TBWA\HAKUHODO Inc. (Headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo. President and CEO: Ichiro Zama) announced that its newly established organization TBWA\HAKUHODO\QUANTUM (“QUANTUM“) has formed a partnership with TECHFUND (Located in Shibuya-ku, Tokyo – President Peaske Kawahara and Yuta Kawahara) to collaborate in the development of entrepreneur support programs.

This business alliance aims to build a solid foundation to support entrepreneurs and start-up companies by sharing the know-how and resources of QUANTUM’s “\QUANTUM Accelerator” and TECHFUND’s “SUNRISE Program”.

In developing the programs, QUANTUM provides hardware, sensing technologies and business management know-how with candidate companies, while TECHFUND provides IT software technologies and know-how about lean startups.

■ TECHFUND

TECHFUND is an industry-leading group of engineers with a vision of “bringing entrepreneurs into the mainstream.”

In Silicon Valley, top-level engineers of Google and Facebook sometimes receive shares in exchange for supporting service development called “sweat equity (shares acquired by collaborative efforts).”  We are the first company in the world to make direct technology investments to entrepreneurs in return for sweat equity.  Since the foundation of TECHFUND Inc. on the 9th of October, we have interviewed over 150 entrepreneurs, contacted about 35 teams on a continuous basis and made investments in 5 companies.  In addition to the objective of assisting each entrepreneur in their business on the right track, we aim to support a total of 50 companies by the end of 2015.

■ SUNRISE Program: click here

The SUNRISE Program offers an 88-day-long incubation service. Based on the lean startup concept, it provides startups in their pre-seed, trial round with know-how and technical support (technology investment) to help ideas take shape. The goals is to see each startup become independent by the end of the program, fully prepared for negotiations with venture capitalists and other investors.

TECHFUND receives five percent share in each startup in return for thorough support and value-added in-kind offerings.