Georgia Tech's Flashpoint accelerator has secured its second fund.
Flashpoint, Georgia Tech’s accelerator, has secured $1m for its second fund. The new fund will, like the first, be managed by angel Sig Mosley. It will be used to invest in up to 50 startups over the next two years.
Flashpoint, which operates independently from the university, will invest around $20,000 in each of these startups in exchange for equity. On top of taking part in a four to six-month accelerator programme – held twice a year – the participants get the opportunity to network with alumni entrepreneurs.
Being accepted into Flashpoint also opens doors of venture firms the startups may not have been able to pitch to otherwise. Indeed, in the past three years, Flashpoint has seeded three dozen startups. They have raised a total of more than $65m from big venture firms such as Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz.
The accelerator tries to go beyond what others do, and uses “startup engineering” – a technique developed by head of the accelerator Merrick Furst – to have startups avoid common pitfalls. Among other things, it forces its participants to do market research to do away with preconceived ideas of what the market wants and identify actual demand.
The accelerator’s biggest success story to date is Ionic Security, an IT security startup that raised $38 million from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and JafcoVentures.
Merrick Furst, a professor at Georgia Tech who runs the accelerator, said: “We have a set of things that we can teach people that can make them better founders. We have identified the factors that cause startups to fail. Startup engineering is about finding ways to manage around it.”
