It is widely acknowledged that a key requirement for the success of any early stage venture is its ability to access funding. In response, ilab provides a number of funding mechanisms to assist founders.
All successful applicants for the Germinate Program receive a grant of up to $20K (based on justified need) which is used for technical development and/or business consulting. The deployment of these grant funds are agreed to with ilab management and committed to the project over the three month period for building and testing a product and planning the means of execution and scale-up within the identified market.
For example:
Founder X has built a website as part of completing a subject in an undergraduate computer science degree. The founder has managed to build a small following of users and requires $10K to expand the functionality and create a more robust and agile backend plus $5K for a small marketing campaign to acquire more users for feedback on current features, while identifying possible future features.
Founder Z works in hospitality and while working at a cafe has sketched out a new scheduling system and means of online venue booking that creates social buying behaviour and ratings/rewards for restaurants. Having no IT background, the founder applies for $12K software development services to build a trial system to crystallise and test the idea.