Eight Midwestern universities opened a shared entrepreneurship hub in San Francisco's South Beach neighborhood Tuesday, backed by Mayor Lurie — and the most conspicuous member is Northwestern, which closed its own SF campus just months ago.

Eight Midwestern universities cut the ribbon Tuesday on Third Coast Foundry, a 3,647-square-foot workspace in San Francisco's South Beach neighborhood for student entrepreneurs — and the most notable member of the consortium is Northwestern, which didn't renew the lease on its own SF campus at 44 Montgomery Street just over a year ago, ending a decade-long presence in the city.

The hub is managed by the University of Chicago's Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship, which has been running a soft launch since March. Mayor Daniel Lurie attended the formal opening, framing Third Coast Foundry as part of his campaign to restore downtown energy. The other members: Carnegie Mellon, Ohio State, Purdue, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Washington University in St. Louis. The Mayor's office says the eight schools together enroll more than 300,000 students and invest roughly $10 billion annually in research — figures that came from his office, not the universities independently.

The model is the real story. What Northwestern couldn't justify as a standalone tenant — one school, one campus, one rent check — becomes feasible as one-eighth of a shared footprint operated by someone else's entrepreneurship center. Samir Mayekar, managing director of the Polsky Center, made the pitch Tuesday: "Walk six minutes in any direction of this office, there is 100 billion dollars of venture capital in that radius." That's a claim, not a filing, but the proximity argument has been San Francisco's strongest card for twenty-five years.

Since its March soft launch, the hub has logged more than 1,000 visitors and event attendees, per the Mayor's office — thin traction for a space billing itself as a bridge between Midwest research and Bay Area capital, but it's three months old. Tuesday night the Foundry hosts the Midwest Deep Tech Demo Day: 40 startups pitching to more than 200 investors.

The arrangement is explicitly a two-year pilot, up for re-evaluation in 2028. What hasn't been disclosed: the cost-sharing structure among the eight schools, the lease terms, or any mechanism for helping Midwest students afford to actually live in SoMa while they network. Lurie is stacking similar bets — Vanderbilt is slated to acquire California College of the Arts' Mission Bay campus in 2027. Whether these ribbon-cuttings convert into retained companies or just visiting cohorts is the question the 2028 check-in will have to answer.