Fullstack Academy to Start Funding Incubator
(Photo: Wikimedia, Creative Commons)
Fullstack Academy, one of the top coding bootcamps in the United States, has announced the creation of Fullstack Fund, a new initiative to invest in promising startups created by alumni of the program.
Fullstack Academy CEO David Yang said that the New York-based startup, which was originally launched in 2013, will invest from its own balance sheet in up to eight companies per year in either pre-seed or seed-stage deals. Terms and capital commitments will be decided upon as each situation comes up.
“Students who complete our software engineering program go on to work for great companies like Google and Amazon, but some have opted for the entrepreneurial startup environment,” said David Yang, CEO and co-founder of Fullstack Academy. “So we asked ourselves — how can we better support alumni with a strong entrepreneurial slant? The Fullstack Fund will empower some of the amazing teams and products that are coming out of our school.”
In order to qualify, startups are required to include at least one cofounder who is a graduate of the 13-week coding bootcamp program Javascript intensive, writes Lora Kolodny for TechCrunch.
Yang said, “This a great way for us to signal to our students that we believe in you. I hear ‘I want to build a company one day,’ all the time. We’re saying one day should be now, now that you have the technical skills you need.”
The model of Fullstack Fund is set to follow the Fellowship Program in Y Combinator. The company will offer $ 20,000 in seed capital, as well as a co-working space in New York City at its campus and mentorship in several areas, including product design and growth hacking.
Each qualifying startup will work full-time for eight weeks on the NYC Fullstack Academy campus and will be eligible to qualify for another round of funding after the program. This is accomplished by being accepted into a top accelerator like Y Combinator, raising an angel round, or determining how to bootstrap its growth. The same terms will be used as is used in the Fellowship Program, with Fullstack taking 1.5% equity in a convertible note.
The launch of the fund makes Fullstack the first elite coding to school to offer students a direct path for non-technical founders to learn to write code, build their product while in school, and also get seed funding upon graduation.
In total, 300 students graduated from Fullstack Academy last year. The company expects to have 450 graduate in 2016. In addition, expansions are taking place next month from New York to Chicago as the company recently acquired The Starter League there earlier in the year.
Coursereport, a ratings and reviews site for coding bootcamps, shows Fullstack Academy holding a five-star rating with 37 reviews.
The company has not released information pertaining to admissions, completion rates, job placement, or other data that other bootcamps disclose to third parties.
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