Caitlin Reimers Brumme, Acting CEO at MassChallenge, joins ChedHER to discuss how the accelerator is supporting founders that are disrupting the status quo in high impact, emerging categories like fintech and health-tech to even space commercialization.

chedHER

How This Startup Accelerator is Fueling Founders that are Disrupting the Status Quo

K Mass challenges the first of its kind startup accelerator. What's your mission and how do you support entrepreneurs, First of all Alicia, thank you so much for having me here this morning. We're really excited to be here. As you mentioned, you're right, we are a first of its kind startup accelerator and launched uh, 10 years ago alongside YC and techstars and have been doing this work ever since. But there's one big difference. We're a nonprofit, we're on a mission to build a global network of innovators solving really complex and hard challenges were best known for the accelerators that we run around the world, which today support almost 500 entrepreneurs and we do it by connecting them to the knowledge, the networks and capital that we know entrepreneurs need to launch and grow, but that are not available for so many founders, a few unique characteristics of our work if, if you don't mind. Uh, one is, we take no equity from the startups we support This means that we require no financial obligation or commitment from startups in order to access the resources that we provide. And second is we believe in and we do our work through a community powered approach. This means we leverage a decentralized community of thousands of experts who lend their expertise and their knowledge to help us identify select and accelerate these startups and provide community for their, for their long duration. At that point, you guys have accelerated over 3000 startups across the globe. Can you tell us a little bit about some of these startups that you've worked with and the success these companies have seen. Sure, I mean nothing more fun for me than to talk about the entrepreneurs that that we're supporting. I'll start with. You know, we have to applaud our unicorns and R. I. P. O. Founders and I know audiences are always keen to hear about the high flyers we're very proud of of companies like highly on one of the first movers in electric trucking squeezed biotech, a biotech company focused on developing therapies for rare cancers and bit So the second ever unicorn in Mexico. And I think, you know, these companies are are bound by the characteristic that they're tackling something complex and are likely to be highly disruptive and transformative. Uh you know, I also wanna wanna pause and and just maybe call in a couple of the founders that are still on that long journey, but they're doing really exciting, important work as well. Uh Nicole Wagner at lamb division, for example, is developing a first of its kind retinol artificial retina, I should say, to restore vision for patients and she's doing this. It's one of my favorite stories. She's doing this in partnership with the International Space Station National Lab and Nasa in order to be able to advance the science and eventually potentially produce the retina in space to achieve the quality that's required to have the impact. She's looking for The founder you mentioned there obviously one of many women founders that you guys are backing. Right? I mean 56% of the startup finalists that mass challenges, worked with last year there at least one female and non binary founder kind of in their composition and that's for 2021 alone when it comes to founders. What exactly do you guys look for? So at the highest level we're looking for high impact, high potential founders. So this means founders that are likely to have a transformative impact on the problem that they're solving and have built a case to believe that they can actually have that impact. As I mentioned again, what's what we think is unique and uh, and also what we think contributes to the diversity of our cohorts is that it's not mass challenge staff sitting in a room using our individual expertise, but rather we mobilize diverse perspectives of individuals around the world. Uh, executives, entrepreneurs, former investors, technical specialists to share their collective wisdom and input to help us identify entrepreneurs that that meet that high impact, high potential criteria. And as I mentioned, we have reason to believe that that crowd driven approach is a key contributor to the diversity of our cohort. What impact have you had or has mass impact or the company had in 2022. And what industries are you watching closely this year? Yeah, this is exciting year. We think we are off to the races with the goal of getting up to support closer to 600 startups, uh, maybe three exciting developments since the beginning of the year. I'll highlight uh you know, one is we've been working closely with H H. S. Health and human services to launch and run pandemic X. Really focused on supporting companies in digital health tackling health equity. Uh second is we just launched a second program with IBM to get historically underrepresented founders, including female founders, access to unique expertise and mentorship around artificial intelligence. I knew your prior guest was talking about how important it is for us to support female entrepreneurs participate in and lead these next generation categories. And last, as we launched in Dallas and we're really excited about that. We have to shout out our partners at Lyda Hill philanthropies who believe that science is the future and want entrepreneurs to be part of that on the categories were watching, we're excited about the conversation that happening and that that seems to be growing around a real economy entrepreneurship. So these are entrepreneurs that are tackling some of the safe, physical, complex challenges that we face uh you know, in in our realm around our our sector big bets, certainly sustainable food systems, climate tech, including uh sustainable industrial manufacturing and safety and security and fintech and digital health have been key parts of our portfolio for years continue to be extraordinary areas for innovation and we're cheering on those companies who are taking a critical new emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, decentralized finance Blockchain and using it and pointing it at issues of access, affordability and equity. So we're hoping that we're gonna see some breakthroughs in the next couple of years there. We're hoping the same for you guys, really appreciate your time and your insight, kate rumors, broom acting ceo at mass challenge.