In April of last year, Facebook announced FbStart, a program to give satartups developer tools and services from Facebook and partner companies to help them get their businesses to take off. The company opened it up to startups the following month. On Thursday, the company provided an update on the program, and revealed that it has distributed $100 million in benefits to over 3,800 startups in its first year. Additionally, it’s adding new benefits and partners.
Upon launch FbStart counted the following among its partners: dobe, Appurify, Asana, BlueJeans, Salesforce Desk, MailChimp, Parse, Proto.io, Quip, SurveyMonkey, User Testing, and Workable. Combined with Facebook’s own contributions, these partners offered services to startups worth up to $30,000.
In July, the program added services from Braintree, Appmethod, and Get Satisfaction, and bringing the worth of services up to $40,000. As it kicked off an FbStart tour in October, it said tools and services were worth up to $63,000 for its “Accelerate” companies and $24,000 for “Bootstrap” companies. In November, it added benefits from Stripe.
New partners include App Annie, Balsamiq, GitHub, Mobile Action, Namecheap, TransparentBusiness, Yandiki, and Zendesk. There are now over 20 partners in all.
When FbStart began, it had two tracks – Accelerate and Bootstrap. The value of the former’s benefits is over $30,000 while the latter’s is $80,000. It’s now adding a third track for Pre-launch, which it describes as:
Designed to provide partner benefits such as domain hosting, access to legal services, or wire-framing services, for example, that mostly help developers who are still building out ideas and haven’t launched their app.
The program is also adding a games package and a social good package.
“Offered in addition to standard FbStart tracks, the Games package includes mentorship from the Facebook Games team and benefits relevant to game developers,” explains Facebook’s Kevin Prior. “Offered in addition to standard FbStart tracks, the Social Good package includes mentorship opportunities with the Internet.org team, and exclusive partner benefits like growth and fundraising consulting from I.G. Advisors, social media consulting from Social Misfits, and access to services from Praekelt Foundation.”
Finally, Facebook is about to start another FbStart tour. Dates are as follows:
June – London, New York City
July – Denver, Mexico City
August – Chicago, Hong Kong, Montréal, Seoul, Toronto
September – Singapore, Taipei
October – Bogota, São Paulo, Seattle, Vancouver
November – Boston, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Helsinki
December – Austin
Startups can apply for FbStart here.
Image via Facebook