Fledge is a global network of conscious company accelerators and investment funds, helping entrepreneurs create impactful companies and co-ops at scale through intense, short programs filled with education, guidance, and a massive amount of mentorship.
Each city runs (up to) one session per year. Each city’s program is a bit different from the others’, but all are focused on mission-driven for-profit companies, and all invest in their fledglings.
Th educational curriculum is based on The Next Step books and online classes, taught to fill in any gaps in the key skills entrepreneurs need to know to succeed: strategy, financials, marketing, sales, funding, etc.
All our cities share a global network of hundreds of mentors, who share their experiences, advice, and connections in 1-on-1 meetings with participants.
Every day, week after week, we push the participants forward, iterating business strategy, financial models, marketing and sales plans, funding options, and investor and sales pitches, plus we put a special focus on storytelling. The result is intense and creates lasting value for years after the companies return home.
We have been refining this service since 2012 and, to date, have helped hundreds of companies from dozens of countries. We’re eager for more. Our goal is to help foster a wave of companies that make a measurable impact in the world, collectively improving the lives of everyone on the planet.
We invest $15,000 (Peru), €15,000 (Europe), or $20,000 (U.S.) into each company we invite to participate, using revenue-based equity, which aligns our interests with the founders, avoids any pressure to “sell out”, and lets us invest in just about any market segment and most any country in the world. Plus, we make introductions to impact investors and make follow-on investments from our family of seed funds.
In rural Ghana, women typically can’t own their own land or do their own farming. Instead, they can only help their husbands, who then let their wives pick the shea nuts from the native shea trees and process those into shea butter. You may not have heard of shea butter, but you’ve used it, as it a common ingredient in moisturizers and cosmetics. Shea butter is thus a path for rural...
A doctor in Nigeria decides he could make more impact growing chickens. Not just growing them one by one or 1,000 by 1,000, but by launching a company where middle-class Nigerians can fund Nigerian farmers to raise chickens, sharing in the profits. Meanwhile, a Nigerian nurse decides she could make more impact working with widowed and single women smallholder farmers, helping them automate...
Given the variety of the fledglings, Fledge’s challenge is how to measure their collective impact. This is a long-standing industry debate, how to measure the impact of a company in a single number, and how to aggregate that number across a portfolio of companies/organizations. 1- Pinchot Impact Index Fledge has been using the Pinchot Impact Index since its inception, in part because it...
Congratulations to BridgeCare Finance, the Best For-Profit Pitch at SVP Fast Pitch Seattle 2017.
Congratulations 2017 Winners!
Meet the 2017 Finalists: BridgeCare Finance
Fledge begins again! 10 intense weeks for seven new fledglings. This time in a brand new city, Barcelona. We’re excited to have a cohort filled mostly with West African companies. For the previous ten sessions we’ve had quite a few East African and Southern African startups, but none in person from Ghana before. We’re even more excited that two of these companies are founded...
Back in March, ImpactAlpha shared the news that Ziweto Enterprise purchased its distributor, Alfa Medics. The rest of the story is quite telling about African startup economics. The story began back in 2016, with the Ziweto founders reaching out to Fledge, seeking introductions to investors for up to $200,000 to buy Alfa Medics. Upon searching the world, we found less than a handful of fund who...
My friend Ross Baird over at Village Capital posted a great bit of advice for the “tech” crowd in TechCrunch today: Dear Silicon Valley, You used to be the envy of the world. Over the last decade I’ve seen countless cities try to become you, from the Silicon Savannah to the Silicon Bayou. At last year’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit on Stanford’s campus, hundreds of entrepreneurs...
The Global Impact Accelerator Program is the first accelerator helping global impact businesses move to Canada under its Startup-Visa Program. This is a comprehensive, 4-month program powered by Fledge, operated by Spring.is targeting companies in healthcare, progressive food, sustainability, creative economy, and cleantech. Based in Vancouver, the Canadian leader for impact entrepreneurship, and...
The idea of having a whole family of seed funds rather than one big pool of capital continues to resonate with investors and serve the needs of entrepreneurs. Case in point, the new Sanitation fund, and it’s $20,000 revenue-based loan to JOELEX. The impetus of this fund was rather simple. A small handful of investors saw JOELEX’s pitch on Demo Day (below), talked to Joel, and...
Being an entrepreneur is hard. The ups and down of startup life are far larger and stronger than most jobs. Working with entrepreneurs isn’t much better, as the empathy is almost are wary. We’ve worked with dozens upon dozens of entrepreneurs at Fledge and most handle these stresses in stride. Sure, they have some sleepless nights and exhaustion, but that is what...