accelerator
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Anthropia’s startup factory has a price: show up, keep your shares
In a Duisburg villa, Anthropia helps social and green startups turn good intentions into businesses. Its Impact Factory charges no fees and takes no equity, but founders still have work to do.
Cambridge Cleantech knows who you need to meet
A smart air brick, a Japanese builder and methane trapped in water: Cambridge Cleantech connects climate inventions with people who can buy, test or fund them. Its business is making the next introduction count.
Maria 01 turned a hospital into a shortcut for startups
In Helsinki, an old hospital puts founders down the hall from venture capital. Maria 01’s real business is making the right people easier to find - with desks, introductions and a €2,000 accelerator among its tools.
DEEP Ecosystems puts a price on building a startup scene
The Munich company helps the people behind startup hubs turn local ambition into fundable projects. Its accelerator offers two years of support, with a 15% success fee on project funding raised.
The Garage traded parking spaces for startup runway
Inside a former Riyadh car park, The Garage brings founders, laboratories and investors into the same orbit. Its most useful promise is practical: help a young technology business get from a working idea to a paying market.
LHoFT wants banks to share their homework
Luxembourg’s fintech hub is tackling the work financial firms keep repeating. Its toolkit now stretches from a shared-data competition to an AI showroom and investment opportunities for financial-inclusion startups.
ROTSA wants Romania’s startups to think beyond the border
A prototype can be built in Cluj. A market has to be won. Romania’s tech startup association is putting foreign customers, practical mentoring and shared introductions on the same itinerary.
Chalhoub Greenhouse Gives Startups a Way Into the Store
The luxury retailer’s venture builder pairs founders with grants, working retail channels and people who can say yes. Its real test comes when the pilot ends.
HIEx Wants Health Startups to Escape the Pilot Trap
A good health invention can spend years waiting for a buyer. Geneva’s Health Innovation Exchange brings ministries, founders and investors together to help promising solutions reach the people they were built for.
Techscaler’s £42 million bet: teach Scotland to scale
Free membership, experienced mentors and a ticket into overseas markets. Scotland’s publicly funded startup programme is growing - and learning that helping a company start is different from helping it scale.
Startup Junkie Gives Away the Advice. Arkansas Gets the Bet.
From enterprise pilots to a mushroom farm’s cooling bill, Startup Junkie puts free business help to work. Its Arkansas experiment depends on something less glamorous than a pitch: people willing to pay for somebody else’s start.
CcHUB Is Building the Parts a Startup Cannot Download
The Lagos-born innovation company has spent years assembling the people, capital and institutional connections behind African tech ventures. Its most useful lesson: a promising app still needs somewhere to go.
Miller Center Knows a Better Pitch Won’t Pay for 500 Freezers
At Santa Clara University, Miller Center pairs social entrepreneurs with executive mentors, then helps bridge the gap between a workable business and money to grow. Its next test is making that support last beyond graduation.
The NHS has good ideas. South London’s HIN helps put them to work.
From faster wound healing to diabetes classes that understand the dinner table, Health Innovation Network South London tackles the awkward distance between a promising idea and everyday care.
OneValley
OneValley is a San Mateo-based global entrepreneurship platform that helps founders launch and scale startups while giving universities, accelerators, enterprises and governments the software to run their own innovation communities. Born from the Silicon Valley accelerator GSVlabs, it rebranded to OneValley in 2020 after its online Passport platform exploded in growth, and today it pairs that software with OneValley Ventures, a $25M seed and pre-seed fund. The mission: take the resources and connections traditionally locked inside Silicon Valley and make them reachable to innovators anywhere in the world.
Evan Stites-Clayton
Evan Stites-Clayton is a General Partner and CTO at HF0, a San Francisco-based residency and venture fund that backs repeat technical founders building AI-native startups. He previously co-founded Teespring with Walker Williams at Brown University in 2011, scaling it from a $3,000 weekend experiment to over $1 billion in cumulative sales and $65 million raised from Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures before going through Y Combinator's W13 batch. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30, he joined HF0 in 2022 to help the next generation of builders compress the gap between idea and scale.
Brian Ma
Brian Ma is the founder and general partner of Iterative, a Singapore-based YC-style accelerator backing pre-seed and seed startups across Southeast Asia. A four-time founder before becoming a full-time investor, he co-founded Divvy Homes (a16z, GIC), Decide.com (acquired by eBay in 2013), and Weave (YC S14), and was one of the earliest product managers at Zillow.
Charlotte He
Charlotte He is a General Partner at Cardinal Ventures, the student-led accelerator at Stanford backing early-stage tech and bio startups. She studies Biology and Data Science at Stanford and fences saber for the Cardinal varsity team. Foster City native; National Merit Scholar; Pan American Cadet silver medalist.
Giulianna Crivello
Giulianna Crivello is the Founding General Partner of DSH Ventures, the pre-seed investment arm of Draper Startup House — the global co-living and coworking network for entrepreneurs backed by legendary VC Tim Draper. A 2018 valedictorian from Sierra Nevada College, she went from research analyst in Nevada to directing investments across 14 countries in her first year at DSH Ventures. She co-manages the fund with Vikram Bharati and has facilitated over 215 investor introductions to startups spanning the US, Singapore, India, and beyond, while helping build Draper Startup House into a presence spanning 25 embassies across 5 continents.
Mohan Iyer
Mohan Iyer is a General Partner at SOSV's IndieBio SF, the world's leading biotech accelerator. With 25+ years operating life science startups across Genentech, Tethys Bioscience, Second Genome, and Pendulum Therapeutics, he brings rare bench-to-boardroom experience to pre-seed biotech founders. Trained as a chemical and biomedical engineer before earning his MBA from Yale, Iyer has spent his career translating disruptive biology into products the world actually needs — and now bets on founders doing the same.
Harj Taggar
Harj Taggar is a Managing Partner at Y Combinator and serial founder who went from Oxford law to Silicon Valley startup culture. He co-founded Auctomatic with the Collison brothers (Patrick and John, later of Stripe fame) in 2007, sold it for $5M in under a year, then became YC's first non-founder partner in 2010. He co-founded Initialized Capital with Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian, co-founded technical hiring platform Triplebyte in 2015 (acquired by Karat in 2023), and returned to YC in 2020 as a Group Partner before becoming Managing Partner. He has advised over 1,000 companies across 17 YC batches and worked with more than 20 unicorns including Coinbase, Instacart, and Gusto.
Joshua Lu
Joshua Lu is GM and Partner at a16z Speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz's accelerator program that bets on founders at the intersection of gaming, entertainment, and AI. With over a decade of operating experience across Zynga, Blizzard (Diablo Immortal), and Meta (Horizon Worlds), he brings rare founder-operator credibility to a program that accepts fewer than 0.4% of applicants and has backed hundreds of early-stage companies with up to $1M checks plus $5M in vendor credits.
Katia Ameri
Katia Ameri is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on the intersection of consumer and technology. An LA native of Iranian descent and Stanford graduate, she was the first investment hire at Pear VC, then founded Mirra - a skincare company that grew to 200,000+ newsletter subscribers with zero ad spend - before joining a16z in 2021. At a16z she leads consumer investments, runs the Speedrun accelerator program, and is the founder of Tech Week by a16z, a decentralized conference series in SF, LA, and NYC that drew 40,000+ attendees and 1,000+ events in New York alone.
Mayowa Ajayi
Mayowa Ajayi is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) on the Capital Network team, focused on consumer, AI apps, and speedrun companies. He brings over 15 years of investment banking experience - most recently as Managing Director at Guggenheim Partners and eight years at Barclays in the Global Technology, Media, and Telecommunications group - to the firm's effort to identify and support the next generation of high-growth startups. Since joining a16z in December 2024, he has become a key figure in the a16z speedrun accelerator program and an educator on startup finance fundamentals, translating Wall Street rigor into founder-friendly insights.
Samira Behrouzan
Samira Behrouzan is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on Marketing and Games, and the force behind a16z speedrun - a pre-seed accelerator that has deployed over $180 million to 150+ startups at the intersection of games and technology. Before joining a16z, she led marketing at 100 Thieves and drove 20+ brand partnerships for Riot Games' Emmy-nominated Arcane series, including boundary-pushing collaborations like bringing ZEDD into VALORANT. A lifelong gamer who grew up on Sega Saturn and N64, she holds an Executive MBA from the IE Brown program and is a vocal advocate for women and underrepresented communities in gaming.
Tom Hammer
Tom Hammer is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he leads People Practices for a16z speedrun, the firm's early-stage accelerator investing up to $1M in pre-seed startups. A veteran people operator who has scaled teams at Riot Games and Bird Rides, Tom coaches founders on talent strategy, organizational design, and building high-performance cultures from day one. He is known for his direct, founder-first approach and his belief that strong hiring is the single greatest lever a startup has.
Babar Ahmed
Babar Ahmed is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mindstorm Studios, Pakistan's pioneering independent mobile game studio behind 1 billion+ downloads and global chart-toppers like Hexa Sort. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who quit a Silicon Valley circuit engineering career to return to Pakistan and build a gaming company from the ground up, he has transformed a startup funded by his father into a 150-person studio with 2 million daily active users, while also co-founding M-Labs (a game development accelerator) and serving as head of strategy at AppLovin's Lion Studios.
Yasin Ehsan
Yasin Ehsan is a New York-bred software engineer turned edtech founder and venture scout. After winning 13 hackathons, landing a job at Capital One the week he graduated, and filing two AWS patents on the Eno chatbot, he co-founded Headstarter - an edtech platform that has helped generate 60+ six-figure job offers for undergrads. In 2025, he joined Andreessen Horowitz's Speedrun accelerator as a scout, bridging the gap between emerging technical talent and Silicon Valley capital.
Leandra Elberger
Leandra Elberger is the Head of Platform at Forum Ventures, New York's leading pre-seed fund and accelerator for B2B SaaS startups. With a career winding through global health, Wall Street, entrepreneurship education, and venture capital, she has built expertise in founder support and community infrastructure. A Tufts grad with an MBA with distinction from Cornell Johnson, she previously served as Studio Director at Cornell Tech and Head of Platform at Atento Capital, and has authored thought pieces on healthcare market opportunities and fintech infrastructure for founders. Her guiding philosophy: a career is a choice that indicates your values.
Sarah Gowe
Sarah Gowe is the Platform Operations Manager at Forum Ventures, one of North America's leading pre-seed B2B SaaS funds and accelerators. Based in New York, she came up through hospitality, experiential events (The Yacht Week), and tech platforms (Airbnb, Bumble, NHL XP) before landing in venture — where she now works directly with early-stage founders navigating the zero-to-one journey. At Forum, she's part of a team that has funded 430+ companies and helped unlock over $1B in follow-on capital.