Flywheel Coworking's decision to expand its startup accelerator is aimed at drawing in more early-stage ventures from across North Carolina, including here in Charlotte, co-founder Peter Marsh said late last week.
Flywheel launched its New Ventures program in 2016 and has accelerated 21 companies over five cohorts. Those early-stage investment startups have grown to a combined value of $43.2 million over the last five years, received more than $15 million in funding and created more than 100 new jobs, Marsh said.
The Winston-Salem-based coworking hub announced last week that it's expanding New Ventures this year to include four total accelerator pipelines.
"This is yet another Covid story," Marsh said. "We had to make a decision whether or not to run the fifth year of our accelerator, and we decided to move forward because we were able to raise the investment fund to support the program."
Marsh said leadership knew the accelerator would have to be delivered virtually, and thanks to the learning management system already in place, was able to convert the program's curriculum without many hiccups.
"We realized, if we could do that, we could run multiple accelerators at once and run the core curriculum through our LMS," he said. "The idea is that we can efficiently deliver our core curriculum and then harvest the knowledge assets in the communities we’re serving to service up very focused, multiple accelerator programs. That has attracted the interest of investors in these regions."
The four accelerator pipelines are:
- Health, Wellness and Nutrition: Focus is on the regional health-care knowledge assets and partnering with the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis and the N.C. Food Innovation Lab.
- AgTech: Greenworks of Lexington is a 64,000-square-foot agricultural lab and research facility with a 20,000-square-foot Flywheel coworking innovation center opening in 2022. Flywheel is partnering with SouthXCapital and anchor AgTech tenants on the accelerator.
- B2B Software with focus on SaaS: This accelerator pulls participation from all of Flywheel’s innovation center locations and invites tech companies that intersect with the strongest industries and regional market verticals.
- The Come Up Accelerator: Partnering with HUSTLE Winston-Salem to offer an accelerator for Black and brown founders. Flywheel Foundation has acted as a fiscal sponsor for HUSTLE since its inception.
Historically, Marsh said, about 25% of applicants are from the Charlotte region. Of the 21 companies to participate since 2016, four are from the Queen City.
"That's going to become more, like five to eight per year, instead of four or five over a five-year period," he said. "We anticipate we're going to be providing capital access to far more companies from Charlotte."
This year's program will be a hybrid of virtual and in-person meetings. Marsh said the first six weeks will be primarily virtual and focus on the core curriculum. The companies will then shift to in-person as they begin diving into their focused programs.
Applications are open through June 7. This year's industry-focused accelerators kick off Aug. 3 and culminate in two days of company demos on Oct. 28-29.
In addition to expanding the accelerator program, Marsh said Flywheel leaders have been mapping out an expanded footprint of its coworking hubs. The company currently has three locations in Winston-Salem, Davidson and Concord. The goal is to build 10 to 15 innovation centers in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia over the next four years, he said.
Currently, locations are in development in Lexington and Salisbury, as well as Greenville, South Carolina. Additional locations are planned in Charlotte and Raleigh/Durham in North Carolina, Columbia and Charleston in South Carolina, and Richmond and Roanoke in Virginia.
"Our grand plan is to develop these coworking innovation centers from northern Virginia, all the way down to Atlanta," Marsh said. "The advantage of doing that is entrepreneurs need access to subject matter expertise and capital that typically exceeds the capacity of any single location."
