LIL Venture Fund

The LIL Venture Fund (LVF) is a permanent fixture in the LIL Universe to provide funding to promising student projects/organizations/ventures to assist in their growth and expansion. 

This is the only venture fund in existence dedicated to funding high-school level student projects/organizations/ventures. 

The LIL Venture Fund (LVF) works closely with our expert partners to ensure more diversified opinions are incorporated into the judging process and to provide all LVF awardees with professional feedback on future expansion directions and potential pitfalls of their ventures.  

The presence of our expert partners in this process allows our LVF awardees to obtain professional-level advice derived from a venture capital context, something that would be otherwise difficult to obtain at the high school level. 

In the spirit of encouraging student entrepreneurship and innovation, the LVF sponsors and organizes the IdeAction (Global Pitch Competition) twice yearly, corresponding to the LVF’s biannual funding cycles. 

Winners of this competition are awarded funding directly from the LIL Venture Fund. All high-school students are welcome to apply for funding. 

Projects are selected based on: 

• current scale of project/organization/venture (e.g. number of people involved, amount of funds raised, number of events organized etc.) and;
• planned direction and growth of project/organization/venture.

The above selection criteria should serve as a broad guideline of how projects/organizations/ventures will be vetted. Since each project/organization/venture is necessarily unique, it is impossible to evaluate all using a standard universal criteria. Projects/ventures/organizations will be analyzed holistically and individually. 

The LVF offers more than USD$10,000 of funding annually. There are two funding rounds per year - May and November. Selection for funding is merit-based; student(s)/projects can be selected multiple times if merited. 

Projects that have won funding are announced at the Spring and Fall Research & Innovation Showcases (April and October annually), respectively. 

In addition to the ongoing support and monitoring that the LVF provides its awardees to ensure the greatest growth potential of projects under its wing, the LVF also provides a complimentary videography service. 

Projects and organizations funded by the LVF are provided this service which they can use to make any video required: for instance, marketing videos, promotional clips, explanatory videos etc. 

Yes! See here for how to become a Limited Partner.