PRESS RELEASE: ALCHEMIST ACCELERATOR ANNOUNCES FOCUS ON INVESTMENTS IN COLLABORATION
Contact: Danielle D’Agostaro RELEASE: DATE March 3, 2017
Email: danielle@alchemistaccelerator.com
ALCHEMIST ACCELERATOR ANNOUNCES FOCUS ON INVESTMENTS IN COLLABORATION
Cisco Investments will continue as an investor in Alchemist’s new fund
San Francisco, Calif., March 3, 2017– Today, Alchemist Accelerator announced that it will be focusing a part of its new fund on early-stage collaboration startups. This includes startups that integrate with the Cisco Spark Service or use Cisco Collaboration APIs to enable voice, video and messaging.
Earlier this year, Alchemist Accelerator announced their new fund. Today, Cisco Investments, an existing Alchemist investor, joins the investors in Alchemist’s new fund. Cisco Investments had invested in Alchemist’s prior fund, which focused on accelerating the development of a number of seed-stage ventures. As part of that fund, Alchemist ran an Internet of Things focused accelerator that helped encourage IoT entrepreneurs and startups through funding, mentorship and resources.
With today’s announcement, Alchemist will expand its focus and support to early-stage innovation within collaboration. Cisco Investments and Alchemist will work together to identify, invest in and develop early-stage startups that focus on enabling collaboration in the enterprise. Alchemist will also dedicate a portion of their fund to invest in early-stage startups that are part of the Cisco Spark ecosystem. Cisco is making this investment via the Cisco Spark Innovation Fund it announced last March. Cisco Spark is the industry’s first integrated and cloud-based collaboration service. It provides users the ability to call, message, and meet, and access those services with apps, cloud-connected hardware, and a rich set of cloud APIs. These APIs, at developer.ciscospark.com, are the integration point for investments from Alchemist’s fund.
“Our relationship with Alchemist has given us exposure to a wide variety of enterprise startups,” said Rob Salvagno, head of Cisco Investments and vice president of Cisco Corporate Development. “With this new fund, our goal will be to support a new generation of startups that are disrupting the collaboration industry by developing new features and functionality on top of Cisco Spark.”
Alchemist already has made investments in a number of collaboration startups, including Assemblage and Synata, two companies that were acquired by Cisco.
The Alchemist Accelerator is a six-month program, accepting about 20 companies every four months. On average, the companies that are accepted receive $36,000 in seed funding. Alchemist structures the program around mentorship, sales, and fundraising to help early-stage companies raise their Seed or Series A round and get their first few customers.
###
Learn More
Anyone interested in getting involved as a mentor, investor or customer or members of the press, should fill out this form: https://vault.alchemistaccelerator.com/register-profile.
For more information on the accelerator, please visit http://www.alchemistaccelerator.com/.
About Alchemist Accelerator
The Alchemist Accelerator is a new venture-backed initiative focused on accelerating the development of seed-stage ventures that monetize from enterprises (not consumers). The accelerator’s primary screening criteria is on teams, with primacy placed on having distinctive technical co-founders. The accelerator seeds around 60 enterprise-monetizing ventures / year. Over 50% close institutional rounds within 12 months of their Alchemist Demo Day.