Latest news with #Techstars
Technical.ly
21 hours ago
- Business
- Technical.ly
Techstars announces AI Health accelerator will stay in Baltimore, with more cash for startups
Techstars' accelerator focused on artificial intelligence and healthcare will stay in Baltimore for the next few years and companies taking part can expect more cash, organizers announced Thursday. The AI Health Baltimore accelerator will host five more programs in the region. Participating startups can expect up to $220,000 in investment instead of the previous $120,000, managing director Nick Culbertson said at the accelerator's inaugural demo day at M&T Bank Stadium. Eight companies hailing from Argentina to Pittsburgh pitched their startups at the event. Innovations included using AI to detect cancer, using the tech as a between-sessions therapy assistant and having it facilitate compliance with rebate policies. No companies in this cohort were from Baltimore, and Culbertson acknowledged that. 'We really want companies in Baltimore to apply,' Culbertson told the crowd. However, he added, 'It's not just about Baltimore companies. Many of the companies who came here, came here because of the resources we have to offer, because of the ecosystem we have provided.' That ecosystem includes Johns Hopkins University and Mid-Atlantic insurance provider CareFirst — the program's key partners. Inaugural cohort urged to stay in Baltimore Lester Davis, the executive vice president and chief of staff at CareFirst, called for founders in this cohort to keep a presence in the region. 'We need you to stay here,' Davis told the crowd. 'Baltimore, the Maryland area, has everything that you need … Stay right here, invest here, build here.' AidRx CEO Tony Lee is taking that advice. He's creating a platform that enables pharmacists to work remotely and connect with patients and outpatient physicians. While completing the Techstars program, Lee from Calgary signed with three outpatient clinics in Canada to use his product. Plus, he's now working with digital health firm Scene Health in Brooklandville to use his product. Leaning into investments in health, tech Investment in AI and healthcare is on the rise for Techstars. The firm is running another health-focused accelerator in nearby DC this spring, with applications accepted now through June 11. Baltimore gets equal investment from Techstars in comparison to players like New York and London, per Andrew Cleland, its chief investment officer. Techstars is also leaning into these health and AI verticals, he said. Out of 500 healthcare investments from Techstars, a third of those are related to AI. Those companies are some of Techstars most successful. 'They've rewarded investors and owners and families,' Cleland told the crowd during a presentation. 'They've changed for our thousands of people. All that context goes into why we're here and why we're so committed to this program.' Applications just closed for the next cohort in Baltimore, and that group will start in September.
Technical.ly
17-04-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
5 Questions Before You Code: Smart Strategies to Evaluate Startup Opportunities as a Technical Co-Founder
Event Description Do you want to be a tech co-founder? You're in high demand, so you have lots of options. But how do you know if a startup is the right fit? How do you de-risk your commitment before joining a new team? Join us at Philly Tech Week for an interactive 90-minute workshop designed to help technical talent assess startup opportunities. You will walk away with a practical framework for evaluating non-technical founders, assessing startup viability, and determining if this business aligns with your skills and goals. In this session, you'll learn: The 5 questions you must ask of business folks looking to partner with you How to avoid the 'build my idea for free' trap The different roles a tech leader can play - and which fits you best The soft skills that matter as much as technical expertise If you're considering joining a startup, this workshop will help you make informed decisions and set yourself up for success. Come ready to learn, discuss, and challenge your assumptions about what it means to be a technical startup leader. Your Workshop Leaders: Lindsay Tabas is a product strategist and the founder of helping software developers expand their impact beyond code. An engineer herself, she teaches technical talent how to design products people want, solve real problems, and communicate value effectively. In addition to working with technical talent, she performs due diligence for pre-seed and seed investors and serves as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence for Techstars and Columbia Ventures. Lindsay also hosts the Make Sense podcast and answers questions on YouTube, earning recognition as Technical.l y 's 2024 Creator of the Year in Philadelphia. Arielle Lechner is an executive coach and founder of NewPo, helping leaders challenge the status quo and unlock new opportunities. With a decade of go-to-market leadership at B2B SaaS and Web3 startups, she knows what drives successful products, strategies, and teams. Arielle has coached leaders from Google, GitHub, and Coda and worked with clients through high-stakes moments like fundraising, scaling, acquisitions, and launching new ventures. This session goes beyond a typical talk❕ It's an interactive experience featuring real-world case studies, hands-on exercises, and candid discussions that will leave you with a practical checklist for evaluating startup opportunities. Whether you're a seasoned developer exploring new challenges or an aspiring technical co-founder, you'll gain smart strategies and actionable insights to confidently navigate the startup world. Prepare to challenge your assumptions, expand your network, and gain the clarity needed to make informed decisions—all in a dynamic, supportive environment led by Lindsay Tabas and Arielle Lechner.
Muscat Daily
16-04-2025
- Business
- Muscat Daily
Startup boot camp aims to turn ideas into business ventures
Muscat – University of Technology and Applied Sciences Muscat will host 'Startup Weekend' from April 17 to 19, bringing together students, entrepreneurs and industry professionals for a 54-hour entrepreneurship boot camp. Held in collaboration with Authority for Small and Medium Enterprises Development and startup accelerator Techstars, the event is part of efforts to help young innovators convert business ideas into viable ventures. It supports the goals of Oman Vision 2040 by strengthening links between academia and industry, and building a knowledge-driven economy. Over three days, participants will develop ideas, build prototypes and present their projects to a panel of investors, mentors and judges. The programme is designed to foster entrepreneurial thinking and provide hands-on business development experience. Juhaina bint Hamoud al Eisriya, Head of Partnership and Entrepreneurship Department at the university, described the event as a practical approach to education and innovation. 'The programme will focus on practical learning, mentoring, business model development and creating real solutions for real-world challenges,' she said. Esraa bint Salim al Ajmiya, Head of Innovation and Technology Transfer, said the boot camp also aims to connect startups with funding bodies. 'We aspire to link entrepreneurial ideas generated during the programme with real market opportunities through sustained support and open communication channels with investors and funding institutions.' Dr Badr bin Khalid al Shibeebi, Deputy Assistant Vice Chancellor for Postgraduate Studies and Research, added, 'We hope the outcomes of this event will serve as a true launchpad for innovative startups that contribute to economic diversification and enhance Oman's competitiveness in innovation and technology.' The event will focus on challenges in education, healthcare, the economy and technology. Around 100 to 120 participants are expected to attend.
Technical.ly
03-04-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
Techstars restarts its DC programming with a new health accelerator
Global investment company Techstars is teaming up with Kaiser Permanente's arm for DC, Maryland and Virginia patients to launch a new accelerator for early-stage healthcare startups. The program, called the Techstars Healthcare Accelerator powered by Permanente Medicine Mid-Atlantic States, will provide founders with mentorship, strategic resources and access to the health provider's network of nearly 1,800 physicians specializing in more than 60 medical and surgical fields. The accelerator will take place in person in DC. 'We are committed to continuously improving upon our nation-leading patient care,' Dr. Richard McCarthy, the executive medical director of the Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group, said in a press release. 'Innovation is fundamental to raising the bar.' Startups working in virtual care models, predictive analytics, preventive health, chronic disease management and other health-related fields are encouraged to apply. Applications for the program open on April 8 and will be accepted through June 11. This isn't the investment and startup support firm's first step into the health tech industry. Techstars previously launched a health and artificial intelligence accelerator in Baltimore via a partnership with Johns Hopkins University and regional insurance provider CareFirst. The program welcomed its first cohort in March. Some of Techstars' other programs underwent major changes in the past year. It ended its JPMorgan-backed accelerator in DC last summer — amid a series of broader changes that saw Techstars lose 17% of its staff — and wrapped its last cohort in December. Keith Camhi, a managing director at Techstars, will lead the new accelerator in DC. He first joined the company in 2018 and led several programs on the East Coast, including the JP Morgan-backed DC program. Camhi also led Techstars' global accelerator team before becoming a managing director in 2021. Since then, he invested in and advised about 70 startups, per his LinkedIn. 'Entrepreneurs are central to transformation in healthcare,' Camhi said in a press release. 'The opportunity to collaborate with a prominent healthcare provider like Permanente Medicine, combined with Techstars' programming, capital, and network, amplifies their ability to create meaningful impact.'
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
I've spent years helping female founders access capital. Now that they have AI, they might not have to
In the past eight years I have taught over 800 founders, mostly female founders, how to raise venture capital. Collectively, they've gone on to raise over $200 million, the majority of that in pre-seed rounds. And I'm not alone: Dozens of programs and organizations—from All Raise to Techstars, and everything in between—have sought to level the playing field for women who are new to the startup space. I wish I could say that all of our efforts have made a big difference. But the data suggests otherwise. When I started the Female Founders Alliance in 2017, Pitchbook published data that all-female teams had raised only 2.6% of venture capital the prior year—the number was 2.1% last year. Sixty-two percent of female entrepreneurs still report experiencing bias in the fundraising process. Even when women do raise, they tend to get lower valuations and smaller check sizes, and a much higher bar to raise the next round. This despite the fact that when women do get funded, they outperform on business metrics. Research from Boston Consulting Group shows that women-led companies generate twice as much revenue for every dollar of investment when compared to all-male teams. Whether it be out of skill or sheer necessity, female founders consistently do more with less. And while they deliver faster exits than all-male teams, these exits are on average smaller. Because even after finding product-market fit, it's just plain hard to scale a company if you don't have the requisite capital to do so. And so they sell sooner, delivering solid, if not spectacular, early exits for their investors, and making female-founded IPOs an extremely rare occurrence. They say that talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. For female founders, the limiting factor has been capital. And that's about to change. In all the buzz and hype about AI, there's a side story I've been tracking that has the potential to change the game for female founders. It's the 'tiny teams' story. Consider startups like Anysphere, which scaled their annual recurring revenue to $100 million while having only 20 employees, and ElevenLabs, which reached the same milestone with only 50. For comparison, when cybersecurity company Wiz reached $100 million in ARR in 2022—the fastest company to do so at the time—it had 400 employees. That number gets bigger with prior generations of unicorns. How did these tiny teams stay tiny? Skill, luck, hard work, and strategic use of AI to keep their operations lean. It remains to be seen if the fast-earned revenue in the examples above is sticky, or if customers are experimenting with AI tools and will leave for the next shiny thing. The need for capital, or the ability to use capital as a moat to outrun competitors, may never fully go away. Still, it is undeniable that a new crop of AI tools makes it possible to build and scale a company at a fraction of the cost than it did even just a year ago. As a result, startups don't look like they used to. Founders are purposefully raising smaller rounds, keeping teams lean, and using AI to scale faster and more efficiently than ever before. As an early-stage investor, I am now consistently meeting founders who have a stated goal of reaching profitability before the Series A. They hope to never raise again. Or if they do, to raise on their own terms, from a position of strength. This new trend has a name: seed-strapping. Raising one round and growing profitably from there. And while this might be a threat for growth-stage VC funds, it's a boon for pre-seed and seed investors like me. AI-powered efficiency means less dilution for me and stronger returns for my LPs. I have never been more excited to be an early-stage VC. The rise of seed-strapping also has exciting implications for women—and for any founder who lacks access to capital. Because if capital is no longer the limiting factor, opportunity becomes more evenly distributed too. In the last two decades a host of tools made it cheap and easy to start a company—you could incorporate with Legal Zoom, make a website with Squarespace, set up a store with Shopify, and put ads on Facebook for a fraction of the price, effort, and skill that all such actions used to take offline. AI is doing the same, but on steroids. You can create professional-grade marketing collateral, automate and optimize your outbound sales, use AI agents to power customer support, speed up coding, and even build basic digital products without writing a single line of code. All of this will get better very, very fast. Some people call this a vibe shift. I'm calling it a power shift. A massive power shift. If women can use AI to build companies more efficiently and raise less capital, it changes everything. We already know that women founders excel at driving revenue in a low-resource environment. Now, AI makes it easier for them to scale that revenue, too. And in the process, they own more of their companies, raise capital on their own terms, and deliver even stronger exits for investors. Outside the insular world of venture capital, there's evidence suggesting that women at large are adopting AI at a slower pace than men. In doing so, they risk falling further behind in career progression. But early data on female founders is far more encouraging. We recently surveyed the Female Founders Alliance community and found that 79% of female founders are already using AI in their startups, and another 6% is planning to. The top tasks they're using AI for are product development (53% of founders), and marketing (52%), followed by operations (39%) and customer service (16%). Anecdotally, founders are leveraging AI as an agent, enhancer, and even a thought partner. AI may be the biggest technological breakthrough we will witness in our lifetimes. But as big as that is, it's an even bigger social paradigm shift. There are very real societal concerns of what AI means for employees. But for entrepreneurs, AI blows the doors of opportunity wide open. That's why I want to see more women using AI—not just as a tool, but as a core strategy for how they build. It makes me rethink how we support founders at Graham & Walker. For the last eight years, we helped founders raise capital. Perhaps going forward, we'll help founders grow without it. The opinions expressed in commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. This story was originally featured on Sign in to access your portfolio
