With a coronavirus pandemic hotspot in Seattle and global travel on hold for a whole, we’ve started Fledge16 and its matching Angel Accelerator online. 9 companies based in 6 countries: From left to right on the map above: Bricolage Recycling glass into sand. South Carolina, USA. Tilaa Honey and cashews. Talame in Northern Ghana. Agromyx Powered fruit and grains. Accra, Ghana. Build...
Twelve years ago TechStars was born. Eight years ago, we discovered Bainbridge Graduate Institute. A few months later, we were introduced to the co-founder of what today is Impact Hub Seattle. Without the existence of these three organizations, Fledge never have been founded. The mashup in hindsight is obvious. TechStars taught us how to efficiently help startups. BGI taught us that it is...
Monday, April 29th begins the fourteenth session of Fledge. Or is it the 17th? Or 61st? You’d think counting would be easy, but the complexities of the real world get in the way. The simplest way to count sessions is to simply count how many times we’ve taught the Fledge curriculum with a cohort of entrepreneurs. But if we do that, we have to include the dozens of part-time Kick...
Congratulations to BridgeCare Finance, the Best For-Profit Pitch at SVP Fast Pitch Seattle 2017.
Congratulations 2017 Winners!
Meet the 2017 Finalists: BridgeCare Finance
How can one company solve the problems of poverty, hunger, and food safety and all it does is grow fresh fruits and vegetables. Golden Cat is a two year old mission-driven, company doing just that, in Rwanda. Rwanda is a poor, but quickly developing country. 80% of the population are smallholder farmers. Half of the 11 million people are under the age of 18. In order to feed this growing...
Zirconia immortalizes steel. The modern, industrial world is built on steel, which before Zirconia was destined to all rust away. The breakthrough this team is bringing to market is a non-toxic, economically sustainable, spray-on ceramic that glassifies the surface of steel, applied indoors or outdoors at room temperature, applicable to new construction as well as existing, rusty surfaces. With...
In America, childcare costs more than college, more than rent, and too often, more than the job pays a new mom who is trying to reenter the workforce. The “solutions” for this are far from perfect: high-interest credit cards, dipping into savings, or worse, postponing a career and giving up future earnings. Fledge9 proudly introduces Bridge Care Finance, a new consumer lending platform lowering...
How Fledge helps startups varies from company to company. One of the best stories from Fledge9 is BioGen Kenya. They applied (three times) with a plan to turn used cooking oil into biodiesel. They launched and are operating that business in Nairobi, expecting to come to Fledge to learn how to raise money to expand. Digging into the opportunity, we learned that last year Nairobi passed a law...
The fledglings are back in Seattle, from Monday, April 10th through Friday, June 9th. Six exciting startups from five different countries: [hr] Africa Business Radio is a multi platforms digital radio combining the power of the traditional online with mobile and social media to reach a wider community of businesses, corporate organizations, platform, entrepreneurs, institutional elders, venture...
Fledge is now more than just an accelerator, it is a family of seed investment funds. This new structure came about after talking to hundreds of impact investors, nearly all of which have specific areas of interest, either by geography and/or sector. With a large collect of funds, those investors can allocate their capital to the topics that best match those interests. To start with, all of...