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Built for technology transfer teams, FirstIgnite helps universities and laboratories connect research discoveries with companies ready to develop them.
Every year, thousands of patents, discoveries, and technical breakthroughs emerge from university labs across the United States. But many promising ideas—from life-saving medicines to cleaner energy and smarter technologies—never make it beyond the lab.
Part of the challenge lies in how universities are organized. Technology transfer offices are typically responsible for protecting intellectual property, which requires deep technical and legal expertise. But identifying companies, starting conversations, and building industry partnerships often requires additional time and resources.
That gap is where FirstIgnite found its opportunity.
Listening to the Same Problem Again and Again
When Chase Bonhag and his co-founders launched FirstIgnite in 2019, they started with a simple step: talk to universities.
“We spoke with about sixty technology transfer offices during our early customer discovery process,” Bonhag said.
The conversations quickly started to sound familiar.
“We kept hearing the same thing. Teams were really good at generating patents and protecting intellectual property, but the marketing and company connection piece was incredibly difficult.”
Many offices relied on conferences, industry introductions, or companies discovering university technologies on their own. Those pathways occasionally led to licensing deals, but they rarely created a consistent pipeline of partnerships.
To address that challenge, FirstIgnite built software that analyzes patents, research publications, and market data to identify companies that could benefit from a particular technology. The platform helps universities identify potential industry partners and initiate targeted outreach.
“The goal was to treat commercialization more like business development,” Bonhag said.
FirstIgnite’s first year followed a familiar startup pattern. The founders ran pilot programs, refined their product, and searched for their first paying customers.
Seven early pilots failed to convert.
But after nearly a year, Stony Brook University agreed to try the platform, writing the company a $6,000 check.
“It was a small contract,” Bonhag said, “but it provided an important signal.”
Soon after, Auburn University and the University of Notre Dame joined as customers. Progress followed, but momentum still felt uncertain.
A Turning Point in Michigan
In 2020, FirstIgnite joined the first Grand Rapids cohort of the Conquer Accelerator, operated by the MSU Research Foundation.
“We had been working on the company for close to eighteen months and we were barely making any money,” Bonhag said.
The accelerator’s $20,000 investment helped stabilize the company and signaled to other investors that FirstIgnite was worth taking seriously.
“We used that check as validation,” Bonhag said. “Once we could say the MSU Research Foundation was backing us, it opened doors with other investors.”
FirstIgnite raised roughly $200,000 from angel investors during the Conquer Accelerator program. The funding allowed the company to hire its first key team members, including its head of sales and head of engineering—both of whom remain with the company today.
The MSU Research Foundation continued supporting the company in later rounds through its Red Cedar Ventures and Michigan Rise investment funds.
“Across three different rounds, the MSU Research Foundation was the only investor that came in every time,” Bonhag said.
Bonhag grew up in Traverse City and chose to build FirstIgnite there rather than relocating to a larger startup hub. That made support from Michigan’s innovation ecosystem especially important.
“It’s harder to build a startup here,” Bonhag said. “There’s less capital and fewer companies doing it. The support we received made a huge difference.”
When the Market Shifted
For several years, growth remained steady but gradual.
Then the environment around university commercialization began to change.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the traditional pathways for industry engagement disappeared. Conferences stopped. Corporate visitors were no longer traveling to campuses. Universities had to find new ways to connect with companies, and outbound outreach suddenly mattered more.
At the same time, artificial intelligence began attracting new attention across industries, including higher education. FirstIgnite had incorporated AI into its platform from the beginning, but institutions were now actively searching for tools built around automation and data analysis. Financial pressures across higher education added another layer of urgency.
“You could feel the shift,” Bonhag said. “By 2023, the same people who had said no to us earlier were coming back and asking to talk again.”
At the same time, some institutions were beginning to see measurable results from working with FirstIgnite. One of the most visible examples came from Idaho National Laboratory.
Rather than simply adopting the platform, the laboratory built a process around it. Staff dedicated time specifically to identifying companies aligned with their technologies and reaching out through the system.
Within a year, the lab increased its licensing agreements from four per year to twelve—a threefold increase that continued into the following year.
The results quickly drew attention from other research institutions. According to Bonhag, the U.S. Department of Energy later funded a $1.8 million initiative to expand similar capabilities across other national laboratories.
For FirstIgnite, the project demonstrated what could happen when institutions paired structured outreach with the right tools.
A Strategic Next Chapter
In February 2026, FirstIgnite reached another milestone when Merit Holdings announced its acquisition of the company.
The deal brings FirstIgnite together with Inteum, a widely used intellectual property management platform serving more than 250 universities worldwide. The combined technologies aim to support the full commercialization process—from managing intellectual property to identifying industry partners.
FirstIgnite plans to continue developing AI-powered tools designed specifically for research institutions, with Bonhag and most of the company’s team remaining in place as the platform continues to expand.
“I’m really proud we were able to do this from Traverse City,” he said. “Companies like ours don’t usually get started here.”
Learn more at firstignite.com.
