The anticipation was palpable throughout the Lincoln Theater as Liz Tracy, director at HQ Raleigh and lead facilitator of the Innovators Program, stepped out onto the stage to kick off the Innovators Program’s recent fourth annual Demo Day.
“We live in a region that is a top area for entrepreneurship,” Tracy said.
Though startups and small businesses may not have been in the spotlight 10 years ago as Innovators Program cofounder Mary-Ann Baldwin pointed out, the Triangle has built quite a reputation for itself. Raleigh has landed in the top spot on lists like Glassdoor’s Best City for Jobs, Selfstorage.com’s Hot Spot for Tech Startups Outside Silicon Valley and the Financial Times’ Mid-Sized American City of the Future. Not to mention, Raleigh was number four on CNN Money’s Best City to Launch a Startup list in 2014.
The Innovators Program is a three-month long accelerator program that provides $20,000 in funding along with education and mentorship to aspiring startups and internal teams from companies like Citrix, Red Hat and this year Becton Dickinson Technologies. The goal is to take an idea and morph it into a sustainable business model by collecting feedback from potential customers and then testing strategies for scaling to find product-market fit. Whether an internal team or a growing startup, all come together under the program to solve a problem.
This program boasts graduates that have raised a combined $8 million after leaving the program. Health-tech startup Medicom Technologies eclipsed $5 million in private equity funding this year, two years after completing the program. EmployUs, another 2015 graduate, raised $750,000 and is providing its employee referral software to over 100 companies across 15 countries.
The problems this year’s cohort aimed to solve revolved around office management, healthcare technology and activism.
There’s much more to the story. read it all at:
Innovators Program Hopes 2017 Grads Will Add To $8M Alumni Funding Total
