Select startups may receive up to US$250,000 investment. When you receive investment, you also become one of Accelerating Asia Ventures’ portfolio companies and part of a wider network. Eligible startups will receive an initial US$100k investment from Accelerating Asia Ventures' early-stage venture capital fund once you clear conditions precedent and a further potential US$150k in investment after the program. You can read more about our investment terms here.

Accelerating Asia Ventures operates on an accelerator/venture capital model. That means your investment from us is made through our early-stage venture capital fund.

SAFE stands for Simple Agreement for Future Equity. A SAFE is similar to a warrant, it's an option to buy equity later at the terms defined in the agreement. SAFEs were pioneered by Ycombinator in 2013 as an alternative to convertible debt, which was widely used at the time. At Accelerating Asia Ventures, we only use SAFEs for startup investment and almost all of the non-institutional investment raised by our founders use SAFEs as well. Check our Craig’s blog for a full explainer on SAFE notes.

We provide support across a range of core areas that we know are a focus for startups. This includes providing general and specialist mentorship from our wide network of external mentors, access to the Accelerating Asia Ventures Founder Community so you have peer support, branding & PR opportunities, fundraising support, access to regional networks for growth and scaling. Plus dedicated 1-1 support from our in-house Entrepreneurs in Residence with exits who have faced the same challenges and blocks you have.

In our last cohort, startups had sessions with the region’s  leading investment firms including Golden Gate Ventures, Monk’s Hill, Cocoon Capital and Sequoia. We also run dedicated sessions with Entrepreneurs in Residence so you can deep dive into focus areas. And of course, our masterclasses which cover capital raising, pitch coaching, sales and growth. 

As an Accelerating Asia Ventures startup, your program fee also unlocks the our powerful network and connections to leading angels, VCs and partners plus perks from AWS, Hubspot, Stripe and more.

We are independent so  program fees help us deliver the best program to you from Demo Days to pitch coaching workshops and PR activities. It also allows us to focus on our founders and ensure our goals are aligned from day 1 and focus on you. 

Actually, most accelerators charge a program fee, the cash amount is usually a bit higher. But we know that for some early stage startups this can be a lot of cash, that’s why we structure it the way we do so you can still benefit from the program.

Our accelerator is 100 days, we know that Founders need to remain focused on building your startup, so while it can seem tough to participate in a program and run your business, our program is designed to be high-impact, for Founders by Founders and you’ll still spend about 90% of your time working on your startup. We focus on condensing the majority of activities, masterclasses and office hours into blocks so that you can spend the majority of your time focusing on running your startup.

Startups prepare a lot of information for our applications and the ones that really stand out and make it through are those who have taken their time to submit a well thought out application with all the documents. We ask things about your vision, your current traction, why you’d like to be part of the Accelerating Asia Ventures program. It’s all designed to give us an idea about who you are and why you want to work with us.

After you submit your application, we will long list a selection of startups to submit further information to us, then you participate in 2-3 rounds of interviews. Startups will then be invited to Virtual Selection Week where representatives from our investor, mentor and founder network will meet with you and help us choose the top 10 startups to join the portfolio and cohort. All startups who get to Virtual Selection Week meet with Accelerating Asia Ventures’ top mentors, advisors, angel investors and Venture Capitalists in our network so it’s going to be an incredibly rewarding experience - you really can’t lose :)

We do not focus on any particular verticals, but are simply looking for the best startups and founders that are solving big problems. Historically, the management team has experience mentoring a wide variety of startup business models, and our mentor and investor networks cover most types of business models and products. So far, we’ve invested in 10+ verticals including edtech, SaaS, logistics, travel tech, agtech and fintech across B2B, B2G and B2B2C. You can see some of our portfolio companies here.

We receive lots of applications for each cohort and we review each one individually. We try to respond to everyone with a yes or no, but it could take up to a few weeks after applications close to get a response. We get back to you after the application deadline, in case you want to make any last minute changes or updates to your application.