Feb 11, 2020 On Our Blog

Meet the Startups of Batch 26

We are excited to announce our 26th batch of companies to join our flagship seed accelerator in San Francisco. From social media analytics to sensors and AI and more, this group of 29 companies was chosen from over 3,000 applicants, representing a less than 1% acceptance rate.  As with every batch, we are continuing our commitment to discovering and backing the world’s most talented entrepreneurs, and recognizing that great founders come in all shades, genders and nationalities. Of the 29 companies in Batch 26, 37% come from outside of the U.S., including Brazil, Nigeria and India. 30% of the companies have a female founder and 70% have one or more founders who identify as a racial minority. Without further ado, …

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Jan 31, 2020 On Our Blog

Enterprise customers want to work with startups. Here’s how to get in the door.

Guest Post: The following post is a sponsored guest post by Perry Light, the Market Connect Lead, North America of Oracle for Startups. All views and opinions represented in this post are the views and opinions of Oracle for Startups and do not represent those of 500 Startups or any of its staff or affiliates. If you would like to join Oracle for Startups, apply and use the code “500 Startups”.  As a startup founder, you are an evangelist. You mesmerize your audience with your conviction and entice them with visions of a better world that is available through an offering that only you can provide. Rather than salvation, it’s savings you dangle before a rapt audience—a paradise of pain …

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Jan 28, 2020 On Our Blog

Market Research for Startups: 3 Steps to Success

Guest Post: The following post is a sponsored guest post by SEMrush. All views and opinions represented in this post are the views and opinions of SEMrush and do not represent those of 500 Startups or any of its staff or affiliates.  When you’re researching a market for the first time, it’s essential to find out what companies operate in your niche. And it’s no less important to understand how these businesses made it to the list of top industry players and what marketing strategies they follow. You also need to research target audience characteristics and preferences, regional opportunities, competitors’ offerings, and overall market development in dynamics. The question is, how are you going to do all that? Most startup …

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Jan 7, 2020 On Our Blog

5 Fast Ways To Know You’re Underpriced & How To Fix It

I see this far too often: earnest company joins me on an introductory call seeking advice on how to grow revenue and profit quickly. I ask them how they arrived at their current price for their product/service. Some fuzzy answer emerges. This gives me the opportunity to share my favorite “growth hack”—increase prices.  As long as the company is open-minded enough to fully hear me out and willing to develop a game plan with me, prices can be increased shortly with no downside risk. I’ll say that again: no downside risk. Look, I’m really lucky to be a part-time Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) at 500 Startups, one of the most active seed-stage investors on planet earth. From my vantage point as their …

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Dec 20, 2019 On Our Blog

The Value of the 500 Seed Accelerator in 2019

Going into 2020, 500 will be entering it’s tenth year of operation. It’s been a crazy journey for us from a small first batch of startups in our Silicon Valley Accelerator to running accelerators across the globe and investing in founders from over 76 countries. While we have undoubtedly matured as a company, we continue to strive to make our Seed Accelerator one of the top programs to support founders and help them build companies at-scale.  Over the past nine years, the venture capital landscape has dramatically changed. What previously defined a “seed” stage is no longer the case, as the average seed investment has gone from $0.5M to $2M.   We’ve also seen an ever-expanding set of options for …

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Dec 17, 2019 On Our Blog

Niama El Bassunie’s Mission to Unlock Trade in Africa

It is within 500’s DNA to invest in talented founders, no matter whether they are situated in Silicon Valley or on the other side of the world. Earlier this year, we partnered with Magnitt, one of the premier players in the MENA entrepreneurial ecosystem, to come out with a State of MENA Startups 2019¹. According to data collected by Magnitt and published in the report, our portfolio has a higher percentage of startups with at least one female founder than the average percentage of female-founded startups in all of MENA.² With all this data, we wanted to share some of the unique stories of these female founders in MENA.  Niama El Bassunie founded WaystoCap in 2016 on a mission to …

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Dec 17, 2019 On Our Blog

¡Hola Batch 11 LatAm! These are the 9 Startups Joining our Latest Batch in Mexico City

500 Startups is excited to announce the latest batch from our Seed Accelerator based in Mexico City. The Mexico City program focuses on providing mentorship and guidance to foster fast-paced growth for Spanish-speaking, early-stage companies based in Latin America. For this batch, our team assessed 1706 applications to participate in the acceleration program. Our final group of startups batch consists of founders from all over Latin America, including five companies from Mexico, one company from Chile, two companies from Colombia, and one company from Peru. The nine startups began the accelerator activities on November 25th at 500’s office in Mexico City. Throughout the four-month program, founders will put in hard work to prepare for Demo Day in March of 2020 …

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Dec 16, 2019 On Our Blog

The Future of Startup Ecosystems Across the Globe

The idea of being a founder has never been so popular around the world, so how is that going to change industries and entire regions? This year we dove headfirst into the rise of corporate venture capital, the changing nature of venture capital education, and the important task of startup ecosystem building. Fast Growing Corporate Venture Capital  With headlines from Softbank, Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and more, corporate venture capital is growing faster than ever. In 2018, we saw this trend reach new heights with more corporate venture capital (CVC) funds than ever. And in 2019, 500 decided to dive into CVC behavior in an unprecedented way.  From May to July 2019, we surveyed over 100 unique corporate venture capital …

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Dec 10, 2019 On Our Blog

500’s Past & Present: Betting on International Startups

In 2010, 500 Startups started as a new kind of venture capital firm in Silicon Valley with a contrarian belief that talent can come from anywhere in the world. Back then, very few venture capital firms in the valley were focused on much outside of our collection of cities within the San Francisco Bay area. ”If you look at our early team, our DNA has always been very global with experience growing up abroad or working internationally. So it really comes down to the thing that we always say which is that we always believed from day one that there are brilliant startups all over the world, but opportunity isn’t universal.” – Tim Chae, Managing Partner at 500 As a …

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Nov 27, 2019 On Our Blog

Ready to scale in Southeast Asia? Start in Singapore.

While people may think of Singapore as a top startup city, what they may not realize is that this city-state potentially has quite a bit more to offer as a local hub when looking to scale throughout the region. This fall, we kicked off Global Launch, a program aimed at building bridges between Singapore and the Silicon Valley. This two-way program brings Singaporean startups here to San Francisco for targeted immersion and education in the heart of the Silicon Valley, and sends another group of global startups to Singapore as they prepare entry into the Southeast Asian market.  We caught up with a few startups from Batch 1 of the Global Launch – SF Program, who have scaled in Singapore …

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