StartupYard's acceleration programme will last three months, from March 31 until June 30, at TechSquare in Prague. Six out of ten finalists will eventually be selected to receive support in building a viable product with a fast launch, and possible funding. Participation is free but StartupYard takes a 5% equity in the accelerated businesses, with an extra option for startups to receive 10.000 euros of funding in exchange for an additional 5%.
Beginning in 2014, StartupYard will now specialize in each new batch of startups it accelerates. This allows startup founders to work alongside other teams in the same field, and share knowledge and nurture potential cooperation on various levels. This batch focuses on "Data, Search and Analytics", and StartupYard is looking for projects involved in semantic search, real-time data analysis, prediction algorithms, cryptography, and web mining.
Attend a Q&A session with the StartupYard management team online on Google Hangout today, on Wednesday Jan 22, at 13:00 (CET). They will answer all questions you may have, and we may even have some questions for you too. Ask anything about the 2014 "Data, Search & Analytics" programme, applications, StartupYard, Prague, investors, and graduates.
The programme consists of three phases: first, targeting the right market with the right product, second, executing product vision, and third, developing and delivering your fundraising pitch. Yet, StartupYard doesn’t stop here. One of the benefits of being part of this programme is free accommodation in Prague – hot hub for data tech and developers – and one paid return flight from anywhere in Europe. On top of this, the programme will cover a number of aspects within creating and growing a business. Those include “from legal to accounting, to hiring, code review and company culture, media trainers, a professional native English copywriter and blogger, and perks worth 250.000 euros,” according to StartupYard’s press release.
Teams will have access to over 90 technical and business specialists that are current or former partners of companies including Google, Yahoo, Seznam, IBM, Softlayer, GoodData. Thanks to Seznam, the largest investor in this Data-driven programme, the finalists will receive mentoring and funding for their projects. In addition, access to part of their full-text search technology and a large amount of data will be available for teams to use in their projects.
Since the first edition, 22 companies have been accelerated by StartupYard and among the alumni, 16 are still active and two were acquired. One of the successful stories belongs to Spectu.com, a digital menu for restaurants/cafes/hotels/bars that runs in places such as Canada, Slovakia, Russia and Czech Republic and was recently acquired by the Czech-market point of sale developer leader ASW Systems.
If you fit the description and want to accelerate your business, go ahead and apply for StartupYard! Better hurry though, applications close on January 31.
