You’ve decided to launch your startup at an incubator, hoping to get a jump on fundraising. If you followed the wisdom of the crowd, you’d probably try to get your startup accepted into a Silicon Valley accelerator, like Y Combinator. There’s gold in them thar hills.
In 2011, 198 tech startups around the nation were faced with this decision. We’ve been following this Class of 2011 to find out how they fared in accomplishing the one thing almost all want – follow-on funding.
The startups in Boston/Cambridge Class had an amazing 2012, nabbing $86,954,881. (See Part 1.) But would they have been more successful if they had launched at an incubator in another city?
We use data from Seed-DB which has been collecting information on 145 seed accelerators and their companies. Startup databases like this are notoriously incomplete. So we had to search individual companies to plug gaps in financings reported.
To identify the top performing programs, we sorted the data by success rate, average and median raised. Then we sorted the programs by the region in which they are located. Finally, we totaled the city’s rank for each metric: success rate, average and median raised.
Here are the results:
#1 Boston/Cambridge (44 co.)
#1 New York City (23 co.)
#2 Los Angeles (10 co.)
#3 Seattle/Portland (20 co.)
#4 Chicago (10 co.)
#5 Silicon Valley (57 co.)
#6 London (20 co.)
#7 Philadelphia (14 co.)
Looks like the founders who chose the East Coast had greater success than the West Coast.
Next, in Part 3, we’ll compare the Classes of 2011 by incubator, not location.