As part of a corporate tour, TilTech Capital (an investment fund supporting entrepreneurial projects that develop products based on modern management practices and platform solutions) visited 17 companies in two countries between September 17 and 25.
Meeting at Accenture
Founded in 2012, Fintech Innovation Lab London is part of a competitive global acceleration program with centers in Hong Kong and New York. It offers ambitious startups three months of mentorship, networking and advice, helping them to improve and test their value propositions. For start-ups, the program is free, without any fees or equity.
The laboratory immerses startups in a global community of their peers, consultants, experts, and decision-makers, as well as prospective clients and investors. Interaction within this ecosystem brings insight, feedback from mentors, and support from influential global financial companies.
Founders Factory
Founded by Brent Hoberman and Henry Lane Fox, Founders Factory brought together industry-leading corporations and a team of 60 operators to help founders create great companies. Here, investors include L’Oreal, easyJet, Reckitt Benckiser and others.
Founders Factory was established to help early-stage businesses quickly become viable and stable. The accelerator offers a variety of services that startups require in the early stages of their development such as accelerated pre-funding, flexible technology development and world-class mentors.
Meeting a Co-Founder at Enterprise Academy
The expert shared fresh insights into the creation, development and support of new businesses, as well as the passion for teaching the world new ways of thinking and alleviating the problems faced by enterprises when developing new solutions and putting them on the market.
The speaker is engaged in corporate education, study program development, investment and public speaking. His achievements include:
Meeting RocketSpace
RocketSpace Startup Services is an exclusive program aimed at smarter and faster financing of the top 1% of tech startups by means of a structured and streamlined process. By bringing top-level corporate innovators, startups and investors to a single platform, RocketSpace contributes to the collective growth of the entire innovation ecosystem.
RocketSpace was founded in 2011. The team of RocketSpace Startup Services uses an extensive network of investors to accelerate the funding and development of startups. RocketSpace’s three-stage, three-month program is designed to provide high-quality personalized coaching in order to bring startups to the right investors and finding quickly. RocketSpace investors include Uber, Spotify, Avast and others.
Visit to Tech City Ventures
Tech City Ventures is a small but dedicated network of companies operating in the very heart of the London technology scene. Companies within the network share a vision of innovation that focuses on community development and collaboration between leading startups in the UK, as well as its corporate, social and educational institutions.
The key service offered by Tech City Ventures is a half-day or full-day session for groups of up to 30 people. Each such session involves an experienced representative of Tech City as well as industry-related startups, accelerators and venture capitalists.
The problems they solve include:
Visit to Market Minds
Market Minds is a membership-based InsurTech community. The company works with global corporations and startups to develop and improve the insurance ecosystem of the future. The Market Minds community and team are made up of an unusual combination of insurance business leaders, influential entrepreneurs, brokers, big data gurus, investors and InsurTech experts who work together to foster long-term growth.
Through the power of community, Market Minds collects first-hand information and reliable knowledge to facilitate business growth.
Market Minds regularly hosts events, including IFT Summit and Insurance 3.0, the world's largest one-day InsurTech event. Insurance 3.0 provides a level playing field for entrepreneurs, business leaders, investors, young professionals, development agencies and insurance companies, allowing them to get involved, discover and build big ideas.
Meeting at Makerversity
Makerversity is the most vibrant and interesting community of emergent manufacturers and entrepreneurs in Europe. Makerversity combines co-working spaces with offices and production workshops.
Marketversity is more of a facilitator than an accelerator. For a fairly low price, it provides 300 of its members with co-working space in central London, including five rooms for seminars, an opportunity to participate in a training program, free negotiations over business support with mentors and most importantly access to industry-related communities.
Marketversity provides space in Somerset House, its main creative hub on the banks of the river Thames in central London, which includes 400 offices, exhibition spaces, various cafés and restaurants.
Marketversity offers membership in a dynamic community, an easily-accessible workspace, tools and equipment for workshops, as well as opportunities for cooperation, projects, investment and funding.
Marketversity began more than five years ago thanks to the support of Somerset House. It has five workshops in total: Wood Workshop, Assembly Space, Textile Workshop, Engineering Workshop, and Digital Workshop. The community works in various fields including product design, experimental architecture, materials science, IoT, VR, AI, games, etc.
Marketversity also runs youth education programs to inspire a new generation of creative and practical minds and increase diversity in the creative industries.
Visit to The Accelerator Network
Accelerator Network Ltd is the parent company for a number of entrepreneurship support programs and initiatives. The programs for startups and corporations that the accelerator network offers are topic-based study modules that employ the most advanced education practices and are taught in collaboration with corporations and/or the government for maximum impact.
Its initiatives and programs include the following:
In addition to its own programs, Accelerator Network also licenses out its business education formats to brands, corporations and governments in the UK and overseas.
Visit to YSYS
YSYS (Your Startup, Your Story) is a thriving startup community for founders, developers, creators and investors looking to make a difference. It’s a place where participants can share ideas and mingle with like-minded people. The community brings together those who are passionate about fighting inequality in the ecosystem of startups in London.
Together with the community, the company supports accelerators, incubators, venture capitalists, startups, nonprofit universities, and corporations in initiatives that foster diversity, integration and social change.
They run programs themselves and help diverse talent launch startups, develop new skills and kick-start their business. In each program, the company cooperates with organizations that seek to hire diverse talents and nurture inclusive cultures.
Autopsy
Autopsy is a UK-based startup analytics company. Together with Forward Partners, one of the leading early-stage venture capital firms in London, Autopsy analyzed the data on 300 unrealized startups that failed at different stages (from pre-seed to series A). The information obtained in these studies is the company’s main product.
Autopsy works for two types of consumers: startups and investors. By acquiring research on company failures in selected industries, startups can refine their strategy and gain access to case studies and content packages. Investors can also acquire data to analyze cases of previously failed portfolio companies and understand common pitfalls. In the future, this will help to avoid mistakes and improve investment opportunities.
The information obtained facilitated the launch of Autopsy Academy, the first online course where unrealized startups and experts study products, sales and marketing, HR, and recruiting.
The tour participants took a walk in Trafalgar Square and saw the Houses of Parliament as well as the world-famous Big Ben and Westminster Abbey.
Additionally, our short walk through St. James’s Park, one of the most beautiful parks in London, to Buckingham Palace, the London residence of the Queen, was a truly unforgettable experience.
Having studied the British ecosystem of accelerators, we can now move on to the Netherlands to see how things are going with incubators and venture funds there.
We visited four companies and had amazing insights galore.
Meeting Michael Koenka
Michael used to work as a pitch consultant at TED Conferences and a business mentor the Rockstart accelerator. As a promotion consultant, he helps professionals to find deeper meaning, articulate business proposals more clearly and influence others using behavioral psychology, speech and negotiation techniques. Currently a partner in several consultancies, Michael has been involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem for more than ten years, giving lectures on accelerators and incubators in Amsterdam.
Visit to RockStart
One of Europe’s first multi-vertical accelerators, Rockstart was founded in Amsterdam in 2011 to give startups access to market, capital, knowledge and community. Since then, Rockstart has become an expert in creating entire ecosystems around particular fields such as Digital Health, Smart Energy and Artificial Intelligence.
Since its inception, Rockstart has invested in more than 150 startups to support their actualization. As a result, more than 69 million euros have been invested and more than 700 people hired. Initially, the company implemented holacracy, but has since moved away from it. Rockstart has experience in developing and implementing programs for Maersk, Shell, the Ministry of Health of the Netherlands and many other.
Visit to The Founder Institute
The Founder Institute is the world’s largest pre-seed accelerator that has helped launch more than 3,500 companies in over 180 cities on six continents. The company was founded in 2009 by serial entrepreneur Adeo Ressi and his colleague, Jonathan Greechan.
The launch of Founder Institute was announced on TechCrunch.
Founder Institute’s first program methodology was crowd-sourced by more than 10,000 members of TheFunded.com, while the very first program started in May 2009 in a small classroom at Stanford University. Initially, there were no plans to expand beyond Silicon Valley, but as there was a lot of interest in launching the program in other cities, Founder Institute started growing.
Currently, the program operates in more than 180 cities, having also been localized into 9 languages. Founder Institute’s alumni have raised $ 800,000,000 and are worth approximately $ 20 billion.
The Next Women
Next Women NL is a business platform that brings women together for inspiration and possible collaboration. By becoming members of TheNextWomen and TheNextWomen Crowd Fund, participants connect with each other and with the ecosystem to increase the influence and opportunities for women. This way, TheNextWomen helps to build financially healthy and strong businesses.
Membership in TheNextWomen gives access to a global community of ambitious women founders, investors and executives, women who are looking for knowledge, capital and network to develop their companies or to move ahead in their careers.
TheNextWomen founded their own fund in 2014 to increase capital for women founders and attract more women to the investment field.
TheNextWomen:
The tour participants visited Europe’s main hub for high-tech startups to get a better understanding of how founders and their teams leverage the global entrepreneur network Techstars to connect with other entrepreneurs, experts, mentors, alumni, investors, community leaders and corporate partners who help their businesses grow.
Meeting with ACE
ACE (Amsterdam Center for Entrepreneurship) is a Dutch startup incubator that promotes entrepreneurship among students, young researchers, university professors and graduates, offering training, support and access to an extensive network of mentors, entrepreneurs and business professionals. Thus, ACE gives innovators an opportunity to build high-performance enterprises.
The incubator offers:
Visit to HightechXL
HighTechXL is Europe's premier high-tech startup center. Here, the founders of startups are supported (starting with the initial idea and going all the way to building a prototype) and given access to a top community of entrepreneurs, corporations and investors. HighTechXL enables people both inside and outside the company to translate their ideas into reality and make an impact on the world of innovation.
The most popular format for working with startups is a three-month program aimed at developing a scalable, tested business case.
The acceleration program includes:
Visit to Techstars
Techstars is a worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs to succeed. Using the Techstars Global Entrepreneurship Network, founders and their teams connect with other entrepreneurs, experts, mentors, alumni, investors, community leaders and corporate partners to help their companies grow.
Techstars operates four divisions:
Techstars accelerator portfolio includes over 1,000 companies with a market capitalization of $ 8.1 billion.
Amsterdam is part of a global movement. Techstars gives accelerator portfolio companies access to financial, human and intellectual capital to ensure the success of their business. After being admitted to Techstars' mentoring program, each company is offered a $ 100,000 convertible banknote. Techstars contributes $ 20,000, which is usually used as a scholarship to cover living expenses during the program, and in return receives 6% of common stock from each company.
Advantages of Techstars’ acceleration programs include:
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On our tour of Germany, we visited the most famous food exhibition, the Green Week, as well as numerous retail chains and enterprises operating in various interesting industries. We have a lot to learn. We must take the best and use it. Thank you, FastForward, for your careful approach to creating this tour.
We visited several retail stores in Germany, as well as manufacturing facilities. What we liked the most about the stores we visited was the high quality standards of German retail. Retailers know how to sell high-quality goods at affordable prices, and this is probably the main secret of Germany's retail success. As for production, we were inspired by some of the small family businesses we saw.