"At the University of Alabama, we were faced with a decision of cancelling our student annual business plan competition and our new faculty /staff competition due to students being off-campus as a result of the pandemic. We quickly saw a path forward to use StartupWind for a virtual competition. Within four weeks we pivoted from an on-site program to a virtual competition - for both events. Judges, facilitators, and competitors all were extremely pleased with the new format. The StartupWind Virtual Competition solution supported the creation of online business plan portals that judges could access to review, on their own time, video presentations as well as the full business plan decks. StartupWind’s software and support team helped us make our flagship event as a resounding success, receiving kudos from all our stakeholders!"

Dr. Theresa M. Welbourne

Executive Director, .uni-block Entrepreneurship Institute

"In 2021, We were recommended StartupWind, initially we thought it was out of our budget. But, after review and realizing everything it can do for us, we went ahead. It was the best decision we’ve ever made! StartupWind brought everything together allowing us to run business plan competitions, idea competitions, several entrepreneurship courses, summer accelerator and mentoring programs seamlessly. Within 6 weeks, we ran our Veteran’s Entrepreneurship Competition & Accelerator, an Entrepreneurship course, a Mentoring program and launched a Big Idea Student Competition. We not only saw the value in such a short time but also have built the foundation for building a powerful innovation engine for our university. StartupWind platform and their support is unmatched and I strongly recommend StartupWind for any University Entrepreneurship program.”

Dr. Patrick Woock

Director, The McNair Center for Entrepreneurship

"As a mentor, I want to be able to spend my time working directly with the participants, not fighting with technology or jumping through administrative tasks. StartupWind is focused on providing an exceptional experience to all parties involved. I am very proud to be among the group of mentors working with the current cohort and look forward to future opportunities to support this amazing community!”

Nicole Spracale

Executive Coach, COO at Thrivacy, alumna at Northwestern Kellogg

"We chose StartupWind because it has the best feature set for all parties involved in the competition/development /mentoring process. StartupWind has a great reputation for customer service as well, which my experience with StartupWind has been fully validated."

Steven Hodas

Executive Director, GV NextEd, Grand Valley State University

"We were facing difficult decisions about our Summer Entrepreneurs program due to the pandemic and were looking for alternatives such as a Virtual Accelerator that would help us move forward. We selected StartupWind as it offers an end-to-end solution for ideation, business planning, and mentoring that enables us to work remotely with our entire cohort. I am impressed with the speed of onboarding and ease of use in transitioning to a virtual accelerator on StartupWind, as well as with the responsiveness and flexibility of the StartupWind team in getting our program up and running with us, at a time when we were faced with very unusual pressures and uncertainties."

Alix Hayden

Acting Managing Director, Innovation Enterprise, University of Saskatchewan.

"As a mentor and coach, I am using StartupWind within a summer accelerator program for students at our university. StartupWind provides a convenient performance dashboard for entrepreneurial participants and coaches to engage easily and effectively. This platform includes progressive tools for ideation, customer discovery, business planning, and mentoring as well as streamlines the entire process of mentor/coach interaction."

Linda Jimenez

Program Director, Kinesiology-Exercise and Sport Science Wayne State University

“I have been working closely with StartupWind as we roll out the platform in support of our summer accelerator. I found StartupWind’s unified single platform very compelling, with Ideation, Business Model Canvas, Business Planning & Mentoring seamlessly integrated. The platform is not only easy to use and intuitive, but the StartupWind team is extremely responsive and genuinely interested in ensuring the success of our programs. I would highly recommend StartupWind to any incubator or university entrepreneurship program.”

Stefan Sysko

Faculty & Coach at TechTown Detroit and Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses

“We chose StartupWind to build a digital innovation ecosystem for TechTown which would allow us to help our startups at different stages of their lifecycle. StartupWind’s tools and frameworks will not only help our technology startups but also regular small business entrepreneurs that we serve. StartupWind’s end to end solutions in a single unified platform coupled with extensive reporting and economic development dashboards are key for us to measure and track the impact of our initiatives."

Ned Staebler

CEO of TechTown Detroit

"As CMURC continues to expand, we needed an online platform for our members to connect with our team. StartupWind provides that platform and allows our team to virtually and effectively facilitate the program. StartupWind’s cohort capabilities enables us to create distinct initiatives for the program and provide our entrepreneurs a safe space to develop their ideas. These capabilities are useful across several initiatives, including the facilitation of business plan competitions. “

Erin Strang

President + CEO, Central Michigan University Research Corporation

"StartupWind has the ability to serve multiple functions required by the MIT VMS (Venture Mentoring) program including engaging entrepreneurs with mentors seamlessly, managing the workflow of meeting scheduling, and facilitating group mentoring through built-in video calling, post-meeting ratings & surveys to measure the effectiveness of the program and engagement of participants. The StartupWind team continues to provide exceptional service and has exceeded our needs for MentorSC and other programs. It has been an absolute delight to work with them!"

Caroline Crowder

Director MentorSC & USC Columbia Technology Incubator

"The StartupWind platform allows flexibility to customize the programs to the needs of the accelerator/ incubator. It has amazing content available that makes it convenient for startups to accelerate growth through the Global Accelerator Program. My favorite feature is the mentoring solution that reduces a lot of operations for larger mentoring sessions and helps seamlessly connect mentors to startups and conduct evaluations all using one platform. The team is dedicated to providing the best solution for all the needs of an Accelerator or incubator. I surely recommend it to anyone in the startup ecosystem trying to make their processes efficient."

Esha Chopra

Director of Strategy & Marketing at Toronto Business Development Centre

"For our annual ERG summit at the University of Southern California, we used StartupWind platform to help attendees from Fortune 500 type companies to develop their ideas, business model canvas and business cases for their ERG projects. The attendees also used the platform to collaborate with each others and get feedback on their ideas. The platform is easy to use, engaging, versatile and definitely added a unique experiential element to our summit. StartupWind provided excellent support and worked like a true partner to make our program successful. I highly recommend StartupWind for any corporate workshops or executive education programs around innovation."

Jennifer Sparks Taylor

Director of Corporate Relations & Executive Education, USC Marshall Center for Effective Organizations

“We are able to incubate promising ideas and connect them to industry advisorsusing StartupWind’s virtual mentoring tool. This will allow our students to make a stronger impact in solving COVID-19 challenges. The StartupWind support team has been very timely in providing assistance and they clearly care deeply about our initiatives."

Katherine Swartz Hilton

Strategic Initiatives, McNair Institute for Entrepreneurism, University of South Carolina

"The step by step guided process of ideation and design thinking frameworks has helped our students to develop their ideas in a structured way. The business model canvas feature is very intuitive and helps track progress with weekly snapshots instead of cumbersome paper and email based feedback system. My experience working with the StartupWind team has been excellent. Their support is near real time and very helpful during onboarding and with user inquiries."

Nik Rokop

Coleman Foundation Clinical Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship, Stuart School of Business, Illinois Institute of Technology.

“We used StartupWind as the Innovation platform for a student entrepreneur program at Wayne State University. Within just a few weeks, over 200 student entrepreneurs collaborated, creates several dozen ideas, customer interviews, and even business model canvases. The single unified platform also can help my team with the ability to track the progress of ventures, provide help where necessary and also pull dashboard and reports to present to leadership, donors, and grantees.”

Marlin Williams

Chief Program Officer, TechTown Detroit & Assistant Vice President for Economic Development, Wayne State University

“We chose StartupWind because it met a number of requirements as we support the I&E ecosystem at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The educational content offered through online video-based courses on the topics of entrepreneurship coupled with the Ideation & Business Model Canvas capabilities are especially helpful in helping student entrepreneurs in our incubation program. We were impressed with the platform’s ability to bridge connections between entrepreneurs for team formation. "

Sheryl Waddell

Director, Global Innovate Carolina Network

"StartupWind’s Innovation Network is an innovative way to create a digital ecosystem for an university, incubator or region’s entrepreneurship initiatives. StartupWind offers end to end solutions in a single unified platform for startups at different stages – from ideation, business planning, mentoring to funding readiness. The wealth of analytics and tracking ability would allow us to monitor the progress of the startups and provide more targeted help to move them forward."

Paul Riser

Director of Detroit Urban Solutions & Managing Director TechTown Detroit

“I believe Startupwind is addressing something desperately needed in our entrepreneurial community here in Chapel Hill. While there is always more work to be done, the best part of our experience working with Startupwind has hands down been the amazing support they provide. There are few companies that I can think of that could even come close to the level of dedication StartupWind team shows to our community’s success. Thank you StartupWind team, for your passion, your support, and your platform.”

Sam Canney

Project Manager, Innovate Carolina at UNC Chapel Hill

"We have been using StartupWind for the 'Entrepreneurship in Action' as the platform for ideation for our students and recently decided to use it for our online "Do your venture" The feedback from the students is very positive – StartupWind provides a simple and frictionless way to create ideas and share them."

Suresh Bhagavatula

Chairperson, Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Development, NSRCEL at IIM Bangalore

"StartupWind has been a key partner who is working with IIM Bangalore for variousentrepreneurship initiatives including the Women Startup Programme competition! The platform is designed very intuitively and offers value at conducting competitions. It provide the ease of managing the competitions end to end, It facilitates the visualization of how business plans/ideas evolve, right from ideation, while the participants are undergoing various mentoring sessions. It helped us evaluate the progress of participants in high magnitude."

Rajiv Sawhney

Chief Operating Officer NSRCEL

"Prior to StartupWind, we were dealing with word docs, google sheets, PowerPoint slides and weekly email threads. Now, we have a single and easy to use platform that allows our entrepreneurs to create ideas in minutes, get feedback from coaches, solidify their business model canvas and eventually build a solid business plan for their ventures. Our on-boarding experience, simplicity of the user interface and the social network, ease of giving feedback and the level of service we are getting from StartupWind is remarkable.”

Billy Banks

Associate Director & In charge of Wildfire Accelerator at the Garage @ Northwestern University

“I selected StartupWind for the “Entrepreneurial Mindset and Action” course at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, an experiential course that required students to run a venture for 10 weeks. I was impressed with the platform’s ability to provide an end to end solution for ideation, customer discovery, lean and business model canvas, prototyping and business planning. The ability to view, capture and judge all class assignments under one platform was a very efficient way to manage the class performance.”

Srivardhini K. Jha

Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore

"We are excited to use StartupWind for our competition. This is a great platform for anyone that is looking to make a virtual connection in the startup world where connections are one of the keys to success. Thank you StartupWind for creating this platform we think that it will streamline our current Global Startup Competition and all our future competitions.“

Arnold Chen

Managing Director at Purdue University