WINSTON-SALEM – Flywheel, a coworking community has opened a third facility in Concord, north of Charlotte, and will operates an expanded Flywheel New Venture Accelerator Program to serve early-stage startups across central North Carolina and the South Carolina upstate region.
The organization’s expanded accelerator program will accept startups on four different tracts. Flywheel also reported a fourfold expansion of the corollary investment funds, said cofounder Peter Marsh, who is an administrative member of the New Venture LLCs.
“Our ability to replicate the New Ventures program as we expand our network of innovation centers along the I-85 corridor is based on the success of the program over its first five years,” said Marsh. “As we expand geographically, the regions we serve all find that access to inception- and early-stage capital fills a gap in the entrepreneurship ecosystems and helps stimulate formation and attraction of scalable technology companies.”
The tracks include a health, wellness, and nutrition track, which will be conducted through a partnership with the North Carolina Research Center in Kannapolis and the North Carolina Food Innovation Lab and an agricultural technology track, based out of Greenworks in Lexington, N.C., where a Flywheel coworking center will open in 2022, through a partnership with SouthXCapital and other anchor tenants of the space to deliver the accelerator.
The tracks also include the “Come Up Accelerator,” through a partnership with Winston-Salem-based HUSTLE, for black and brown entrepreneurs, said Marsh. The final track is focused on business-to-business software companes.
The accelerators will run from August 3 through Demo Days on October 28-29. Companies accepted into the program also enjoy a residency at Flywheel innovation centers during the 13-week program and for 3 months following.
This is the sixth year of the New Ventures Accelerator program, which has spun out a portfolio of 21 companies across five cohorts starting in 2016 that together have raised more than $15 million in new financing and created more than 100 jobs.
