Toronto-based innovation firm Kinetic Café is teaming up with Freshii, a leader in healthy fast food, to offer a health, food and fitness-focused startup program.
The Fresh Startups program will be led by Kinetic Café’s Saul Colt, who previously worked at FreshBooks and Rogers Communications. His website calls him “the smartest man in the world”. Colt will work with the accepted applicants through a program based on a business/service model, customer identification, product development and marketing and sales acceleration. Startups have until October 4 to apply for the program.
“Launching the Fresh Startups Program with our Partner Freshii is very exciting because it gives me an opportunity to share the things I’ve learned over my career with some exciting new startups as well as fix this things that I feel are broken in the current accelerator models.“ said Colt.
In an email Colt mentioned that while the model of most tech accelerators is a three-month program focused on raising money from investors, the Fresh Startups program will be different. “The focus should be to build great companies with the support and focus to drive revenue,” he wrote.
The two companies have built a vertically focused six month startup program designed to “grow great companies in the space of health, food and fitness,” focused on driving revenue. Freshlii will come in by providing industry connections, namely its existing global customer base from over 80 restaurants in 8 countries.
The program will offer companies funding of $25,000 in cash and $15,000 in digital lab credits, for between five and 10 percent of the company. According to Techcrunch, Fresh Startups are in the process of working out access to a government loan worth an additional $15,000.
“We are excited to launch the Fresh Startups program with our partner, Kinetic Café,” said Freshii’s Matthew Corin. “By mentoring and seeding health and wellness focused technology companies, we will create more value for our existing Freshii customers while providing passionate entrepreneurs mentoring, growth capital and access to a global retail brand.”
Whether the program will ultimately serve to be a pipeline for companies like Freshii to offer industry know-how in return for startup equity, remains to be seen. Regardless, such a program is innovative in Canada and shouldn’t have problems attracting fresh food-focused startup applicants. Those interested should visit the website.
