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.
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.
Y Combinator Management, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, and Twitch.
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 January 2024, the company had accepted over 4,100 companies into its accelerator programs with a combined market capitalization of $106bn USD. Techstars operates accelerator programs in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.
Francisco Partners, legally Francisco Partners Management, L.P., is an American private equity firm focused exclusively on investments in technology and technology-enabled services businesses. It was founded in August 1999 and based in San Francisco with offices in London and New York City.
500 Global 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.
Startup accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are fixed-term, cohort-based programs, that include mentorship and educational components and culminate in a public pitch event or demo day. While traditional business incubators are often government-funded, generally take no equity, and rarely provide funding, accelerators can be either privately or publicly funded and cover a wide range of industries. Unlike business incubators, the application process for seed accelerators is open to anyone but highly competitive. There are specific accelerators, such as corporate accelerators, which are often subsidiaries or programs of larger corporations that act like seed accelerators.
InvestedIn is a crowd funding website for fund raising projects and charity events such as walkathons and celebrity cause-based campaigns. InvestedIn is also a technology provider offering a white label crowdfunding platform for commercial and non-profit use.
Sandbox Industries is a venture capital firm located in Chicago. The firm focuses on connecting established corporations with disruptive startups via strategic corporate investment funds.
Zoomcar is an Indian carsharing platform, headquartered in Bangalore. Founded in 2013 by David Back and Greg Moran, it currently operates in more than 34 cities.
Pipedrive is a cloud-based software as a service company. It is the developer of the web application and mobile app Pipedrive, a sales customer relationship management (CRM) tool. The company has more than 1,000 employees in its eight offices across Europe and two offices in the US. Its CRM is used by over 100,000 customers around the world. In 2020, Pipedrive became the fifth Estonian-founded unicorn.
Steve Sue is a social venturer most well known for innovation and entrepreneurship programs including Lemonade Alley, Project Lemon Tree and BizGym.com. Sue started his career as a home builder, founding Bedrock Development, Inc. in Oakland, California. Bedrock evolved into an award-winning environmental design firm with architecture, theme and branding units that created production housing, retail, restaurants, live entertainment sets and theme parks. He became known as conceptualist in a variety of industries culminating as a driving force to mega-resort developments around the globe in and through Las Vegas.
Ward 4 LLC privately funds a space in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for startup accelerators and co-working. It is currently located in the John Pritzlaff Hardware Company Building.
gener8tor is an American startup accelerator that operates in several US cities, including Madison, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. As of March 2017, gener8tor was ranked as the top 11th startup accelerator out of more than 150 accelerator programs in the United States by the Seed Accelerator Rankings Project.
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.
ANSR is a global company that helps organizations build, manage and scale global teams through Global Capability Centers (GCCs), also known as Captive Centers. ANSR was established in 2004 by Lalit Ahuja. Since its inception, ANSR has established over 100 GCCs aggregating to over 100k enterprise talent.
Dogpatch Labs is a startup and innovation hub situated in the Silicon Docks area of Dublin. The company's headquarters are located in the CHQ building. Dogpatch Labs consists of over 500 members from 100+ startups.
Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator is an American seed accelerator launched in January 2011.
Xena Workwear is a Milwaukee-based women's workwear company specialized in stylish women's steel toe shoes and apparel. The company creates fashionable personal protective equipment (PPE) for women.
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.
