For this year’s Startup 2.0 competition we have tied up with SeedCamp, which is probably the most successful European micro-fund. What’s this? It’s a mix of incubator and fund. They are also called accelerator funds. Entrepreneurs come to them to ask for the money and advising they need to build their first business plan.

There are many requests and only the most interesting ideas are selected. They can later go to some type of campus in which successful entrepreneurs guide them in the first steps of their future or new company. These advises can save a business and the €15K-20k they can get does really help for some months. Once they grow, they are supposed to get more funding out the big VCs. And Seedcamp does also help in that field.

So where is the business? Ycombinator, the Silicon Valley-based micro-fund in which SeedCamp inspired itself does make a lot of money out of the sale of shares of the projects it helped create. … are among them. Herman Blackbook, which recently launched a micro-micro-fund which invests $1-3k in application developers, is searching for the same source of revenues with a lower risk.

SeedCamp has not yet arrived to that point. Europe is probably different as there are not so many projects and sales. So what does SeedCamp do? It’s selling its model all around Europe, so that it can get money out of local sponsors. It has already gone to Israel and France and plans to do the same in Slovenia and Poland.

There are more projects around the world based on YCombinator:
– Shotput Ventures, in Atlanta (USA)
– SeedRocket, in Barcelona (Spain)
– TechStars, in Boulder y Boston (USA)
– Start@Spark, in Boston (USA)
– LaunchBox Digital, in Washington DC (USA)
– DreamIT Ventures, in Philadelphia (USA)