Bae Accelerator

Bae Accelerator is a three month programme to help ambitious founders scale rapidly leveraging the power of our community.

The goal is to give you the insight and network to build the momentum to raise your first venture capital round within 6 months of the programme end.

Bae HQ is the community of high-growth Asian-Heritage founders & investors in the UK.

No fee. No equity taken. No direct capital.

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Who is this for?

• Startup must be headquartered in the United Kingdom.
• At least one founder must self-identify as being of Asian heritage.
• All founders must be coachable, open to feedback and respectful at all times.
• Teams must be working on their startup full-time for the duration of the programme.
• The core product must be tech-enabled (sector-agnostic) with atleast an MVP ready.
• Ambition must be to build a venture scale company and close first venture fundraising round by end of the year.
• Contact time is 2-3 hours per week with fully remote available except for mandatory attendance at the June 24th Demo Day in London.

If you are too early for this programme, consider our IncuBaetor instead.

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What you get

• Dedicated one-on-one sessions with Bae HQ team to focus on your greatest needs. (Weekly)
• Off-record firesides with scaled founders with the raw reality of dealing with early-stage problems. (Weekly)
• Clinics led by VCs to give direct and constructive feedback on investment readiness. (Weekly)
• Access to Joelson as lawyers-in-residence. (Ad-hoc)
• Mentor sessions specific to your current challenges (Ad-hoc)
• Exposure through Bae HQ’s media channels (Ad-hoc)
• Pitch to a room full of investors at our demo day.
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Weekly Themes

Each week we will focus on a different key area important to your future and investor interest:

1. Vision & Alignment
2. Customer Obsession
3. Founder-Problem Fit
4. Crafting Unique Strategy
5. Operating Leverage & Execution Speed with AI
6. Customer acquisition & GTM
7. Business Model & Financials
8. Traction, Metrics & Investor Readiness
9. Roadmap & Execution
10. Fundraising strategy
11. Storytelling & Presenting

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Demo Day

Hosted at Google KX, the cohort will pitch their startups to a carefully curated audience to complete the programme.

This will include VCs, family offices, angel investors alongside presenters and mentors from the accelerator.

We will publicise this event widely and ease follow ups between founders and investors.

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Application Process

We are assessing your founding team above all else. Your past, your execution so far and your traction are all reflections on you and how you execute.

There are only two steps to the application process:

Written Application

The first stage is a simple online application with questions that shouldn’t be difficult to answer if you are clear in your own mind.

The planned application questions are here - you can prepare your answers in advance while waiting for applications to open. While you can’t ask us to look over your application in advance (that’s cheating!), we recommend you ask others to give you feedback.

At least three people will look at every application which will be scored individually and those with the highest averages will be taken to the next stage.

The five scoring areas are: Team Quality, Problem Potential, Solution Differentiation, Traction & Programme Alignment.

Interview 

The second stage will be a 15-20 minute virtual interview with a single representative from Bae HQ. This is your chance to boost your overall scores.

We’ll expect all founders of your startup to be in the interview so we can make an accurate assessment.

Expect the same style of questions you’d receive from an investor with a focus on any information gaps, concerns and weaknesses in your application. An interview guide will be sent to candidates after submitting their online application.

Final decision will be made by committee with recordings of interviews used to assess borderline cases.