According to CB Insights 70 percent of tech companies fail around 20 months after first raising financing. Some of the most frequent reasons for failure are a lack of product-market fit, flawed business models or issues within the team. This data suggests that startups need more than just financing to grow and succeed. The real value a VC brings to the table lies beyond the capital (see article on TechCrunch, “Capital is a commodity” written by our Partner and CIO Charlie Graham-Brown).

Therefore, there has been a boom in portfolio support (also known as “platform”). A VC platform can add value in multiple ways: network access, fundraising support, talent recruitment, sales, technical knowhow, and the list goes on with both common and rarer startup needs. Founder should find the right fit for their needs.

At Seedstars International Ventures we focus on pre-seed and seed stage investments, which gives us the opportunity to support ventures in our portfolio in a variety of ways. Furthermore, our expertise in emerging and frontier markets brings unique value to the equation.

Being part of the Seedstars portfolio means more than just capital, ventures will get access to our value creation platform (see image below).

Growth: Scale sustainably

Being part of the Seedstars International Ventures portfolio means hands-on support in growth. Through the 3-month long Seedstars Growth Track, the entire team will be involved to learn how to implement growth methodologies with a dedicated growth mentor, webinars, fireside chats, and proprietary tools and frameworks. Startups in the cohort are also encouraged to meet their portfolio peers from adjoining sectors and regions to share knowledge and how they have overcome similar challenges.

“ Seedstars growth track has been super helpful in defining our growth strategy, Dastgyr has been able to grow 50% month on month since we participated in the 3-month track and the best part of the program is the experiment methodology.”
- Zohaib Ali, Co-founder of Dastgyr (Pakistan)

Find out more about our Growth offer here

Fundraising: Raise capital

Our team at Seedstars helps startups fundraise by designing the right fundraising strategy, reviewing all necessary documentation (data room, pitch deck, cap table, etc) and putting them in front of the world's top venture capital investors. Our main edge here is our global network. While we know all top local funds, we also have deep relationships with US, European and global investors.

“One of my major reasons to take investment from Seedstars was because of the great references I received from other teams on their fundraising support. Seedstars not only acted as a sounding board but also opened up doors to some of our larger investors to come in.”
- Asif Khan, CEO of Ando Foods (Kenya)

Network: Connect everywhere

The companies get access to a network of over 250,000 stakeholders in +90 countries which they can leverage for establishing partnerships, recruiting talent, as well as finding mentors, investors, and like-minded entrepreneurs.

“The Seedstars growth track and network have been invaluable to Truck Lagbe’s journey. The mentors provided significant guidance and direction for our key management. Post-program, the Seedstars team continued to be engaged, and supported us by making relevant introductions to investors in their network.”
- Ravid Chowdhury, Board Director of TruckLagbe (Bangladesh)

Community: Peer Support

We’ll help you connect with like-minded entrepreneurs. Our portfolio counts +70 companies, which enables us to connect ventures to peers who have the same challenges or are working on similar solutions. It opens a great opportunity of P2P partnerships across the globe. As an example, two of our portfolio companies Pezesha and ZUMI built a partnership:

“At Pezesha we take a collaborative approach in enabling affordable working capital across value chains. Today, we warmly welcome our newest partner Zumi as we join hands to scale the retail supply chain in Kenya”
- Hilda Moraa, Founder & CEO, Pezesha (Africa)

Talent: Hire talent

Apart from support in hiring the best talents courtesy of our huge global network, we support startups by reviewing their company culture, for example, drafting their core values upon need. Seedstars has 8+ years of experience in managing remote and diverse teams across 5 regions, so by walking the talk we are openly sharing all the best practices of building strong teams.

“In our case, the Seedstars Value Creation Platform not only showed us the way to sustainable growth through an intensive course on growth methodology but also helped us to create our in-house growth team from scratch. How? In many ways; just to give an example, they introduced us to our actual Head of Growth!”
- Martín Salassa, Co-founder & CEO of Cárbula (Colombia)

PR: Stand out

In a sea of startups, standing out and spreading the word is a challenge. Through Seedstars’ help, startups will be coached and supported in their media efforts. The team is always ready to help build a press release, craft a pitch and reach out to its extensive media network. We aim to give the spotlight to our startups so keep an eye out for them in the media.

“The accompaniment of Seedstars in Public Relations has been of great value to us: they connected us with widely recognized media that might be interested in telling our story, helped us to build an interesting narrative, with dedicated and in-depth reviews, and increased visibility of our experimentation process and the positive results we’ve achieved. Different people from their team were involved in moments of the process and guided us step by step to obtain publications in the media of interest to us.”
- Sebastian Henao, CEO of Globalwork (Colombia)

Perks: Save money

Finally, startups can save up to 200,000 USD with free or discounted services provided by partner companies such as AWS, Hubspot, Segment, Xero and others. We always strive to build more partnerships with the most popular tool providers that are widely used by our portfolio companies. Our recent partnerships for discounts were: Notion, Hunter.io, Hotjar, Freshworks, etc.

“Seedstars’ network of tools and perks is super helpful. We got connected to great deals for various apps which upgraded our software and ops in efficiency and productivity.”
- Amiel Herrera, Founder & CEO at MedCheck (Philippines)

If you are a startup interested in becoming part of the #SeedstarsPortfolio, submit your pitch here. If you want to join our network as an investor or mentor please follow the dedicated links.

Submit your pitch to Seedstars International Ventures.