Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneurs in over 900 ventures, including America Online, Amazon.com, Tandem Computers, Compaq, Electronic Arts, JD.com, Square, Genentech, Google, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Nest, Palo Alto Networks, Synack, Snap, AppDynamics, and Twitter. By 2019 it had raised around $9 billion in 19 venture capital funds and four growth funds.
Benchmark is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco that provides seed money to startups.
Y Combinator (YC) is an American seed money startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 2,000 companies, including Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise Automation, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Twitch, and Reddit. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was more than $300 billion by January 2021. The company's accelerator program is in Mountain View, California. It's considered to be one of the most successful startup incubators in Silicon Valley.
The Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) is an Africa-wide technology entrepreneur training program, seed fund, and incubator headquartered in Accra, Ghana. The three-phased institution was founded in 2008 to provide training, investment, and mentoring for aspiring technology entrepreneurs with the goal of creating globally successful companies that create wealth and jobs locally in Africa.
500 Startups is an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator founded in 2010 by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai. The fund admitted a first "class" of twelve startups to its incubator office in Mountain View, California in February, 2011. They expanded to a second class of 21 in June 2011 and a third class of 34 in October 2011.
Stripe is an Irish-American financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company dual-headquartered in San Francisco, United States and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment processing software and application programming interfaces (APIs) for e-commerce websites and mobile applications.
Angela Benton is an American businesswoman. Benton founded NewME (acquired), the first startup accelerator for minorities globally in 2011. She is a pioneer of diversity and one of the most important African-Americans in the technology industry. She has helped minority-led tech companies raise over $47 million in venture capital funding.
Silicon Beach is the Westside region of the Los Angeles metropolitan area that is home to more than 500 technology companies, including startups. It is particularly applied to the coastal strip from Los Angeles International Airport north to the Santa Monica Mountains, but the term may be applied loosely or colloquially to most anywhere in the Los Angeles Basin. Startups seeded here include Snapchat and Tinder. Major technology companies that opened offices in the region including Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, BuzzFeed, Facebook, Salesforce, AOL, Electronic Arts, Sony, EdgeCast Networks, MySpace, Amazon.com, Apple, Inc., and Netflix. By some 2012 metrics, the region was the second- or third-most prominent technology hub in the world. In the first six months of 2013, 94 new start-ups in Silicon Beach raised over $500 million in funding, and there were nine acquisitions.
EdSurge is an education journalism initiative provided by the International Society for Technology in Education. EdSurge publishes newsletters and operates databases used by venture capitalists, teachers, school administrators and others. In May 2018, EdSurge was identified by the Brookings Institution as one of the world's 16 leading "innovation spotters" in education. These organizations "are searching the globe to find, highlight, and sometimes support education innovations," Brookings wrote.
AngelList is a U.S. website for startups, angel investors, and job-seekers looking to work at startups. Founded in 2010, it started as an online introduction board for tech startups that needed seed funding. Since 2015, the site allows startups to raise money from angel investors free of charge.
Ali Rowghani is an Iranian-born American businessman.
StartX is a non-profit startup accelerator and founder community associated with Stanford University.
SOSV is a venture capital and investment management firm that provides seed, venture and growth stage funding to startup companies in the technology sector. The company's focus is on accelerating startups via their market specific seed accelerator programs located in Europe, Asia and the USA. The firm is made up of 8 general partners, 120+ full-time support staff and thousands of worldwide mentors. SOSV is headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, with back office operations in Cork, Ireland, and flagship offices in San Francisco, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Taipei, New York, Cork, and London.
Yabacon Valley (YV) is a nickname for an area within Yaba. Yaba is a suburb of Lagos, Nigeria and located at the mainland of the Lagos. This area is already growing as Nigeria’s technology hub and cluster of hundreds of banking institutions, educational institutions, technology and startup companies which steadily attracts angel investors, venture capitalists, enthusiasts and media people from all over the world. This cluster is the major reason many technology firms are considering opening up shops in Yaba. Close to the region is the Lagos Lagoon which lies on its south-western side, it empties into the Atlantic via Lagos Harbor, a main channel through the heart of the city, 0.5 km to 1 km wide and 10 km long. The term originally was born from an unintentional act of an absent mind, manipulating the Silicon Valley name to create a nick version for this cluster while writing a story title. More so, due to the lagoon near this region, the term Silicon lagoon has also been used to refer to this cluster although this is yet to stick and its origin or creator is unknown.
Aileen Lee is a U.S. angel investor. A venture capital investor, she is the founder of Cowboy Ventures.
Blue Startups is a Hawaiian-based accelerator company co-founded by Henk Rogers, Maya Rogers and Chenoa Farnsworth in 2012. They created it to help startup companies, and help make Hawaii more identifiable as a technological business hub. The company has a network of over 120 mentors from the Hawaii, Silicon Valley, and Asia areas. It has a total of eight lead mentors, which includes Henk Rogers, Robert Robinson, Steve Markowitz, Donavan Kealoha, Lisa Brett, Bill Spencer, Michael Troy, Joseph Pigato and Eric Bjorndahl. The company's stated goal - according to former Program Manager Meli James - is to get companies started in Hawaii and make them want to keep working in the state.
Popout, Inc. DBA Shippo is an American software company that helps e-commerce businesses, online marketplaces, and platforms integrate shipping with multiple carriers through their API and web application. Shippo allows users to compare shipping rates, create labels, generate international customs documents, return labels, and track parcels. Some of their customers and partners include eBay, Freestyle Solutions, Tuft & Needle, Weebly, GoDaddy, Shyp, Mercari, Stripe, and Sellbrite. As of October 2017, Shippo has raised over $29 million in funding lead by Bessemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, and SoftTechVC.
Bikanta is a startup biotech company that develops clinical products which focus on the detection of cancer through the insertion of fluorescent nanodiamonds.
Meesho is an Indian social commerce platform founded by IIT Delhi graduates Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal in December 2015. It enables small businesses and individuals to start their online stores via social channels such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram. Meesho is headquartered in Bangalore, and was one of the three Indian companies to be selected for Y Combinator in 2016. It was also a part of the first batch of Google Launchpad - Solve for India program. In June 2019, Meesho became India’s first startup to receive investment from Facebook.
Berkeley SkyDeck (SkyDeck) is a high-tech entrepreneurship startup accelerator and incubator program at the University of California, Berkeley serving as a joint venture between the Haas School of Business and Berkeley College of Engineering. Founded in 2012, SkyDeck promotes high-tech entrepreneurship in the Silicon Valley.
