Kuwait-based startup accelerator Brilliant Lab has been an active contributor to Kuwait’s startup ecosystem since 2014. Its primary agenda is to help promising businesses in Kuwait through giving them exposure to global experts, who could provide an insight into innovative and successful business plans and ideas.
Brilliant Lab has a strategic agreement with telecom giant Zain Kuwait under which its accelerator program, Zain Great Idea, operates.
Zain Great Idea first came into existence in 2012 as the result of a collaboration between Zain Kuwait and the Industrial Bank of Kuwait. The program typically lasts between six and nine months. Among other perks, it offers workshops facilitated by mentors representing Kuwait IE Business School, as well as Mind The Bridge, a San Francisco-based nonprofit incubator that provides extensive training to investors, startups, and even large corporations.
In the latest batch of Zain Great Idea, Brilliant Lab took 12 homegrown startups all the way to London and Silicon Valley last November where they participated in the Mind The Bridge Startup School. The underlying reason behind this educational tour was to give these promising entrepreneurs the requisite know-how of turning their ideas and strategies into successful business models.
“There is nothing called local market and international market. Technology came to our life to remove borders. In 2018, the customers in Kuwait more and less are sharing the same needs and concerns of customers in Australia. The winner will be the one who’s building a scalable product that you can easily replicate to other countries,” said Neda Al Dihany, Founder of Brilliant Lab.
Neda also underlined that Brilliant Lab has even bigger plans for the next batch.
“In the next batch, we will activate our acceleration equity fund. We will invest $150,000 in exchange of equity between 7 to 12 %,” he added before saying that the amount thus raised will be utilized to grow the sales of the startup and set a legal framework meant to prepare the company for the next round.
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