Accelerator Strategy Overview
Geography: Nordics and Baltics, CEE
Preferred industries: Deep Tech and Life Sciences
Company stage: Early stage, Pre-Seed
Product stage: TRL5 – TRL7+
Product type: Deep Tech and Life Science products and solutions.
Revenues: Pre-revenue stage
Program Details
Duration: 7 weeks for Incubation, 6 months for acceleration
Participation fee: free
Equity Investment: between €25 000 up to €125 000 in the acceleration program
Grant: up to €15 000 per team in the incubation (pre-acceleration) program
No. of batches per year (+ months when you collect applications): 4 incubation programs per year, 2 acceleration programs per year, there are no deadlines for applications
No. of startups in a cohort: 10 – 30 teams in incubation program, 10-12 in acceleration program
Q&A with Sandra Golbreich, General Partner
What are the 5 most important things you look for in a startup applying to your acceleration program?
Baltic Sandbox Ventures is the region's first early-stage venture capital fund specialising in Deep Tech. We concentrate on pre-seed and seed level startups, particularly in Deep Tech and Life Sciences. Our focus is on businesses with a strong emphasis on technology and IP. We support these startups through our incubation and acceleration programs, offering grants and investments to pre-seed entrepreneurs.
As these startups progress and their companies begin to enter the market, our seed fund is ready to invest in their further growth. We're most interested in startups that stand out with their technological or IP edge. Our ideal teams are those who, in addition to being both creative and innovative, are also strategic in their approach. We understand the unique challenges faced by scientists and engineers in advanced domains and don't expect them to become business managers overnight. However, we do look for individuals who can apply their scientific expertise to solve interdisciplinary problems, and these are skills we work with them on to develop during our incubation and acceleration programs.
Our investment criteria are not centred on later-stage metrics like MRR. Instead, we focus on the startup's scientific and technological capabilities, the strength of their IP portfolio, and their strategy. We value teams capable of navigating tough environments, building resilience, and managing risks in R&D, product development, and market entry.
What startups should take into account before applying to your acceleration program?
You’d be surprised how many SAAS companies without any scientific or technological edge just putting screens on databases apply to us for funding, even though we clearly state we’re looking at Deep Tech and Life Sciences companies with a fundamental Scientific, R&D or Advanced Engineering edge. We’re not interested in screens on databases, unless it’s powered by some meaningful, hard-to-replicate, and preferably with some secret sauce that can be protected by Patents because of its innovative novelty.
If a team has:
- Fundamental scientific and technological edge, with properly protected (or protectable) Intellectual Property;
- Higher-end Competencies in the Technological domain within their team: whether Advanced Computing through to Life Sciences
- High willingness to learn the auxiliary and interdisciplinary skills necessary to turn their scientific project into a commercial enterprise that can scale
…then those are the teams we want to work with.
Our aim during the programs is to enable the start-up founders to gain the skills and knowledge that they tell us they need to lead their businesses to achieve their goals, and build a network of supporters and future customers. We expect people with scientific backgrounds to learn essential entrepreneurship and business skills and gain an interdisciplinary mindset. We give grants between 5K and 15K and investments between 25K and 125K.
Can you share some of the red flags that can disqualify a startup from joining your accelerator?
What is considered a red flag to one accelerator could be mild discomfort for another accelerator. We usually work with start-ups that are between the TRL5 and TRL7+ range, most of them already know what they are doing, to whom they are creating and what their plan. However, we as humans, can not be the master of every possible field.
Since we are a distinct fund emphasizing Life Science and Deep Tech. We typically assist in resolving every concern that a start-up raises throughout the incubation and acceleration programs. For example, we can assist start-ups who have intellectual property (IP) but lack security knowledge. When it comes to acceleration, we pay attention to both the concept and its scientific confirmation of concept. We also value it when a startup clearly understands its target market and its own objectives for growth.
Prior to beginning engagement with new start-ups, we always conduct due diligence and identify distinct red flags. If the founders are willing to take on the challenge of improvement, we are eager to address them.
What are the most valuable skills that selected startups can develop thanks to your program?
We take an active role in helping founders and hence run both incubation and acceleration programs (with funding) to funnel down the best entrepreneurs to our investment at Seed rounds. These programs can help with different KPIs - including, but not limited to additional fundraising, sourcing co-founders and talent, IP protection, tech transfer deals, POC and validation experiments, complex sales support, or hybrid financing. Most of our partners are also entrepreneurs, so we help where we can. We also organize workshops on various themes to help founders of start-ups to gain entrepreneurship skills essential for leading a business like pitch preparation and development, strategy planning, product selling, creativity, team management and etc.
How does your accelerator support portfolio companies during and after the program?
Supporting our start-ups is one of the most important duties of ours. We put a lot of effort into getting to know each startup founder who takes part in our programs. We take time to understand their goals and mission they set for themselves. With the help of one-on-one meetings with a number of our founders, we dive down into understanding the more narrow field of deep tech or life science they are working on, we build trust and relationships that allow us to reveal the true abilities and potential of our founders. Gaining these relationships and trust enables us to consult start-ups in developing their KPIs in accordance with their operations and industry.
A lot of our founders join us with STEM backgrounds. Due to this we do not focus on teaching them what they already know, because they bring their ideas and knowledge to it with themselves. During our programs, we organize a lot of workshops for founders to discover the essential entrepreneurial knowledge of business management, sales, marketing, team management, and nearly everything else that's required to run a successful company and get off to a head start on their start-up journey.
In addition to what is mentioned above, part of our focus goes to network-building opportunities for our founders whether it is with people who could become their biggest supporters, customers, investors, business partners or fellow entrepreneurs from our own community. We encourage to get to know each other, and share their own experiences. We believe we can learn a lot from each other situations or even prevent something similar from happening. Also, it is always great to have people in your life that understand your situation.
What are the best-performing companies in your portfolio?
Our portfolio encompasses a diverse array of businesses across multiple deep tech and life science competency areas. Despite our recent first investments, we hold optimistic expectations for each team carefully selected through a rigorous evaluation of skills, dedication, and aspirations. It would be premature to designate specific businesses as 'best-performing' at this stage, as their ultimate success will be determined over time. We take pride in supporting and collaborating with each team, firmly believing in the significant potential for returns with every investment. We eagerly anticipate the continued growth and development of our portfolio in the forthcoming years.
What key lessons have you learned from projects that didn’t work out the way you expected?
Every time a new group of start-ups enrolls in our program, we learn new things, acquire new experiences, and encounter scenarios we have never encountered before. As a result, we can now advise our start-ups on a greater variety of issues and provide them with more guidance than in the past. We teach our startup founders to test ideas by iterating on each project; this way, both we and they can learn from each other. incorporating lessons learned from past cycles into current ones and expanding our startup advice list. The most crucial lesson we continually learn with each new program is that you should never give up, always do your hardest, seek assistance when needed, look for answers, and accept setbacks because they are a necessary part of growth.
Why, in your opinion, accelerators are becoming more popular nowadays?
Startup acceleration programs are becoming more popular as a result of the global boom in entrepreneurial activity and growing demand for resources, mentorship, and support.
Us and our competitors'/colleagues' programs provide resources such as financing, mentorship, and networking opportunities to businesses and help to gain entrepreneurship skills. Also, we provide a hands-on learning environment, allowing companies to gain practical business insights.
Accelerators are intended to shorten the time it takes companies to reach critical milestones, ensuring time efficiency in competitive marketplaces. We and our competitors/colleagues provide industry-specific expertise and coaching to specific sectors and verticals. Lastly, one of the main contributors to the popularity is the success of start-ups that participated in incubation and acceleration programs and shared their positive experiences with others.
What are the hottest markets you currently look at as an accelerator and where do you see the biggest hype?
I’m not sure if investing based on hype is a smart idea, but maybe for some people - that’s not our mindset. Our Partners already were involved in Deep Tech initiatives (we called them ‘companies with an edge’) years before Deep Tech became a hashtag in the European investment scene. At the end of the day venture investing is about getting into a deal where a team is building something of fundamental value solving a meaningful and sufficiently larger problem in the market. Rather than look at ‘hot’ markets or ‘biggest hype’, we prefer to ignore the popularity contests and focus on real value, that’s where we like to invest. We believe Deep Tech, companies with a fundamental Scientific or Advanced Engineering edge, applied to significant market problems and opportunities with strategic, committed Founders is what makes for a valuable venture opportunity.
Do you have any predictions about the key trends that will shape the European accelerator scene in the near future?
Anyone who is focusing on predicting the future is, at best, only making a guess. It is better to focus on why Accelerators should exist in the first place: to enable and foster innovation, speeding up their progress into the market whether that means growth or other aspects of company building enabling teams to make a bigger impact. We look for innovations that would make their future compelling and inspiring. We focus on this ‘why’, and seek to participate in opportunities and innovations that Founders show us based on their competence and vision for the future they’re creating. We don’t believe we know the future, but we do know what will make it inspiring when we see it, we seek to back that, and the teams making that future possible. We work closely with founders to enable them with the skills and knowledge that they tell us they need to lead their businesses to achieve their mission. Our focus is on things that are in front of us: the needs of the teams building a future we can be excited about.
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