Sequoia, the US based VC firm that has invested at an early stage in several successful tech businesses, has announced a programme called Arc.
In Brief:
Arc is being described as a “catalyst” programme as opposed to an accelerator.
It will support a number of FinTechs across 8-week programmes.
It aims to focus on “outlier” founders, I.e. those that may not already have access to similar opportunities.
What does this mean?
The programme seems to wish to stand out from the crowd, first of all by calling itself something different to an “accelerator” or an “incubator” programme feeding businesses into Sequoia which it may end up investing in. Secondly it will focus on founders it describes as “outliers” - perhaps meaning those not from a typical background many FinTech founders come from – and will achieve this by not allowing any warm leads and partially using data science to sift through applications.
