Raise Ventures: an accelerator, online and back again.
Digital consultancy for Belfast’s privately-run startup accelerator through the Covid years, from pitch nights on Zoom to six micro-brands for a founder community of 250.
Raise Ventures is Belfast’s privately-run startup accelerator: “by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs”. From 2020 to 2022 Raise hired Invisible Building as a service provider, consulting on marketing and strategy, graphic design and UX design. That meant writing up the founder stories, helping take the pitch events onto Zoom when the world shut, and designing the family of small brands that gave the community its rhythm when the doors reopened.
- Client
- Raise Ventures, Cathedral Quarter, Belfast
- Role
- Service provider: consultancy on marketing and strategy, graphic design and UX design
- Period
- 2020–2022, through the Covid years
- What they do
- Accelerator, pitch events and a founder community of 250+
- What we did
- Content, event formats, six micro-brands, talks and panels
- Today
- Still going strong at raisestartups.co.uk
Started as a pitch night. Became an accelerator.
Raise started in 2017 as an open pitching event, with founders in front of angel investors and no gatekeeping. Raise Ventures Ltd followed in October 2018, and in February 2019 it opened a six-month accelerator on Commercial Court in the Cathedral Quarter, describing itself as “Northern Ireland’s first privately-run startup accelerator”. Its founders were Jenny Ervine, Matt Johnston, Marty Neill and Michael McDowell. Between them they had built companies, invested in them, and run the earlier StartVI accelerator.
The programme’s four words were innovate, validate, accelerate, raise. By early 2023 Raise counted 25 active accelerator graduates, more than 50 startups pitched at eight angel investor events, and a community of over 250 founders. That is a small team doing a lot, which is where a studio like ours is useful.
The pitch night that had to move to Zoom.
Raise’s spring 2020 investor event was planned for a room in Belfast in April. Lockdown ended that. On Thursday 18 June 2020 it ran instead as Remote Raise: seven startups pitching over Zoom to an audience of 40 angels and funds. The surprise was the upside. As Raise put it afterwards, “the audience came from far and wide, US, UK, Ireland and Europe”. A room in Belfast could never have done that.
The same thing happened to everything else. The monthly Startup Club became a Zoom “lean coffee”. The Tech for Non Tech talks went online, with sli.do for questions. David spoke at the June 2020 edition, “Automation, No-Code and Community”, on building MVPs fast with no-code tools. Through 2020 and 2021 we wrote up the sessions, the founder interviews and the year-end reviews for the Raise blog, and by June 2021 the pitch event had become Hybrid Raise: part room, part stream.
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Online Raise Startup Club meets on Zoom for the first time, run as a lean coffee.
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Remote Raise I: seven startups, 40 angels and funds, and an audience from the US, UK, Ireland and Europe.
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David speaks on no-code and automation at Tech for Non Tech.
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Remote Raise II. Seven more pitches, over a lunchtime.
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Remote Raise III. A fourth follows in the spring.
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Hybrid Raise: four startups pitch to a room and a stream at once.
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The Digital DNA Belfast Hub Crawl, run by Raise with Ormeau Baths, Clockwise and the Cathedral Quarter. David works on it in a Sugar t-shirt.
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Raise Pitch Night at Café Parisien: “our first in-person pitch night in almost 3 years”. Sold out, and still on Zoom for those who couldn’t travel.
Six micro-brands
By 2022 Raise was running half a dozen different things under one logo. We gave each its own mark, look and tone of voice, so a founder could tell at a glance what they were being invited to.
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Startup Stories
Founders who have been there and done it, telling it straight. Running since 2020; in person at the Raise Space and online via Zoom.
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Brew Crew
“An hour of caffeine fuelled startup conversation.” The open coffee morning for Belfast’s entrepreneurs, from autumn 2021.
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Deep Dive
Workshops and panels on one hard topic at a time: AI and machine learning, share option schemes, diversity, MVP prototyping, grant writing.
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ELSS
The Emerging Leaders Summer School: eight Fridays in summer 2022, mixing leadership skills with sea swims, hikes and yoga.
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Pause
“A brand new mindfulness toolkit for founders”, delivered monthly by email from October 2022. Calm in the chaos.
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Raise Pitch Night
The investor showcase the whole thing is named for. Six investment-ready startups, a room of angels and funds.
Deep Dive: MVP Prototyping.
In November 2022 David sat on the other side of the table, as a panellist on Raise’s Deep Dive on MVP prototyping. He was billed as “Invisible Building and Sugar Financial Technology”, which by then was the honest description: a studio that builds for founders, run by someone in the middle of being one.
What three years alongside an accelerator teaches you
Lessons we now bring to every founder we work with.
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Online widens the room
Moving to Zoom was forced, and it brought investors from the US and Europe who were never going to fly to Belfast for an evening. Hybrid is not a compromise; it is a bigger audience.
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Name the format
“Come to our event” gets ignored. “Brew Crew, Wednesday, 8.30” gets a calendar entry. A small brand turns a one-off into a habit.
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Write everything up
A talk reaches the people in the room. The write-up and the recording reach everyone who searches for that topic for years afterwards.
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No-code first
Most early-stage founders do not need a developer yet. They need a form, a database, an automation and a landing page, and they need them this week.
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Founders are people
In October 2020 we were writing mental-health tips for founders on the Raise blog. Two years later Raise had a mindfulness series and a summer school built around resilience. Burnout ends plenty of startups before a competitor gets the chance.
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Small teams need systems
An accelerator, a fund, an events programme and a newsletter, run by a handful of people, only works when templates and automations do the repetitive parts.
Still raising.
Raise Ventures is still at it, now based at Clockwise on High Street and running pitch nights, its accelerator and new growth programmes for Northern Ireland’s tech founders. If you are an early-stage founder in Belfast, start there.
And if you run an accelerator, a fund or a founder community and need your small team to look and work like a big one, have a look at our consultancy for startups, or get in touch.
The Raise years
Written up from our notes and the public record, and dated to when it happened.
Six Micro-Brands for One Startup Community
Startup Stories, Brew Crew, Deep Dive, ELSS, Pause and Raise Pitch Night: why a small accelerator needed a family of small brands.
MVP Prototyping: Notes from the Raise Deep Dive Panel
When to use no-code, why to build on boring open technology, and why a prototype is your best pitch deck. From Raise Ventures’ Deep Dive panel.
No Code MVPs: My BelfastJS Talk, and a Product Built in 24 Hours
My BelfastJS talk, No Code MVPs: a freelancer directory built in 24 hours with FigJam, Typeform, Google Sheets, NoCodeAPI and a little React.
You Probably Don’t Need a Developer Yet: No-Code for Founders
How non-technical founders can test a startup idea with a landing page, a form, an automation and a payment link. From Raise Ventures’ Tech for Non Tech.
Remote Raise: What Happens When a Pitch Night Moves to Zoom
Raise Ventures moved its investor pitch night onto Zoom in June 2020: seven startups, 40 angels and funds, and an audience from the US to Europe.