FoundersBoost Toronto is the city’s only 100% free, not-for-profit preaccelerator program for early-stage founders. We are a volunteer-only organization that runs six-week boot camps that prepare founders for accelerators, investment, and revenue. We take no equity and charge no fees from any of our startups.
FoundersBoost Toronto is led by Aashna Kumar, a local venture capitalist who revived the once-dormant organization in early 2020. We are supported by a community of dozens of volunteers who serve as speakers and mentors. Our volunteer base primarily consists of investors across Canada’s venture capital firms and established local founders.
The six-week FoundersBoost program has three key components, starting with expert speaker sessions. We bring recognized experts from the community to speak on customer development, legal and fundraising, building products that matter, market sizing and more. These talks are intimate and never distributed to the public so that our founders can ask specific and personal questions, big and small, about their businesses.
The next key component in our program is our pitch coaching. Each week, we run workshops to identify holes in our founders’ pitches and hone their startup stories. We believe that refining a pitch is an iterative process and we see tangible, meaningful results from the beginning to the end of the program.
Finally, our founders benefit from 18 one-on-one mentorship sessions through the duration of the program. Our mentors are founders and investors from Toronto and beyond, who take the time to join our boot camp sessions and work with our startups. Our founders are able to build relationships early with high-potential advisors and investors that often support their growth for years beyond the program.
Our program culminates with a Demo Day showcase, where our founders share their founder stories and present their pitch to a public audience. Our founders have leveraged Demo Day to attract investors and build awareness in the Toronto tech ecosystem.
FoundersBoost is a critical part of Toronto’s tech ecosystem because it equips founders with resources that would otherwise be behind a paywall: specific, tailored speakers, iterative pitch feedback, and highly relevant mentor relationships. Beyond this, our graduates exit our program with a community of mentors and alumni backing them as they continue the scaling process.
We are proud to democratize access to the resources and relationships that founders need to thrive in Toronto’s tech ecosystem. We have an unsurpassed success rate and our graduates have gone on to raise venture funding and join large accelerator programs. We run programs in the Spring and Fall, and would be so happy to welcome you into our
community!
