Why Are We Making Our Flagship Acceleration Program Remote-First

We always thrived to address the needs of first-time founders all over the world. The Coronavirus outbreak triggered us to move the program entirely to cyberspace, making it possible for any entrepreneur to participate, regardless of where you’re based!

At ReaktorX, we have received 700+ early-stage startup applications and accelerated more than 60 startups during the last 3 years. Half of these startups are still live and kicking and half of that half raised funding — 100k EUR was the average ticket. Often, the first funding came from the network of the lead mentor or the ReaktorX team.

While running the program, we had a number of challenges. Some of the amazing founders that we wanted to accept couldn’t make it to Warsaw for ten weeks. Some had children or a corporate job and wanted to work on their projects outside of our workshop schedule. There was one more thing — founders are often limited to the market of their origin, and not thinking to go global with the business. Making the program really international, makes it easier for the founders to exchange their experiences and can open their minds to new market possibilities.

Still we were able to work with some of the most exciting early stage startups in the region like enkids — marketplace for English teachers and kids willing to learn online, Renderro — cloud solutions for modern digital content creation, Lofty — which helps you fit out your home without the pain, and Fabriline — marketplace to manage procurement processes within the company.
We’ve hosted teams from Kosovo, Iran, Korea, Belarus, Ukraine, France, Portugal and other countries, we also feature a bunch of awesome international mentors like Rudradeb Mitra or Sargheve Sukumaran, but the space and time limitation was always there. But not anymore!

New incredible mentors!

Mentoring has always been the number one value as seen by ReaktorX alumni founders. Now we are able to engage the best mentors from not just Warsaw, but all over the world — including Silicon Valley. Some of the experts joining us in batch 7 are:

• Uldis Leiterts, co-founder at Infogram (sold to Prezi), serial founder and designer from Latvia.
• David Bizer who worked with Marc Andreessen at Netscape and was the first Google recruiter in Europe
• Tom Karwatka — founder and CEO at Divante, one of the biggest ecommerce shops in Central and Eastern Europe.
• Łukasz Adziński — co-founder of Nasza Klasa (sold to Naspers), once the biggest social networking platform in CEE, now CEO at Picadilla — a free to play game development studio based in Wrocław.
• Paweł Kopiński — ex Head of PR & Marketing at Techland, responsible for the success of Dying Light, one of the top grossing premium games, currently co-founder at Superbright, a VR gaming studio that cooperates with Google, Oculus and Sony.
• Magda Posłuszny — investor at Speedinvest, the biggest early stage VC European VC.
• Hussein Kanji — investor at Hoxton Ventures, London-based venture capital fund investing across Europe (startup portfolio includes Deliveroo and Babylon Health)

Remote acceleration — Four benefits for startups

No need to come to Warsaw. We will bring all the perks of a strong business community to you, wherever you are based.

No need to quit your job to join the program. Even though the program is extremely time-consuming and we encourage you to focus entirely on building your product and validating your business idea, thanks to the bigger flexibility of joining the classes and mentoring sessions remotely you can now combine working on the startup and your daily life.

You are probably staying at home anyways. Have you been thinking about this startup idea for a long time already? Your corporation sent you home for remote work? It is the perfect timing to kick-off your project, to keep you busy while staying at home for a while due to the pandemic.

Getting funded in Poland. This is the best time ever to launch a startup in Poland and get involved in its startup ecosystem. Why? Simply because there is a lot of funding opportunities for startups — Polish Development Fund allocated the budget of PLN 2.8 billion, which within five years will be invested by venture capital funds or business angel groups supporting startups at various stages of development. Top foregin investors also took notice and have set up funds in Poland including Pitango from Israel and Sunfish (ex Rocket Internet) from Germany. Billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper declared a “golden age” for Eastern European tech and got involved with OTB Ventures. Paul Bragiel, associated with projects such as Uber, Stripe, Pokemon Go and Zappos, invested in SMOK Ventures — ReaktorX partner.

How can I apply?

If you’ve had this disruptive business idea for a while but did not do much about it — now is the time to act and ReaktorX is here to help! Apply at reaktorx.com — simply fill in the application form. Deadline? ASAP — we accept the best ideas as they come. The start of the program is 20th of April 2020.

Once you are accepted, you will be matched with your own private mentor who will help you develop your product on a weekly basis. Besides mentoring sessions with your own mentor, you will also get a chance to talk to other international mentors and network with like-minded entrepreneurs. You’ll get the knowledge you need through a series of online workshops organised twice a week. At the end of the program all the startups get a chance to pitch their ideas to top regional VCs like SMOK, Pitango, MOC, Sunfish, Inovo and others who are part of our network during the demo day.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity and sign up now! We trust that it will prove to be an inspiring showcase of how digital technologies can help us use this difficult times to build something good for the world or at least realize your plans as an entrepreneur!