Earlier this year, Cornell Tech made headlines when it opened its campus on Roosevelt Island — and it’s closing out 2017 with some equally exciting news. The tech entrepreneurship hub celebrated the inauguration of the Tata Innovation Center, which will serve as a gathering point for academia and industry leaders to collaborate on innovative technologies.
Along with the inauguration, Cornell Tech announced it received a $50 million investment from Tata Consultancy Services, which will be used to support research in areas like cloud-computing security and digital privacy.
“With TCS’ investment in Cornell Tech, we take a major step forward in realizing the founding vision for this campus, which is to bring together faculty, business leaders, tech entrepreneurs and students to reinvent the way we live in the digital age,” Cornell President Martha E. Pollack said in a statement.
Cornell University is already a major contributor to the New York tech scene. Graduates of the school have launched startups such as Yext, Justworks and Citymaps, which provide users with marketing, HR and travel solutions, respectively. They have each made headlines of their own, either by raising large funding rounds or by getting acquired by major corporations. In 2016, TripAdvisor bought Citymaps, which operates as a standalone business within the company.
“All this has been delivering on a commitment that we made to the city of New York...which was to create a new graduate-level institution for the digital age in the heart of New York City,” Dan Huttenlocher, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean of Cornell Tech, said in a statement.
Formerly known as “The Bridge,” the center was renamed the “Tata Innovation Center” as a tribute to the company that made the investment. Before the center opened, Cornell Tech meetings were held at the Google building in Chelsea.
