AllianceBlock joins Kickstart Innovation, one of Europe’s largest multi-corporate accelerators.
AllianceBlock team is happy to announce that it will be joining Kickstart Innovation class of 2019. AllianceBlock is one of 10 startups to be selected to the Fintech Vertical.
From 500+ applications, Kickstart’s team of experts and partners chose 100 startups to take part in a two day bootcamp in Zurich where they pitched their ideas to panels of experts, participants and professionals. Of these, 48 made it to the final program which includes six verticals (Fintech & Digital Assets, Cybersecurity, Edtech & Learning, Food & Retail Tech, Healthtech, Smart City & Infrastructure) and will start in September and end on the 8th of November 2019.
Kickstart Innovation —until recently known as Kickstart Accelerator — is one of Europe’s leading ecosystem innovation platforms offering programs for startups, scale-ups, corporations and organizations. It is one of the largest European multi-corporate innovation platforms. The Swiss innovation acceleration program inaugurated in 2015 to provide startups and corporates with a platform to establish collaborations and partnerships.
Dr Amber Ghaddar, cofounder of AllianceBlock said:“ There are so many accelerators out there. And we are very very careful in our applications as an accelerator can end up costing money, wasting time and just be a marketing ploy. We have applied to a select few and we usually look at five core points: Product development, access to clients, access to funding, access to partners and performance of Alumni.” And she went on to say: “Kickstart for us was a no brainer, Switzerland is one of the largest private wealth markets in the world, they have two very large banks and are the world center for everything blockchain related. We came to Kickstart with two projects in mind, for both the investment banking industry and the private wealth industry and we will develop them with two specific partners with the aim to advance from a successful PoC to a long-standing collaboration in daily business. We will divulge the details in September!”
And indeed Kickstart differentiation comes from the close ties between the accelerator and the Swiss ecosystem. This lead to a platform with over 50 partner organizations, from large corporations to innovative SMEs, (smart) city and cantonal departments, leading universities, research institutions, foundations and participants including AXA, Coop, Migros and Swisscom as well as Credit Suisse, City of Zurich, ETH Zürich, Gebert-Rüf-Stiftung, Mercator Foundation Switzerland, Stäubli, and University of Zurich. Projects participating in the program are given the opportunity to scale their products, services and solutions and are selected on the basis of a PoC proposal to specific partners to be delivered during the duration of the program.
And despite their relative youth — the 2019 batch is only the 4th batch of kickstarters — the track record of the Startup alumni is impressive. Since 2016, there have been 75+ partnerships signed with the like of Credit Suisse, AXA, Swisscom etc… (Check here for 2017 and here for 2018) helping startups validate their visions and find new clients. While some like Kickstart 2018 participant Labster raised $21 million in Series B funding, one of the investor’s being Kickstart partner Swisscom Ventures, whom they had met during Kickstart.
Katka Letzing, cofounder and co-lead of Kickstart Innovation said: “In the space of four short years, Kickstart has evolved from an accelerator dedicated to early-stage startups to an ecosystem innovation platform focused on later-stage startups and scale-ups as well as established partners that fosters innovative solutions through collaboration. Kickstart is focused on “delivery”, and our goal is to give startups and partners the right tools to deliver PoCs that would lead to long term partnerships. The numbers speak for themselves, if you look at the 2019 pipeline, we have scale-ups with over 50 employees and over 80M USD funding which applied to join Kickstar”.
To learn more about AllianceBlock, join us on:
- Telegram: https://t.me/allianceblock
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/allianceblock
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzsfjvEv3qOfTJtG4RNAW3A
To learn more about Kickstart, click here
