$10 million gift from Jeff and Edie Fisher and family helps launch a new innovation-and-entrepreneurship hub at college of engineering
Purdue University has secured a $10 million commitment from the AGE Fisher Family Foundation—created by alumni Jeff Fisher and Edie Fisher—to launch a new innovation-and-entrepreneurship hub inside the College of Engineering.
The gift establishes the Hub for Innovation, Ventures, and Entrepreneurship (HIVE), positioning the Fishers not simply as supporters of Purdue programs but as architects of a dedicated on-campus platform meant to move engineering talent into venture formation.
For Jeff and Edie Fisher, the donation reads as a return to origins as much as an investment thesis. They grew up in Indiana and met at Purdue, and Jeff Fisher has framed the commitment as an effort to provide today’s engineering students with a resource he says did not exist when they were undergraduates, especially for those who want to build companies, not just careers.
That donor intent matters because HIVE is designed to meet students at the point where academic work begins to resemble market work: testing ideas, finding collaborators, and learning the mechanics of early venture-building.
Jeff Fisher’s own professional arc helps explain why the new center is explicitly engineered around entrepreneurship, not only “innovation” in the abstract. He joined NVIDIA in 1994 and remains there as a senior executive, with Purdue pointing to NVIDIA’s invention of the GPU as a catalytic technology that fueled PC gaming, advanced parallel computing, and helped accelerate the widespread adoption of AI across industries.
In the university’s telling, Fisher’s career—built in Silicon Valley during the semiconductor boom and matured inside one of the defining compute companies of the AI era—becomes a practical template for what HIVE aims to cultivate: engineers who can translate technical advantage into durable companies.
The physical footprint is also meant to signal seriousness. Purdue says HIVE will be located in the Duncan Annex of the Max W & Maileen Brown Family Hall of Electrical Engineering, in the heart of campus, rather than pushed to the margins of the university where “startup activity” can become siloed.
The plan calls for an approximately 10,000-square-foot facility with up to 10 incubator spaces for Purdue Engineering startups, hot-desking for competitively selected undergraduate innovators, Purdue Innovates staff offices, collaboration common areas, and dedicated space for pitch competitions and entrepreneurship training activities.
HIVE is being structured as a connector, not a standalone boutique. Purdue’s description links it to campus-wide partners such as the Mitch Daniels School of Business and to the Purdue Research Foundation’s Purdue Innovates initiative, aligning engineering-originated ventures with the broader commercialization and startup-support ecosystem already operating around the university.
The Fisher commitment also supports hiring a managing director, a choice that typically separates symbolic “centers” from operational ones by underwriting day-to-day execution.
Leadership, at least initially, will be anchored in a faculty director who has built companies, not only studied them. Christopher Brinton, an Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and computer engineering, has been named the inaugural faculty director; Purdue notes that he cofounded the big-data startup Zoomi while pursuing his PhD and will focus the center on helping engineering students explore, launch, and scale new ventures.
The university’s timeline is immediate by academic standards: HIVE is scheduled to open for activities and events in fall 2026.