On Wednesday 18th November at 6pm (GMT) Birmingham Enterprise Community held its Demo Day for the FORWARD Accelerator’s F2 cohort, the second cohort of the FORWARD Accelerator. This was the first ever FORWARD Demo Day with the one for the first FORWARD cohort being cancelled due to the COVID-19 outbreak back in March 2020.
The F2 cohort began their FORWARD journey back in April when the programme began. Over the course of the past 6 months the 8 businesses that make up the cohort have received intensive support designed to help the ventures grow and access opportunities. This support consisted of expert-led workshops, access to a mentor pool of 30 international mentors, weekly 1-to-1 coaching, workspace at our Alpha Works home, support to help explore opportunities such as partnerships, R&D projects and funding, advance tracking and diagnostic tools, access to resources from BEC partners such as IBM, Google & Hubspot and finally the benefits that come from interacting with their fellow entrepreneurs as part of one of the fastest growing entrepreneurial communities in Europe.
The businesses on the programme came from not only the UK but saw representation from the USA, Italy, Costa Rica & Venezuela. In fact 50% of the cohort were international businesses. We also saw one of the companies, Sibo, relocate to Birmingham in September 2020 and several of the others are working towards establishing a presence within the region. You can check out the awesome companies that make up the FORWARD F2 cohort here.
At Demo Day, we saw the businesses pitch to a crowd of investors, mentors, entrepreneurs (both new and experienced), potential clients and other stakeholders who could open up further business development opportunities. After these pitches the businesses then got to talk with attendees through a virtual networking session. Attendees of the Demo Day have already been in touch with several of the companies to explore opportunities and have reported their delight at the quality of the pitches on display at Demo Day.
You can check out the recording of Demo Day for yourself here. Their FORWARD journey may be over but these businesses will stay part of BEC as programme alumni.
We are now on the search for the next cohort of businesses for our FORWARD Accelerator to make up our F3 cohort which will start in January 2021. We are seeking high growth startups & scaleups from anywhere in the world, from any sector to receive support to help them grow further. Find out more here and please get in touch with us if you have any questions about FORWARD.
