David Cohen on The Techstars Entrepreneurial Journey; Berlin Program Includes Two Israeli Startups

During the Rackspace Startups program discovery tour of Berlin, I had a chance to catch up with Co-founder and Managing Partner of Techstars, David Cohen.

Over the years, David and I have crossed paths, with the last time being at the first graduating class of Techstars Cloud / San Antonio, which Rackspace is also major partner in the program.

Techstars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment program with each company receiving  $18,000 in seed funding. In addition, companies accepted into the program are offered a $100,000 convertible debt note by a group of prominent VCs immediately upon acceptance into Techstars.  The are nine city-locations including Berlin and branded vertical market programs run by Techstars for companies like Disney, Ford, Barclays, R/GA and others.

Recently, the company announced  the acquisition of UP Global and its Startup Weekend, Startup Week, Startup Next and Startup Digest programs.

During our visit, it was also great to see, mentor, and connect with two Israeli startups in the program, Platfarm and AppInside.

Platfarm – Platfarm is a software as a service company servicing agricultural cooperatives.By leveraging cutting edge software technology, Platfarm enables agriculturual cooperatives to collect, communicate, analyze and report information. This includes actionable data insights, which results in increased productivity and efficiency of agricultural production.

AppInside – AppInside is a security company that analyzes mobile apps for malicious abuse, legal violations and security threats. AppInside has developed a unique technology that analyzes automatically, without any integration, the internal components of a magnitude of mobile apps for malicious abuse, legal violations and security threats, offering an ongoing insight dashboard and a platform for security services. To date, we scanned more than 230,000 apps and the numbers are growing on daily basis.

Great to be with two Israeli teams at Techstars Berlin from AppInside and Platfarm

Of course, part of the conversation was about the possibility of a Techstars program in Israel.

While nothing has been officially announced, David did indicate that a city based program like Techstars Berlin in Tel Aviv or another city could be a possibility.