A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential.
Silicon Alley is an area of high tech companies centered around southern Manhattan's Flatiron district in New York City. The term was coined in the 1990s during the dot-com boom, alluding to California's Silicon Valley tech center. The term has grown somewhat obsolete since 2003 as New York tech companies spread outside of Manhattan, and New York as a whole is now a top-tier global high technology hub. Silicon Alley, once a metonym for the sphere encompassing the metropolitan region's high technology industries, is no longer a relevant moniker as the city's tech environment has expanded dramatically both in location and in its scope. New York City's current tech sphere encompasses a universal array of applications involving artificial intelligence, the internet, new media, financial technology (fintech) and cryptocurrency, biotechnology, game design, and other fields within information technology that are supported by its entrepreneurship ecosystem and venture capital investments.
A business incubator is an organization that helps startup companies and individual entrepreneurs to develop their businesses by providing a fullscale range of services starting with management training and office space and ending with venture capital financing. The National Business Incubation Association (NBIA) defines business incubators as a catalyst tool for either regional or national economic development. NBIA categorizes its members' incubators by the following five incubator types: academic institutions; non-profit development corporations; for-profit property development ventures; venture capital firms, and a combination of the above.
Episode 1 is a venture fund set up to invest in early-stage technology companies based in the UK. The three partners behind the fund – Simon Murdoch, Damien Lane and Adrian Lloyd – are experienced entrepreneurs and investors, and have been through every stage of the start-up process, from inception to initial public offering. The firm invests between £250,000 and £2 million in UK based early-stage companies. Episode 1's first fund was launched in 2013 and totalled £37.5m. Its objective is to give a better start to the next generation of British tech ventures than their predecessors. It was created with a mixture of public and private money, including backing from Alex Chesterman of Zoopla Property Group. It is one of the UK Government's Enterprise Capital Funds – set up to support fund managers who invest in small, high-growth businesses. The £12.5 million of private investment was matched with £25 million of public money. The government's Business Secretary Vince Cable endorsed the launch of the fund, saying it 'will target a serious gap in the equity market for high-growth small firms'.
Techstars is a pre-seed investor that provides access to capital, mentorship, and other support for early-stage entrepreneurs. It was founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado. As of May 2022, the company had accepted over 2,900 companies into its accelerator programs with a combined market capitalization of $71bn USD. Techstars operates accelerator programs in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Lightspeed Venture Partners is an American venture capital firm focusing on multi-stage investments in the enterprise, consumer, and health sectors. Lightspeed invests in seed, early and growth-stage companies.
East London Tech City is a technology cluster of high-tech companies located in East London, United Kingdom. Its main area lies broadly between St Luke's and Hackney Road, with an accelerator space for spinout companies at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) is an international venture capital firm founded in 1993. The fund specializes in investments in startup companies, focusing on digital media, enterprise software, semiconductors, data storage and cyber security, having raised close to $1.4 billion USD across nine funds. JVP is headquartered in Margalit Startup City Jerusalem with offices in Be'er Sheva, New York City and Paris.
Brandwatch is a social media suite company owned by Cision. Brandwatch sells two different products: Consumer Intelligence and Social Media Management.
BostInno is a local online news site and community publishing platform covering "the view from inside" innovation in Boston. It was founded in 2008 as a community startup blog by Chase Garbarino, CEO and co-founder of Streetwise Media, and Kevin McCarthy, CTO and co-founder. On December 7, 2009, BostInno was relaunched as a news platform profiling local innovation across verticals including tech, venture capital, city news, food, higher education, and sports.
OwnLocal is an Austin, Texas-based digital advertising startup founded in 2010.
Prehype is a venture development firm. Prehype has offices in New York City, London, Copenhagen, and Rio de Janeiro, and was founded by Henrik Werdelin in September 2010. In addition to venture management services, the firm provides angel investments and access to a network of talent including entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, and developers.
Ian Hogarth is an investor and entrepreneur. He co-founded Songkick in 2007 and Plural Platform in 2021. Hogarth is the current Chair of the UK Government's AI Foundation Model Taskforce, considering the risks of artificial intelligence.
Olamide Brown, née Orekunrin, is a British-Nigerian medical doctor, healthcare entrepreneur, and founder of the Flying Doctors Healthcare Investment Group and a director of Greentree Investment Company.
Allied Minds plc is an American intellectual property (IP) commercialization company. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange. The company has technology transfer agreements with over 160 partners, including 34 U.S. federal research facilities, as well as university labs such as Harvard and New York University. It reviews thousands of IP assets per year, and forms, funds and manages start-ups that operate as subsidiaries. This IP commercialization model is relatively new to the US.
The Founder Institute is an American business incubator, entrepreneur training and startup launch program that was founded in Palo Alto, California in 2009. Although based in Silicon Valley, The Founder Institute maintains chapters in over 180 cities and more than 65 nations. It offers a four-month part-time program for new and early-stage entrepreneurs that helps them develop their business ideas and form a company. Among the key requirements for graduation is the creation of a fully operational company by the end of the four-month program. As of 2018, over 3,500 companies had been created from the program, which raised over $800M funding in total.
Cheryl Sew Hoy is an entrepreneur, speaker and angel investor, best known for being the founding CEO of the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC), a government-funded agency to support entrepreneurship in Malaysia and ASEAN.
Kim Taylor is an American entrepreneur. She founded the online college manager company Ranku and the recruitment technology company Cluster, the latter of which she is serving as its CEO.
Cardiff Start is a community interest organisation based in Cardiff, Wales which aims to promote and develop the start up sector in Wales' capital city.
Darshan Somashekar is an Indian-American tech entrepreneur, advisor, and investor. Some of the companies he has co-founded include drop.io, Imagine Easy Solutions, and Unwind Media with Neal Taparia. He is also a Venture Partner at TMV.vc.
