This year for the first time ever in the history of Kiuas we are running two Accelerator programs instead of one Ax and two Starts. Now that we’ve kicked things off with our spring batch it’s time to take a look at our first application period of the year and what learnings are we taking with us to the next one.

Every year we are surprised by the variety in ideas, backgrounds and industries of the startups that apply to our programs and this year wasn’t an exception. Some statistics on our applicants:

• The average team size was 3.6 while the range was all the way from 1 to 31
• The average age of a startup was 2.5 years
• Education background of founders varied from high school students all the way to PhDs
• Experience of the founding team ranged from no experience at all to serial founders
• Applications arrived from 33 countries in 4 continents.

What about the teams that got selected this season?

As the program this year has been designed to be customized based on each startup’s individual needs we had more freedom to choose startups from a larger range of stages. When stage as a factor was very broad this time and didn’t weigh as much on if a team was a good fit for Accelerator, what did we focus on then?

Problem. Is this a relevant problem that needs to be solved? Does the world change if this problem gets solved? How often do people experience this problem and how painful is the problem to the target audience? How big is the market within this problem?

‍Team. Does the founding team have the needed skills to build the product far enough to reach early validation? Do they have industry expertise that gives them the competence to solve the problem they are working on? Is the team committed full-time? Is the level of ambition in the team “We want to build a company that becomes a global category leader”?

As for the first time the program is fully tailored to each startup’s individual needs, we ended up keeping the batch size moderate to maximize the learning and the value provided to each startup.

Through these learnings, we are already stoked about our fall program and being able to help a whole new batch of founders with global ambition this Fall.

We can already state, that the initial reception of our program was astonishing and thus we know we’re on the right path. The batch's blogs and Instagram content will start flowing in the upcoming weeks, and trust us when we say, that those are something you definitely wanna read and watch.

If for some reason you didn’t apply this time or you didn’t get selected, the next application period is just around the corner, so stay tuned and don’t miss it!

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