November 2024, courting national universities to anchor new satellite campuses in the city’s core. Vanderbilt University, which is based in Nashville, Tenn., last year explored a downtown San Francisco location, but ultimately opted for a site closer to Mission Bay, a neighborhood southeast of downtown that in recent years has drawn AI pioneer OpenAI and other growing startups and tech incubators.
For now, the Third Coast Foundry innovation hub is an experiment: The space will operate as a two-year pilot, according to Samir Mayekar, managing director of the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago, which will manage it.
Mayekar said the consortium of schools is “testing the San Francisco market” and the joint venture, with plans for a “more permanent, long term lease” and larger presence in the city in the future.
“This is our minimum viable product. If it’s successful, and we find our product market fit with this space, then we would absolutely be open to expanding,” he said.
Third Coast Foundry will be used for investor pitching, alumni networking, workshops and, critically, showcasing startups and technology spinning out of the universities. The hub comes with an amenity space that can host events for up to 200 people, Mayekar said. Each university will contribute to programming and community building efforts hosted within the space, and will share its operational costs.
The idea for the shared innovation hub was born during Deep Tech Week in San Francisco last summer. Three of the eight partner universities held a startup demo day, for which they invited more than two dozen companies to pitch to local VCs.
“I think the challenge is you have a huge concentration of capital on the coast, especially in the Bay Area, and it’s not always easy for folks in middle America to tap into that,” Mayekar said.
He described the South Park area, a historic district and quiet greenspot in the gritty South of Market neighborhood known for its small but influential enclave of tech startups and venture capital offices, as the “urban Sandhill Road,” referencing the area in Menlo Park where venture capital firms have congregated.
“You can get on the Caltrain from the space and go to Palo Alto, Redwood City, or wherever — it’s also a space where you can stay nearby and walk everywhere,” he said, of Third Coast Foundry’s office. “If you just look at this nexus of where Y Combinator, OpenAI, Anthropic and the AI corridor that’s been emerging are — a lot of those shops, in addition to the top venture capital firms, have critical mass around this space.”
In contrast, vacancy across the city’s Financial District and Mid-Market office towers remains in the mid-30 percent range, highlighting the challenges city leaders face in striking a balance between revitalizing downtown and the practical realities of modern innovation and organic growth. The magnetism of the city’s newest tech ecosystem, fueled by growing companies looking for large modern spaces, proximity to talent and attractive amenities, has shifted much of San Francisco’s entrepreneurial energy to neighborhoods on the fringes of downtown, like Mission Bay and South Park.
Even so, city officials see these emerging hubs as part of a broader strategy to keep San Francisco competitive on the national stage.
“San Francisco is the global hub of innovation, technology, and venture capital, and with yet another investment from leading institutions of higher education, we are accelerating our city’s recovery and strengthening our city center as a place where people live, work, play, and learn,” Lurie said. “I look forward to welcoming students and leaders from the Midwest and partnering with these universities to open our doors to the next generation of innovators.”
© 2026 the San Francisco Chronicle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
