Varsity Venture Studio, a University of Wisconsin-Madison-wide venture studio, turns ideas into funded software businesses. Varsity Venture Studio is a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and venture builder High Alpha Innovation, and is the first university venture studio of its kind.

In its second program cohort, the Varsity team focused on commercializing technology that addresses the ongoing challenges in managing software supply chain security: development teams who aren't addressing risk management are already behind the curve.

In collaboration with the Varsity Venture Studio team, High Alpha Innovation systematically narrowed the second UW-Madison idea pipeline cohort to leading concepts that were vetted through a Sprint Week, with ultimately one emerging to be launched as a software business. Together they launched FitStack, a platform that actively supports software developers throughout the CICD pipeline by reducing the attack surface of code and containers, removing vulnerabilities and fixing misconfigurations. FitStack is led by co-founder and CEO Roger Cummings.