Springboard

500 Labs, formerly known as 500 Startups, is a global venture capital firm and startup accelerator established in 2010 and headquartered in Mountain View, California. The firm focuses on seed and early-stage investments across a wide range of sectors, including technology, financial services, biotech, and various emerging markets. It aims to support small and medium-sized startups through funding, mentorship, and a structured four-month accelerator program. 500 Labs invests between $0.05 million and $1 million for equity stakes of 5 to 10 percent in companies with monthly revenues of at least $100,000 and valuations between $1.54 million and $7.69 million. The firm has a strong emphasis on diversity, actively seeking to invest in companies led by minority founders. With a global footprint, 500 Labs operates in regions such as the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and has supported over 2,200 startups since its inception. It also contributes to building startup ecosystems through educational initiatives and global partnerships.

5minutes empowers creative professionals to build websites optimized for revenue in 5 minutes or less. 5minutes is a design led, all-in-one platform for creative professionals that helps them to get a full-fledged web presence: all sites are optimized to look good on mobile devices and to be indexed and ranked by Google for relevant keywords in a few hours (the average time to get indexed is two weeks). 5minutes also assists users to sell digital and physical products (stock photos, wedding albums, prints, etc all through the same platform), to identify who to follow on Twitter & Facebook in order to grow their social graph and to come up with and schedule daily updates on Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn in order to get more leads. We got more than 4,000 people signed up for a paid subscription on our landing page. In the last few years, the three cofounders worked together with professionals and companies like Universal, Incase, or Lexus to help them do the same thing that 5minutes helps with: look good online and sell stuff.