A new business collaboration is bringing startup expertise and funding to cybersecurity companies.
In a press conference held Tuesday, San Antonio, Texas-based company Geekdom announced that it is partnering with gener8tor, a nationally ranked accelerator company based in Wisconsin, to launch a program to help cybersecurity companies develop products for the market.
The 12-week program will launch in San Antonio in the summer of 2022. Within the first year of its launch, five startup companies will be selected to complete the program and receive an investment of $100,000 each.
A further ten companies are slated to receive accelerator investment funding via the program in 2023.
“I am beyond excited about what’s happening,” said San Antonio’s mayor, Ron Nirenberg.
“Now we have gener8tor providing the fuel for the startup community to continue to catalyze cybersecurity in San Antonio. The excitement is real.”
Geekdom provides a co-working space located in downtown San Antonio along with resources and opportunities to help create and develop businesses.
“We are part of the transformation that is occurring right as we watch,” said Graham Weston, who founded Geekdom and the web-hosting and cloud-computing company Rackspace Technology.
He added: “Every single day, we need to be working on building innovation in the city, and on having ideas fertilized, encouraged, accelerated.”
Troy Vosseller, the co-founder of gener8tor, said that the accelerator aimed to disrupt the current trend in which venture capital money is concentrated in California, New York, and Massachusetts.
“Our focus is on these secondary markets outside of Silicon Valley,” said Vosseller, “The San Antonio community is doubling down on its strengths. Cybersecurity, with the assets that exist here, is exactly the smart strategy.”
The program will be open to startups located in America and abroad.
“We anticipate hundreds of applicants, from which we’ll narrow that down to the top five,” said Vosseller.
“They’ll be spending three months here, during which time we’re connecting them with mentors, customers, corporate partners, the cybersecurity assets that exist here as well as investors.”
He said the program will explore how to help the selected companies “relocate and have a significant presence here in San Antonio for the long term.”
