Lighthouse Labs announced its milestone 10th accelerator cohort on Monday, and it's poised to be the most diverse and most competitive program yet.
This year's cohort includes four Richmond-based startups: EDai, Grantable, Team Excel and lokii, as well as Koda Health, of Houston, Texas; Lumify Care, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; HUED, of Washington, D.C.; Interstride, of Austin, Texas; Bold Xchange, of St. Louis, Missouri; and Frameworq, of Birmingham, Alabama.
All 10 teams will receive $20,000 in equity-free funding at the end of the accelerator. To date, Lighthouse Labs has invested $1 million into 62 other early-stage startups over the last nine years.
"It was really strong competition this year. We had an almost overwhelming number of applications," Ali Greenberg, Lighthouse Labs community outreach manager, said. "It was really a community effort to choose the top teams, and if we could have accepted 50, we would have ... There were so many amazing candidates, and we wanted them all."
Greenberg said the Richmond-based seed-stage accelerator program received more than double the number of applications than in spring or fall of 2020. The spring cohort begins March 15 and runs through June 4.
Additionally, Greenberg said all of the startups have at least one founder who has a racial, ethnic or gender identity traditionally underrepresented in the startup ecosystem. This includes five Black founders and five women founders.
"We're really thrilled that a high percentage of the teams have an underrepresented founder because it's a testament to the changes we made to the application to remove barriers to access," she said. "These are the folks who truly scored the highest, so how amazIng is it to see that they truly represent the potential of the startup ecosystem."
Expectations for success for each of the startups is high, said Greenberg.
"While we have companies in the cohort that represent all stages of early-stage startups, they are all really poised to truly accelerate," she said. "We anticipate that we’ll see products launch and revenues grow for many, but also in the two-to-three years to come, acceleration sets them up for long term success, as well."
To coincide with the announcement of the 10th cohort, Lighthouse Labs also rolled out a website and logo rebrand. Greenberg said the timing was intentional.
"It really was a milestone and an opportunity for the organization to think about what the previous 10 years have looked like and what the next 10 years can look like," she said. "It's exciting because it's bringing a visual to the changes we've already implemented ... Our goal now is to be the most founder-friendly accelerator on the East Coast."
Greenberg added, "We need to be accessible; Our website needs to put founders first, and we need to continue to put founders first. We exist to support them. The aim is to strip Lighthouse down to our foundational building blocks that we then provide to these companies that they'll use to build themselves up."
