Lakeshore Advantage
announced this week that three startup technology companies were
awarded $20,000 each in pre-seed funding as winners of the inaugural Momentum initiative.
The initiative, a combined effort of Lakeshore Advantage and Grand
Rapids-based Windquest Group, focuses on college age entrepreneurs and
aims to spur innovation in the technology sector along West Michigan's
lakeshore.
In addition to funding, the winners
will participate in a 12-week intensive entrepreneur training program
of workshops, coaching, speaker presentations and networking, and will
have incubator space in the Lakeshore Advantage Business Garden,
Zeeland. The program also provides one-on-one mentoring from members of
the technology community and pro-bono legal and financial services, and
business valuation counseling.
The winners are:
-
Revetto – A social network and social media aggregator which enables communication between a variety of social platforms.
-
Downstreams - Aggregates people’s
online stories and streams (from blogs to tweets to pictures on Flickr)
and returns the collected data.
-
Public Collections - Provides an online outlet for small companies to collect unpaid invoices.
"The $20,000 is meant to cover living
expenses for the summer and help them develop their beta applications,"
says Amanda Chocko, Lakeshore Advantage's director of entrepreneurial
development. "They will have milestones they have to meet and the
investments will be dispersed when they meet the milestones."
The students will live in Hope College's downtown Holland housing for the duration of the program.
At the close of the program, an
Investor's Day will provide the winners with a chance to pitch their
ideas to second-round investors.
In all, Momentum attracted 28 applications from students attending Hope College, Davenport University, Kendall College of Art and Design, Calvin College, Grand Valley State University, Michigan State University, University of Michigan, Michigan Tech, ITT Technical Institute, and Polytechnic Institute of NYU.
Source: Amanda Chocko, Lakeshore Advantage
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Deborah Johnson Wood is development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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