Fledge is a global network of conscious company accelerators and investment funds, helping entrepreneurs create impactful companies and co-ops at scale through intense, short programs filled with education, guidance, and a massive amount of mentorship.
Each city runs (up to) one session per year. Each city’s program is a bit different from the others’, but all are focused on mission-driven for-profit companies, and all invest in their fledglings.
Th educational curriculum is based on The Next Step books and online classes, taught to fill in any gaps in the key skills entrepreneurs need to know to succeed: strategy, financials, marketing, sales, funding, etc.
All our cities share a global network of hundreds of mentors, who share their experiences, advice, and connections in 1-on-1 meetings with participants.
Every day, week after week, we push the participants forward, iterating business strategy, financial models, marketing and sales plans, funding options, and investor and sales pitches, plus we put a special focus on storytelling. The result is intense and creates lasting value for years after the companies return home.
We have been refining this service since 2012 and, to date, have helped hundreds of companies from dozens of countries. We’re eager for more. Our goal is to help foster a wave of companies that make a measurable impact in the world, collectively improving the lives of everyone on the planet.
We invest $15,000 (Peru), €15,000 (Europe), or $20,000 (U.S.) into each company we invite to participate, using revenue-based equity, which aligns our interests with the founders, avoids any pressure to “sell out”, and lets us invest in just about any market segment and most any country in the world. Plus, we make introductions to impact investors and make follow-on investments from our family of seed funds.
Venture capital and angel investing are realms filled with unspoken assumptions. One such assumption is that companies should burn through substantial capital before even considering profitability. This notion is misguided! Countless startups, often overlooked by these investors, are compelled to be profitable to survive. If these investors took a moment to recognize these startups, they would...
From the creators of Fledge Peru comes EGA Farms…
For the socially responsible produce consumer, EGA Farms promotes growth, sustainability and competitive development while undertaking a commitment to support the farmers and families that makeup the agro-industrial sector of the Tacna Region of Peru.
The Land Accelerator celebrates half a decade of programming in 2023, all focused on for-profit companies working on land restoration. Over 1,000 applications arrived yet-again for the original Africa program. From boosting agricultural yields to creating jobs and fighting climate change, there are multiple benefits to making degraded land healthy again. Landscape restoration creates...
After a successful crowdfunding in 2022, Bricolage Dynamics now has a commercial-scale processing center that is busy recycling post-consumer glass into sand, for use in construction and landscaping. The plan for 2023 is to begin franchising their glass to sand model. If you know of a community that is not collecting glass, or any municipal recycling company that is sending most of their...
“The Missing Middle” is what we call the gap in finance the majority of entrepreneurs face in getting from a viable prototype or early customers to a full-scale proven business. In Part 1, Luni explains who he is, and how he came to fill in this otherwise missing middle. In Part 2, Luni jumps back to the history of venture capital to explain the pervasive paradigm that leads to...
Every year, we collectively throw away 50 million tons of clothes and other textiles worldwide. With its 100% waste-based, fully recyclable NuCycl fiber, launched in April, Evrnu aspires to create a virtuous textile cycle. NuCycl is made by chemically liquefying old textiles into their essential molecules, purifying the liquid pulp, and then extruding the pulp into fibers to be spun into yarn...
Paniel Meat Processing and Livestock Bank, two companies created by the same founder merged back together in early 2022. Business is good, growing from $35,000 in annual revenues back in 2017 to over $1.5 million USD in 2022.
In short… it works. Quite well. To see what that means in practice, below is a site visit video shot this month in Kigali, Rwanda.
Too many first-time entrepreneurs ignore the needs, desires, and goals of investors, focusing solely on their own needs, desires, and goals. Try thinking of investors as a field of crops. Planting seeds is when you meet new, potential investors. You can’t harvest the day you plant. You have to fertilize and weed and in some climates water those crops if you want them to grow. If you just...
The best part about accelerators is how many people you get connected to while in the program. Those entrepreneurs who suck the most value from accelerators take advantage of that new network. And not just to get answers to the most pressing challenge, but to find what the mentor, guest, etc. might know that you don’t, as extracting that knowledge doesn’t just not cost the other...
The best accelerator programs invest in their invitees, but the way accelerators invest and the mindset behind their investments is vastly different than venture capital funds and Angels, and a vastly superior process. Three key differences are: Batches Accelerators run cohorts of participants and thus choose companies in batches. Venture capital funds (and Angels, which follow the model of VCs...
