San Francisco: Sandbox Industries, a startup foundry and early-stage venture capital firm, has opened its office in San Francisco. The Chicago based venture firm manages $18.8 million vintage 2008 seed fund.

Launched in 2003, Sandbox launches new businesses and invests in seed-stage software and tech-enabled businesses. It is also one of the founders and investors in Excelerate, a summer-long boot camp to help entrepreneurs build great companies by providing them with mentors, customers and investors.

The initiative will be run by Managing Director Millie Tadewaldt. This will help the company in the strategic expansion of Startup Foundry to build startups from the ground up using an internal team of founders-in-residence, developers, designers and other specialists. Gauri Sharma, CEO of Lab42 is one of the founder-in-residence of Sandbox and is also one of the portfolio companies.

Founders-in-residence can sue focus groups, conversations with customers, landing page tests, product technology tests and other techniques to establish the value of a potential company’s market. The foundry also brainstorms as many ideas as possible and cheaply tests the best ideas, and launches them into new businesses.