Startup Accelerators in UK Invest £33M Yearly in Businesses
Starting a business is a difficult endeavour that requires many resources to achieve success. The number of entrepreneurs is growing in the UK, which has led to the establishment of business accelerators as the main providers of guidance and resources that new businesses need.
Startup Accelerators offer programmes with fixed durations, lasting anywhere from three to 12 months. During this time, startups have the chance to apply their ideas and transform them into viable businesses. In order to do that, 81% of accelerators offer mentorship and office workspaces 54%. This is essential to keep the business progress on track.
One of the most attractive features of accelerators, though, is the funding these programmes provide. According to the British Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), 61% of accelerators provide direct funding, which in most cases is in exchange of a equity percentage of the startup.
Accelerators vs Incubators
The Increasing Trend of Startup Accelerators in the UK
Currently, there are 171 programmes in the UK according BEIS’ last update. These are focusing in different fields of innovation, although 30% accept projects from all sectors. Accelerators specialised in digital technologies account for 23%, and those focused on social enterprises account for 10%. However, there is a lot of variety and there are accelerators covering many sectors such as B2B, healthtech, foodtech, fintech, or transportation, and recently blockchain focused accelerators.
Each accelerator has its own conditions and requirements. Entrepreneurs apply with their projects according to the type of resources they need and what the accelerator might offer them. One of the benefits most startups pursue is to gain access to investors, which can drive the success of the project as these first rounds of funding oftentimes lead to further success and more investors down the line, as seen in cases such as Transferwise.
Supreme Factory has created a new hybrid type of business assistance as a Virtual Accelerator Fund which is bridging the gap between Startup Ecosystems by matching all stake holders such as startups, talents, corporates, investors, government, organisations, etc. This new hybrid type of acceleration came as an idea from experience of working with different types of accelerators such as Teen Accelerator: Acorn Aspirations, Post Accelerator for late stage startups: IDEALondon (Cisco, UCL), Startup Lab/Studio: ex UCL Advances – Digital Business Lab (UX Lab, Device Lab, App Lab), Hyper Acceleration: Google Launchpad x, etc.
Supreme Factory teamed up with Market Inspector who created this infographic that reveals the current status of accelerators and its influence in the UK startup ecosystem.
