The theme for this year’s StartupYard, the Prague-based European accelerator program now headed-up by serial entrepreneur Cedric Maloux, is ‘Data, Search and Analytics’. Adding weight to this proposition, it’s announcing a partnership with Business Intelligence platform GoodData that will see the next StartupYard cohort get free and early access to GoodData’s platform and new developer tools, along with direct support from the San Francisco headquartered company’s R&D teams based in Prague and Brno.
Run out of co-working space TechSquare in Prague, Czech Republic, like most accelerators in Europe these days, StartupYard is modelled on Y Combinator/Techstars and consists of a 12 week bootcamp-style mentoring program, culminating in a Demo Day in front of potential investors from the European angel/VC community. It offers two sets of terms: a €10,000 Euro investment in return for ten percent equity, or no investment in return for five percent equity.
Both options include of host of other perks, including three months accommodation in Prague, and return flights from anywhere in Europe. Plus, of course, the much talked up mentoring. “If we find good teams I want to make sure they can participate in the program and coming to Prague should not be an issue,” StartupYard CEO Cedric Maloux tells TechCrunch.
Breaking this year’s theme down a bit further (applications are still open), StartupYard specifically mentions that it’s looking for startups focusing on Semantic Search, Real-Time Data Analysis, Prediction Algorithms, Cryptography, and Web Mining. Six teams will be selected in total.
Returning to the partnership with GoodData, in a blog post, Jaroslav Gergic, VP Operations and R&D at GoodData, says that StartupYard teams will get early access to the forthcoming Data Discovery SDK, Data Storage Service and GoodData Runtime Environment, which have been in development throughout 2013 and will be made generally available later in 2014.
Our partnership with StartupYard will allow the accelerator companies to leverage these cutting edge technologies to deliver their innovative solutions on top of GoodData even before they become publicly available. The StartupYard partnership will benefit from shared location. StartupYard is based in Prague, Czech Republic, GoodData have R&D in Prague and Brno, Czech Republic. The accelerator companies will have access to GoodData engineers and architects to assist them in developing their solutions on the GoodData platform. The location gives us the ability to tap and get inspired by the best European talent in the heart of Europe and we believe this will change the world of Data and Analytics.
Also noteworthy is that StartupYard has already partnered with Seznam.cz, which can be thought of as the Google of Czech Republic. It’s partly opened its full text search to teams so that they can develop things like media monitoring, and predictive marketing tools.
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