Techstars Anywhere Accelerator Welcomes 2019 Class
Feb 04, 2019
One of the themes we’ve seen from 12 years of running Techstars mentorship-driven accelerators around the world is that there are a lot of founders who for whatever reason can’t—or shouldn’t—relocate for three months to participate in an accelerator. Sometimes they have families, sometimes they have employees, sometimes they have customers. We asked ourselves: Can we provide them with a world class Techstars accelerator experience without making them move?
Techstars Anywhere Accelerator is our (mostly) remote accelerator program, delivered using technology and a bit of travel so that founders can continue to build their businesses from anywhere without needing to relocate to join a Techstars mentorship-driven accelerator program. The goal of the Techstars Anywhere Accelerator is to create an accessible Techstars accelerator experience for great founders—anywhere.
Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of the third class of Techstars Anywhere Accelerator, Techstars Class 158. This year, our program is focused on consumer and B2B technology companies working in the United States.
We are extraordinarily proud to have a fantastic 2019 class with founders from diverse backgrounds and locations. While a few founders come from startup hubs like New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, we also have founders building businesses in Columbus, OH, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Minneapolis, San Diego, Denver, Newark, NJ, and Seattle, and six of our startups are remote-first companies with teams distributed across multiple cities. There’s also a great deal of diversity across the group with six of the companies having at least one co-founder from a historically underrepresented group in tech. Over a third of our founders are women, and over a third are African American. Two founders are Marine Corps veterans (Oorah!). And there are plenty of parents in the class, including a first time dad to a five month old baby girl and one co-founder currently pregnant with twins, due just after Demo Day. By providing broader accessibility to the Techstars network, Techstars Anywhere helps great entrepreneurs start and build great companies just about anywhere.
I’d like to give special thanks to our mentors and partners who make Techstars Anywhere Accelerator possible, and a shout out to our accelerator team, Program Manager Kendra Dixon, and Operations Associate Leandro Jaime.
By making Techstars more accessible, we’re proud to be able to create a world class accelerator experience for world class founders who may not otherwise have had the opportunity.
Here are the companies in Techstars Class 158:
Bloominous
Los Angeles
Bloominous is the first nationwide, full-service wedding floral brand that combines technology with curated designs from celebrity florists to deliver personalized styles for every wedding in every town.
Civic Eagle
Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Washington, DC
Civic Eagle’s SaaS platform leverages artificial intelligence to help enterprises and non-profits identify, track, and analyze legislation and regulations.
echoAR
New York
echoAR is the world’s only AR-first CMS + CDN. echoAR is a cloud platform for augmented reality that helps developers and companies quickly build and deploy AR apps and content.
EnrichHER
Atlanta and Washington, DC
EnrichHER is a crowdfunded lending platform for women led businesses that makes it easy for investors to provide affordable and non-dilutive capital to women led ventures.
events locker
Los Angeles and Seattle
events locker is a cloud-based exhibitor management platform that streamlines operations for live event organizers, which ties into a first-of-its-kind lead generating sponsorship marketplace.
Gamefuly
Newark, NJ
Gamefuly enables esports video game skill development through a peer-to-peer online marketplace connecting gamers who want to learn with esports experts who want to earn. Gamefuly is like Coursera, but for esports!
Parabol
Los Angeles and Brooklyn
Parabol provides high-performance collaboration and retrospective meeting SaaS for remote and distributed teams that creates accountability, transparency, and autonomy while surfacing valuable employee engagement insights.
QuickCarl
San Diego and Washington DC
QuickCarl connects homeowners to the home services pros with the expertise they need to troubleshoot and solve problems in the home—in real time from any mobile device.
Speedwell & Yarrow
Columbus, OH
Speedwell & Yarrow helps busy professionals make the most of life outside the office while offering employers an innovative way to support the next generation of leaders.
https://www.speedwellandyarrow.com/
Summed
Denver and San Francisco
Summed gives you the convenience of shopping like a credit card, but with the benefit of repaying your balance like a low-rate installment loan. We offer APRs on average 50% lower than traditional credit cards.
