(Source: https://www.iidf.ru/media/articles/accelerator/demoday-12-prom)

Alejandro Cremades, the co-founder of Onevest crowd investing site and the author of The Art of Startup Fundraising made a list of the most successful accelerators in the world for American Forbes. When compiling, Cremades took into account the number of investments and exits, based on the information from Crunchbase database.

The first place in the rating was taken by Y Combinator - one of the first and most famous accelerators in the world, having invested into 1.834 companies for the period of its activity; the number of exits is 192.

The second place was taken by 500 Startups with 1.694 investments and 162 exits. Both of these accelerators are Californian.

The top three leaders are closed by another accelerator from the USA, Colorado: there are 1.557 investments and 134 exits on the account of Techstars.

In the Cremades rating, only four accelerators are not from the USA, including the Russian Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF), which took the 8th place.

The IIDF invested in 335 projects within the period of  its activity. It is noted that 4.5 thousand startups take part in the basic online accelerator program every year, and about 20 thousand people visit the IIDF, including Hackathon events.



The Internet Initiatives Development Fund  is a Russian venture capital fund created by   the Agency for Strategic Initiatives. The Foundation puts resources into innovation organizations in the beginning of their development, builds up a system of start-up   networks, and is engaged with the improvement of techniques for legal control of the venture business.

Since 2013, the Internet Initiatives Development Fund has been the most dynamic investment fund in Russia. As it is stated in the Dow Jones report, IIDF was positioned first in Europe by the quantity of transactions in the first quarter of 2014. By April 4, 2015, the fund has financed 150 projects, including 104 deals in 2014.

Kirill Varlamov is the chief director of the Fund.

One of the key territories of IIDF's businesses is represented by three-month  acceleration programmes. Under the direction of a mentor, groups have a  120-hour training course that consist of eight parts and includes sessions on marketing, sales organisation, development as well as consulting on company development. Their activites are controlled by invited experts.

To prepare teams for taking part in acceleration programmes, IIDF created  the so-called pre-accelerator, focusing on the development of start-up business models and improving their investment attractiveness.

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