About xFoundry

our mission

To turn every university into a solution engine.  A place where students use cutting-edge tools, mentorship, and entrepreneurship competitions to launch scalable ventures that solve the world’s toughest problems.

our vision

Create a global alliance of universities that serve as hubs for high-impact, multidisciplinary innovation, where students with a passion for technology, entrepreneurship, the arts, athletics, and science form teams and compete in challenges that shape a better future.

By the numbers

talent reach
25x

Competitions can engage up to 25 times more diverse talent than traditional recruitment methods, tapping into a wider pool of innovative thinkers.

Knowledge Spillover
7x

The collaborative environment results in seven times more shared learning and cross-pollination of ideas among participants.

multidisciplinary engagement
139

undergraduate and graduate degree programs and counting engaged in xFoundry initiatives as of May 2025.

idea generation
10x

Competitions typically generate ten times more viable ideas compared to internal innovation processes, fostering a rich environment for creativity.

TEAMS Framework

Innovation doesn't happen in silos, it happens in TEAMS.

TEAMS combines five essential mindsets to provide every venture with the precise expertise it needs, from ideation and prototyping to market launch and validation. These mindsets represent a unique perspective, contributing to bringing ideas to life in a novel way.

Each team member begins with a unique viewpoint, and that diversity of thought is the strength of multidisciplinary collaboration. By combining varied experiences, passions, talents, and interests, students build a richly skilled team ready to tackle complex challenges. Their perspective is their superpower and their unique contribution to the recipe for innovation.

Technology: The Experimentor

Rooted in curiosity and iterative problem-solving, the technology mindset treats bugs as clues and errors as data points, using hands-on experimentation—disassembling, testing, and reassembling—to refine solutions. It constantly asks “Can we build this?” and “What tools or architectures make it work?” to ground ambitious ideas in reality. 

This mindset thrives on play, especially with emerging tools and platforms. Whether it’s testing out the newest AI tools, editing content on the latest platforms, or writing code to automate a task, it approaches tech as a sandbox for exploration.

Above all, the technology mindset is about asking better questions, imagining alternate possibilities, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, one test, one tool, and one tweak at a time.

Entrepreneurship: The Guiding Light

The entrepreneurial mindset is driven by a desire to spark action. Every creation, decision, or response is designed to make people move, act, or respond. It thrives on forging a path forward, constantly measuring each step against a central question: Does this serve the purpose?

Entrepreneurs are motivated by feedback and reactions, seeing them as signals for growth or opportunity. They guide the team with intention, ensuring every task aligns with the original goal.

This mindset values breadth over depth, building a flexible, cross-functional toolkit that draws from many disciplines. It adapts, evolves, and shape-shifts whatever it takes to keep momentum going.

Most of all, the entrepreneurial mindset embraces ambiguity. It doesn’t wait for certainty or perfect conditions; it starts, iterates, and learns in motion.

Arts & Athletics: 
The Creative Competitor

The arts and athletics mindset is forged through discipline, performance, and the ability to rebound from failure. It thrives in the spaces of consistency where repetition becomes mastery, and every mistake is a lesson in resilience.

Whether it’s a public loss on the scoreboard, a shaky performance on stage, or critical feedback from a coach or director, this mindset understands that failure is part of the process and shows up again and again, ready to push forward. 

This mindset can perform well under pressure and in high-stakes environments, constantly asking: what will it take to win, and how far do I need to push past my limits to make it happen? 

Wired for practice, grit, and performance, it embraces the kind of repetition most avoid and the vulnerability most fear. For the Arts and Athletics mindset, resilience is essential, and success hinges on training for precision, perception, and an understanding of what it means to perform publicly and be judged, enabling rapid adaptation and recovery.

Marketing: The Connector

The marketing mindset is grounded in the desire to communicate, translate, and connect. Learning happens through careful observation and listening, constantly adapting language, tone, and delivery to align with the audience’s needs.

Fueled by the passion to drive action, this mindset crafts every message with clarity and purpose, ensuring it resonates, deepens understanding, and inspires decisive action.

Storytelling, design, and framing are all tools used by the Marketing mindset to shape the audience's perception. There is a constant pursuit of improvement, with attention focused on how the message is conveyed and how it can be made clear and persuasive.

The marketing mindset is the translator and amplifier, focused on bridging understanding between parties and ensuring that messages are accurately interpreted and not lost in translation.

Science: The Inventor

The Science mindset is driven by the desire to invent and produce something new and original. It is methodical, inventive, and rooted in deep knowledge.  Its creativity flows through structure, applying procedures, systems, and logic to turn ideas into reality.

Inventions aren’t made in isolation, but within a framework of context and understanding. Innovation emerges not from guesswork but from mastery. This mindset makes informed decisions, crafting novel solutions based on expertise and refined through deliberate iteration.

Whether designing a product, composing music, or developing a new theory, each creation is carefully constructed. The process matters as much as the outcome.

Meet our growing partner network

Want to partner with us?

Join our growing network of partners to support students taking on society's grand challenges.

partner network
30+
Corporate, academic, and government partners have partnered with xFoundry to lend their expertise, software, and more for students to use as they solve society's grand challenges.
about xFoundry

Where did we come from?

Built at the E.A. Fernandez IDEA Factory, in the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland, xFoundry was inspired by the university’s strategic mission to tackle humanity’s grand challenges.

We saw a need to go beyond traditional education and create a space where students could use their college years to gain valuable experience and build solutions together.

We wanted to tap into the passion, energy, and talent of students, cultivating an environment where they could work on meaningful projects and make a real impact. This led us to create a solution foundry, a place where ideas are forged into tangible solutions for the world's most pressing problems.

Why the "X"?

The 'x' in xFoundry is a symbol of our core values and approach:

  • X is a force multiplier: It represents the power of collaboration, where the collective effort of a team is greater than the sum of its individual parts.
  • X is a connector: It signifies our role in bringing together diverse minds, disciplines, and ideas to create innovative solutions.
  • X is the solution: It stands for the outcome of our work—the tangible, impactful solutions that we develop to address global challenges.