New Startup Accelerator Advise.me Increases Seed Funding, Adds 5 More To Its Team

One week after its launch, new startup accelerator and incubator Advise.me has received over 200 applications for its “Global Startup Initiative,” a program that encourages companies from all parts of the world to apply. Several of those entrants are “pretty compelling,” Solomon Engel, Advise.me Founder and CEO tells us. That may be one of the reasons why the program is now increasing the funding possibilities for its participants.

Initially, the program was touting seed funding for startups as either $6,000 to $7,000 per founder, or up to $25,000 in total. However, as of now, that cap is being removed. Some startups may see “potentially much larger” seed and series rounds from its investment partners and institutions, Advise.me says. The amount of funding will be determined by the investors.

Advise.me’s program is offering a slightly different take on startup advising than some of the others in the space. Instead of a classroom approach, each startup receives one-on-one support from a team of 2 to 7 industry experts who have experience that’s relevant to the startup they’re paired with. That not only improves the quality of the advice the team can give, but the advisors can also help startups by connecting founders to the appropriate industry contracts.

In addition, the team will go beyond advisory duties and get actively involved with different areas of the business, including helping their startups get media exposure through the team’s contacts, working on product development, helping form strategic partnerships and more. Explains Advise.me, in its system, this hands-on approach makes the team much more vested in the company they’re supporting.

Startups also receive $2,000 per month in Media Temple or RackSpace hosting for a year, 3 months of office space (rent and utility free), VIP invites to Advise.me events and meetups and the chance to demo to investors, partners and media.

Advise.me’s team already included an impressive group of advisors, with folks from Google, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, EA, Sencha, Xero, Sega, Apple, Playdom, Yahoo, Nokia, AOL and several other big-name companies on board.

It’s now adding six more to advisors to the list: Brenden Mulligan, Entrepreneur & Founder of Onesheet, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, VP of Product at SimpleGeo, Kurt Wilms, Founder and CEO at fflick (acquired by Google), Philip Fierlinger, Co-founder & Head of Design at Xero, Nitin Gupta, VP, Business Development at Retailigence Corporation and Bruce Watermann, SVP Print Operations at Blurb.

More details on Advise.me’s Global Startup Initiative are here.