YES!Funded - YES!Delft

Meet the Investor Readiness Program Batch 2020

Written by Andreea on November 17, 2020. Posted in News, Online, YES!Funded.

Meet the startups of our Investor Readiness Program

Six startups are currently enrolled in our Investor Readiness Program. In 10-weeks they get all the tools to be attractive from an investor’s perspective and to obtain the necessary funds to further accelerate! After previous successes, and numerous requests, YES!Funded also started to welcome startups outside our ecosystem to the program! Scroll down, get to know them a bit better, and find out how they experienced the program so far.

PATS Indoor Drone Solutions

PATS Indoor Drone Solutions is automating insect control for horticulture with their Bat-like Drones.

“Investor readiness is much more than a fancy slide deck. You have to make the switch from selling your company to building the case for investors such that they see the long-term potential and have no other want than to be part of this journey together with the startup team.

The program gives great insights into all aspects that are relevant to building this case, with great and detailed support and guidance by the YES!Funded team.”

Cuurios

Asset-intensive industries struggle to inspect, maintain, and repair their assets in a coordinated and timely way. Their business-as-usual collaboration solutions (e.g. E-mail, Microsoft Excel, Power BI) are reactive, highly dependent on human input, or lack data context. This leads to avoidable production losses, asset downtime, or quality issues.

The software product of Cuurios is a collaborative environment to organize, track, and manage asset related actions, turbo charged by data.

“The first three weeks of the YES!Delft Investor Readiness Program were inspiring and intense and it gave us valuable insights on the investors perspective, our elevator pitch, and much more… Cuurios is now 2 years successful in business and we believe this program will help us prepare and present an appealing investment opportunity!”

Interested to know more about this startup’s experience in the program? Read all about it in the extensive blogpost they wrote.

Keep on reading

Lynk

Lynk is embedding quality control intuitively into your projects’ digital workflow.

“Even amidst Corona, Carola, Jan Geert, and Bianca have managed to make the Investor Readiness Program feel personal and inclusive. The masterclasses have been on-point and have nudged us to look beyond technology and product metrics. We are looking forward to making our business case full-circle and getting in touch with investors.”

Mavin

The purpose of the media has always been to hold governments and organizations accountable. But who holds the media accountable? Mavin believes it should be you. Especially now! Mavin will be an ecosystem of crowd-sourced, reputation-based, rating, and commenting tools to enable internet users to instantly recognize the trustworthiness of content they read, share, or engage in. This will help to restore online trust, fight misinformation, bad bots, and trolls while offering publishers additional engagement, traffic, and revenue.

“We applied to join the Investor Readiness Program to improve how we target, present to, and connect with investors. The first weeks have been focused on getting the basics in order to target investors, while the second part of the program is more focused on the in-depth knowledge required when connecting to investors.

We received great feedback on our pitch deck, not only from the YES!Delft team, but also from the Entrepreneurs in Residence which are part of YES!Delft. Especially those connections, to seasoned entrepreneurs and investors are most useful and relevant to us and we are looking forward to a lot more inspiring conversations.”

BodyGraph

BodyGraph designed The Textile Coach, a smart undershirt that provides accurate body monitoring and gives actionable advice.

“During the first three weeks, we already got so many new insights from the YES!Delft team and the other participants. We now know what investor-ready truly means. We are looking forward to putting the things we learned into practice and pitch for the ‘friendly’ investors, later on in the program.”

Olivia

Olivia brings inexpensive wireless data fuels to the next wave of innovation. An explosion in affordable hardware makes gathering data possible in ways it wasn’t before. Communicating data wirelessly remains costly and painful. Olivia changes that, by becoming the world’s first mobile network operator for smart devices.

Are you an investor looking for investment opportunities in these startups or would you just like to get to know them even better? Join the Investor Day!

YES!Funded announces its new Director

Written by Andreea on January 24, 2020. Posted in News, YES!Funded.

Following the need from startups for support in their funding journey, we launched YES!Funded a year ago. YES!Funded is a three pillar proposition service, where we help startups become investor ready, introduce them to relevant investors, and if desired we also provide support with actual funding rounds, both in the form of deal making and grants writing. Our service is unique because we provide support to startups in every stage of their funding lifecycle and we can act based on the specific needs of these startups.

THE FIRST YEAR

When we started YES!Funded, it was all about solving acute funding problems, building trust from scratch with no track record and infrastructure. Because we realized a lack of knowledge on funding issues, we piloted an Investor Readiness Program. In parallel, we built an extensive investors network and sought collaboration with informal investor circles, platforms and banks, in order to organise quick access to a large investor base. We entered into contracts with several startups, succeeding in closing one equity deal, and executing numerous grants applications together with our partner StasburgReeve.

Now that we know that there is a large need for support in this area, we are going to further build and scale our proposition. To make this possible, YES!Delft asked Bianca Boelema-Noordhuizen to join YES!Funded as the Director. With her experience in M&A (at Philips), venture capital and angel investments, Bianca has in-depth knowledge of the entire startup investment process. Therefore, this new role and task to take YES!Funded to the following stage fits her perfectly.

THE NEW ROLES

Bianca will be responsible for managing the YES!Funded service from an operational and strategic point of view, and will focus on developing and building the proposition to a national proposition. This includes building a strong team, implementing the Investor Readiness Program, attracting potential partners, establishing an active network of investors and providing startup access to this network.

Jan Geert is responsible for the investment advice to the startup community, the deal flow and execution of private investment tracks, and together with StrasburgReeve for the grant application flow. With his throughout experience in the tech-startup and investments world, he can advise startups on anything from business planning and finance to startup funding, investor focus, grants, deal structure and governance.

Carola has been part of YES!Funded from the start and played an important role in piloting the Investor Readiness Program. In addition, she supports the startup and investor communities by bringing them together and building an investor network. She makes sure that investors have access to the right investment opportunities, matching their investment focus with startups needs.