We’ve been following the 255 startups that were accepted in 2011 into incubator programs around the nation. (See Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series.)
We want to find out which Class has been most successful in accomplishing the one thing almost all startups want – follow-on funding.
We use data from Seed-DB which has been collecting information on 145 seed accelerators and their companies. After plugging gaps in funding reported, we sorted the database by success rate, average and median raised, to identify the top programs. Then we totaled the incubator’s rank for each of these measures. The lower the amount of points, the higher the rank in each category, the better the result.
Here are the results:
A strong end of the year finish by the Class of 2011 at Tech Stars pulled Boston ahead of New York. For now, Boston has three of the top five startup classes in the nation. Who would have thought by just following the tech press, for example, that LaunchpadLA outperformed Y Combinator?
It will take many years for these startups to demonstrate quantitative results of any significance. But money raised by participating in the incubators is an early signal because most need funding during their early stages.
Stay tuned!