Idealab

What is Idealab?

Idealab is a prominent venture capital firm and a pioneering technology incubator founded in 1996 with headquarters in Pasadena, California. With over $1 billion in assets under management, they focus on investing in and nurturing various sectors including Media, Cloud Services, Online Social, and Infrastructure.

They are adept at identifying large-scale problems and creating technology solutions by testing numerous ideas simultaneously. Once they discover a viable concept, they build a dedicated team, spin it off into an independent company, and provide extensive support for its growth.

Idealab operates with a comprehensive investment approach, offering a minimum of $50,000 and a maximum of $500,000 to start-ups, with a preferred 'sweet spot' investment of around $200,000.

Their expertise lies in Pre-Seed, Seed, and Early Stage investments, and their unique incubation model provides their portfolio companies with a range of essential services including office space, development technologies, product and graphic design, marketing, financial advice, human resources, competitive research, legal, accounting, business development, and more.

Idealab boasts a successful track record of having created over 150 companies, leading to more than 45 IPOs and acquisitions. The key figure behind Idealab is innovator Bill Gross, whose contributions and insights on entrepreneurship, innovation, and the potential of technology to drive growth have been shared worldwide through talks at prestigious events such as TED and the World Economic Forum.

Over the years, Idealab has had numerous successful exits, including companies that have been acquired by industry giants such as Google, eBay, Yahoo!, and Airbnb, or have gone public.

What they say:

We accelerate deep tech, climate, sustainability, and emerging technology startups built within a studio model