What are startup accelerators

Startup accelerators

Startup accelerators play a vital role in e-commerce businesses. This means that they are the main platform for e-commerce startup companies to seek investments and to grow during their initial phases. Startup accelerators are constantly increasing in number and this has led to global economic growth. Some tech companies which have been valued at more than 1 billion USD are actually products of startup accelerators. Startup accelerators are usually confused with Startup incubators.

What is the difference between Startup accelerators and incubators?

Startup accelerators are fixed term programs that mainly deal with seed investments, connection building, mentorship, and education of startups. The entire program ends when the startup pitches to investors. This process has seen the building of many startup companies. Then there are Startup incubators. Startup incubators are very similar to startup accelerators the only difference being the fact that incubators are government funded and do not take equity. They mainly provide grants. Anyone can apply to enter a startup accelerator, however, the competition is stiff. Two of the largest accelerators have acceptance rates of only 1% to 3%.

The largest Startup accelerators

There are many startup accelerators, but the accelerators that standout the most are Y combinatory and TechStars. These two accelerators are very competitive having an average acceptance rate of only 1,5%. Their seed investment is typically around 50,000 USD. Startups must graduate typically after 3 months of commencement. Y combinatory was the first startup accelerator and it was followed by TechStars in 2006.

E-commerce related companies that went through startup accelerators

Some of the e-commerce related companies that went through startup accelerators are Stripe, Dropbox, Airbnb, twitch and reddit. These companies have become global giants in their fields.