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 refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend to become registered, startups refer to 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 be successful and influential.
Venture capital is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which have demonstrated high growth. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing risky start-ups in the hopes that some of the firms they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. The start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are usually from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
Seed money, sometimes known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor invests capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term seed suggests that this is a very early investment, meant to support the business until it can generate cash of its own, or until it is ready for further investments. Seed money options include friends and family funding, seed venture capital funds, angel funding, and crowdfunding.
Funding is the act of providing resources to finance a need, program, or project. While this is usually in the form of money, it can also take the form of effort or time from an organization or company. Generally, this word is used when a firm uses its internal reserves to satisfy its necessity for cash, while the term financing is used when the firm acquires capital from external sources.
UST, formerly known as UST Global, is a provider of digital technology and transformation, information technology and services, headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California, United States. Stephen Ross founded UST in 1998 in Laguna Hills. The company has offices in the Americas, EMEA, APAC, and India.
CyberArk is a publicly traded information security company offering identity management. The company's technology is utilized primarily in the financial services, energy, retail, healthcare and government markets. CyberArk is headquartered in U.S. headquarters located in Newton, Massachusetts. The company also has offices throughout the Americas, EMEA, Asia Pacific and Japan.
Corporate venture capital (CVC) is the investment of corporate funds directly in external startup companies. CVC is defined by the Business Dictionary as the "practice where a large firm takes an equity stake in a small but innovative or specialist firm, to which it may also provide management and marketing expertise; the objective is to gain a specific competitive advantage." Examples of CVCs include GV and Intel Capital.
Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Kharagpur (E-Cell) is a non-profit student's organization dedicated to promoting the spirit of entrepreneurship among students throughout India. Established in 2006 under the aegis of STEP, IIT Kharagpur, E-Cell has since been involved in more than 70 startup companies in the initial stages of their existence. It is a student body under Rajendra Mishra School of Engineering Entrepreneurship (RMSOEE), IIT Kharagpur and has taken up various initiatives to promote new ventures by students of IIT Kharagpur and students across the country.
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.
OmniCompete is an organisation specialising in the design and implementation of innovation competitions. In February 2012 OmniCompete was acquired by InnoCentive. One of the original founders went on to co-found the crowdsharing platform Zyncd in 2014.
Jade Magnet was an online Crowdsourcing platform for creative and marketing support services. It was founded in 2009 by Sitashwa Srivastava and Manik Kinra. The company is headquartered in Bangalore, India and has white label partnerships in Qatar as Mixilion and in Singapore as id8on.
Fintech, a portmanteau of "financial technology", refers to firms using new technology to compete with traditional financial methods in the delivery of financial services. Artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, and big data are regarded as the "ABCD" of fintech. The use of smartphones for mobile banking, investing, borrowing services, and cryptocurrency are examples of technologies designed to make financial services more accessible to the general public. Fintech companies consist of both startups and established financial institutions and technology companies trying to replace or enhance the usage of financial services provided by existing financial companies. A subset of fintech companies that focus on the insurance industry are collectively known as insurtech or insuretech companies.
Funding Societies is a Southeast Asia’s digital financing platform for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), headquartered in Singapore. It was the first such platform in Singapore to engage an escrow agency to independently and safely manage investors’ funds. In Indonesia it is known as Modalku. Since its launch, it has disbursed more than US$2.6 billion in business financing to MSMEs through more than 5.1 million loan transactions.
ThetaRay is a fintech software and big data analytics company with headquarters in Hod HaSharon, Israel and New York, and offices in Madrid, London, and Singapore.
MACH37 is an American startup accelerator that was established in 2013 as a division of the Virginia-based Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) with funding from the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 2017 CIT partnered with VentureScope, a strategic innovation consultancy and venture firm, to revamp MACH37's operating model and curriculum. Following a successful partnership between CIT and VentureScope, MACH37 became fully owned and operated by VentureScope in 2020. MACH37 focuses primarily on honing and strengthening startups' product-market fit through extensive customer discovery and market research, expanding emerging companies' professional networks, fostering founder wellbeing, and providing emerging companies in the cybersecurity industry with access to investment capital and an immediate customer base. In an October 2020 article Forbes named MACH37 'the Granddaddy' of top cyber accelerators giving a nod to the fact that MACH37 was one of the first accelerators in the world dedicated to cyber and cyber adjacent technologies, and it has lasted far longer than many of its peer accelerators while strengthening over time. The name 'MACH37' is a reference to the escape velocity of Earth's atmosphere. VentureScope applies Lean Startup methodology at MACH37 as an efficient and successful approach to assist startups to rapidly adapt their search for a successful business model and test their hypotheses about customer needs and market demands.
The Ministry of SMEs and Startups is a ministry of the Republic of Korea, established in July 2017 by the Moon Jae-in government. It succeeds the former Small and Medium Business Administration. The headquarters are located in Sejong City, Sejong. As of February 2021, Lee Young, a member of the National Assembly and People Power Party, has been appointed as the South Korean Minister of SMEs and Startups.
SafeToNet is a British cyber-safety company headquarters in London, and offices in San Francisco, Cologne and Toronto. The company uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and behavioural analytics to help safeguard children by detecting threats such as cyberbullying, sextortion, abuse and aggression.
Judo Bank is an Australian bank focused on small and medium-sized enterprise lending but also offers a range of personal term deposit products to consumers.
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.
