Wow, that was fast. TechStars’ first international affiliate, Startupbootcamp, literally just announced its plans to expand the Copenhagen-based startup mentoring program into Madrid, London and Berlin later this year. And now Dublin has been added to the list! Guess Ireland’s rather grim economic situation didn’t phase anyone.
But unlike the other Startupbootcamp programs to date, the Dublin program is kicking it up a notch and integrating multinationals. With IBM and Citi as partners for the event (along with Enterprise Ireland and Dublin City Council), the Dublin program will be oriented more towards the application and commercialization of specific technologies developed by the teams. For this particular event, it looks like the team will devote particular attention to applicants addressing the problems of capturing, storing, searching, sharing, analyzing and visualizing large sets of unstructured data.
Naturally, Startupbootcamp won’t be the first program of its type in Ireland, which is currently home to the European headquarters of Google, Facebook and Zynga – and maybe Twitter in the upcoming months. Other local startup mentoring programs include Endeavour and NDRC’s Launchpad. Similar programs are now popping up in other European cities but one of the big questions on everyone’s mind is whether or not these programs will thrive given the status of the European exit market.
Regardless, Startupbootcamp’s first program did churn out some rather interesting companies, including Roozz (a startup that converts any software to run in the browser) and Magma (which is more or less a Basecamp-like plateform oriented towards magazines and print publications). The pan-European Startupbootcamp network currently counts some 150 mentors as well, now including some well-known names from Balderton Capital, DFJ, Mangrove Capital Partners amongst others.
The former CFO of Xing, Eoghan Jennings, will be running the Startupbootcamp program out of Dublin. Applications for the Dublin program will officially open during the summer. For entrepreneurs interested in checking out the next available program, applications for the program in Madrid are open now through May 15. And it looks like programs in Berlin and London are now set to launch in 2012.
Startupbootcamp became the first international affiliate of TechStars in 2010, who also recently announced its plans to further develop its international network with the launch of Startup America. TechStars’ founder, David Cohen, is planning to have roughly 30-35 international affiliates by the end of the year.