It is tough to raise money if you’re an entrepreneur. But it is even tougher if you’re an international entrepreneur based outside of the US.
There are over 300 international accelerators and incubators producing thousands of promising startups each year, which go largely unnoticed by US investors. Many of them are currently looking to expand into global markets but don’t have the global network or access to international capital to do so.
This is what World Wide Investor Network (WIN) is trying to change. WIN is a NY-based organization focused on bringing the best and most innovative international startups to the NY investor community, and to help them accelerate their growth in the US.
WIN organizes pitching events in NY to bridge this gap. The last event took place on 14th November, featuring venture capitalists such as David Teten (Partner, FF Venture Capital), Kirill Sheynkman (Managing Director, RTP Ventures), Ed Sim (Founder, BOLDstart Ventures) and Habib Kairouz (Managing Partner, RHO Capital Partners), and also seasoned entrepreneurs such as Mark Uhrmacher (Founder and CTO of Ideeli), Ari Rabban (Founder and CEO of Phone.com) and Freddie Pikovsky (Founder at DUMBO startup Lab). There were startups from many countries, including several from Israel (confirming the thesis of the book ‘Startup nation’), New Zealand, Singapore, UK, Denmark and Lithuania.
At the event, WIN also announced the launch of “The Global Innovation Fund”, with the aim to accelerate top international startups to enter the US market and provide them with funds ($250k to $750k per company), mentorship, top investment experience. The Fund’s team will include Eyal Bino (Founder of WIN), J. Skyer Fernandes, (Partner at Centripetal Capital Partners) and Elizabeth Lopez (VP Operations at WIN). The fund will have 5/10 global council members per geographic region.
Here are some of the most interesting companies that presented in NY:
FETCHFANS (Singapore)
A social media marketing platform that creates Facebook websites for independent business owners to increase their products and services on FB. Tech Crunch named it one of the 7 social media startups to watch.
PLURALIS (Israel)
Crowdsourcing platform for landing page optimization to help online businesses to improve their conversion rates.
QUEUE.IT (Denmark)
Software to prevent website poor performance and crashes, and to manage overload during extreme user peaks.
BLOOIE (United Kingdom)
Brand new way to discover and discuss the content people love online. It enables websites to host meaningful real-time conversations by pairing users together based on shared interests and suggesting new content.
GARANTIA DATA (Israel)
Garantia Data is at the intersection of big data and cloud computing. It offers web companies fully automated cloud services for hosting their open source datasets Redis and Memcached in a reliable, scalable, less demanding, and safe manner.
TERMINAL 0 (Canada)
A preference matching engine designed for airline passengers to select who they sit beside on a flight. A Linkedin on the fly to increase ROI while on board.
CROPLOGIC (New Zealand)
A unique software platform for crop management that enables a demonstrated and significant improvement in crop yield and yield forecasting, more sustainable, and water and nutrient management.
ARTNETBOOK (Lithuania)
A cloud-based solution for the art industry (collectors, artists, art galleries and dealers). It provides an online art collection management database, system for organizing art collections, running and managing art galleries.
FIREBLADE (Israel)
A centralized cloud SaaS that makes websites friendlier and safer to users, unbreakable to potential abusers and more profitable to their owners.
Post written by Lila Pla Alemany (Columbia Business School, InSITE’s VP of Communications)