Besides linking up the startups with more mentors and funding opportunities, we are opening up even more avenues for entrepreneurs to build relationships and deepen their engagement with corporates. We want to provide a fast-track for corporates and startups to engage with each other and are working with some of the biggest names in the industry to help them tap into innovation and for startups to access corporates as important partners and customers.
- Founders pack – now offers additional £50k in value
- Sponsorship – brings corporates closer to teams through site visits, masterclasses and mentorship
- Seedhack – building a bridge between open innovation and tech starttups
Founders’ Pack
Companies, large and small, work closely with us to provide some much needed services for startups. Of course startups benefit from these services because it lowers their cost of doing business. Anything that lowers their cost means their capital goes a longer distance. And when they are bootstrapping or have raised a small amount of capital, every little bit counts. So, we are excited that Facebook as our Platinum Founder Sponsor along with 33 other companies as our Bronze Founder Sponsors have come together to provide over £50k of value in services delivered. For many of our sponsors, our companies become their long-term customers. It’s a huge win-win.
From infrastructure services (e.g. 3scale and AWS) to analytics (e.g. Chartbeat, KISSmetrics) to advertising (e.g. Facebook, Google) to business services (e.g. Forsyth Group, Rougefrog, Zendesk) there are many services that will help Seedcamp founders save time and money in running their businesses day-to-day.
The full roundup of companies participating is listed here.
Sponsorship
In addition to being Founder Sponsors, we are thrilled that some of the larger corporates have chosen to support Seedcamp’s own operations by becoming Annual Sponsors. We want to specially thank Microsoft Bizspark and Qualcomm for their support. Microsoft has been part of the Seedcamp sponsors for the past few years but we have solidified that relationship further throughout 2010 and 2011. Qualcomm joins us for the first time – both as a Seedcamp Week sponsor and a yearly sponsor for 2012 and we are looking forward to working with them closely.
The sponsorship runs at a deep level as it brings great benefit to Seedcamp companies as well. All our sponsors are an integral component of the startup and developer community and as such they also participate as mentors at every event Seedcamp puts together. Their experts across product, biz dev, corp dev, dev relations, marketing and other functions are very active as mentors. Beyond this, we do site visits at their offices across EMEA and the US where we benefit greatly from the masterclasses run by their different product and corporate development groups. We have seen first-hand the long-term benefit for our startups as they always have a point of contact and assistance into these organizations. It is a great 3-way relationship.
Seedhack
In addition to sponsorship, corporates and traditional industries have woken up to the fact that innovation impacting them comes from many places, often from the outside. As such many are trying to figure out how to tap into this innovation and have approached Seedcamp to help them. In the same vein, many wanna-be entrepreneurs and those with a speck of an idea for helping solve some of the world’s problems are looking to tap into knowledge of those in industry as to what some of the biggest pain points are. They are eager to start a new company and can use some critical insight.
We felt one big way to connect would-be founders and industry is to involve as much of the broad community as possible. A new product we are therefore launching to help corporates, tech companies, and hackers all connect up to solve some major problems is Seedhack. Seedhack will kick-off with a first hacking weekend in September that tackles a few themes around health and big data to name a few. We aim to repeat this exercise a few times a year with other themes. Hack weekends have been a great inspiration for us and we think this unique take on the concept will involve a large part of the community that doesn’t often get to work together.
Related articles
- Seedhack ver. 1.0 (seedcamp.com)
- Seedcamp Hatches The Seedhack Event: A European Hackathon On Steroids (techcrunch.com)
- Seedhack FAQ – /* what you need to know */ (seedcamp.com)
- The idea for seedhack (seedcamp.com)
- Seedcamp Week – Breaking Records yet again! (seedcamp.com)
- Seedcamp Flexes Upwards With Its Biggest Week Yet (techcrunch.com)