500 Startups
500 Startups is an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator founded in 2010 by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai. The fund admitted a first "class" of twelve startups to its incubator office in Mountain View, California in February, 2011. They expanded to a second class of 21 in June 2011 and a third class of 34 in October 2011.
History
In 2012, 500 Startups acquired Mexican.VC, an accelerator in Mexico City, expecting to ramp up its investment in Mexico substantially. Through its investment in Alta Ventures, 500 Startups planned have better access to deal-flow in this region. 500 Startups LATAM is directed by Santiago Zavala and have startups like Platzi in its portafolio.
As of August 1, 2015, 500 Startups had invested in over 1,200 companies including Eat App IDreamBooks, Little Eye Labs, myGengo, Cucumbertown, Visual.ly, Canva, Udemy, RidePal. As of August 2015, more than 20% of the companies had participated in other incubators, 20-30% were international, and over 60 had been acquired.
Some of firm's active companies are CreditKarma, Twilio, GrabTaxi, and TalkDesk, The exits include $403M acquisition of Makerbot by Stratasys, $350M acquisition of Wildfire by Google, $200M acquisition of Viki by Rakuten, and $117M acquisition of Simple by BBVA.
500 Startups has locations in San Francisco, Mexico City, Miami, Dubai, Bahrain, Istanbul, Seoul, Singapore, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, and Kuala Lumpur. In 2015, they announced they would be starting a three-month growth program in London, UK as well as a pre-accelerator in Oslo, Norway.
In July 2017, co-founder Dave McClure resigned as general partner of all funds and entities managed by 500 Startups amid allegations of sexual harassment.
In March 2018, 500 Startups announced that it chose Downtown Miami as its first East Coast U.S. outpost.
