Be Great Partners to Fund 200 LA Startups within Next Year

To date, Be Great Partners has funded about 15 companies with $25,000 to $50,000 each since it opened in February. But now the incubator’s “investment strategy is more on the aggressive side with six startups per month and 80 percent of that in the LA area,” Lin Miao, Be Great Partners founder and CEO, said.

The fund, which Miao said was raised mostly from friends and family, will help Be Great Partners achieve its goal of companies starting (and staying) in LA. Miao said an LA location not only allows startups to use their limited funding more efficiently – when comparing to the high overhead costs of hiring and office space in, say, San Francisco – but also gives companies access to both traditional and celebrity investors.

“Here in LA we are seeing more and more celebrities and more high-worth individuals writing checks and investing in startups,” Miao said. “We believe that trend will accelerate over time as infrastructure gets built and we want to help startups be next to that.”

In addition to providing accessible funding, Be Great Partners supports its startups with 13 hands-on mentors and 25 in-house developers, who     CEO Lin Miao              have seen everything.” Because of the in-house developers, Be Great Partners companies can scale their businesses more quickly without having to search for more specialized developers to hire themselves.

The accessible mentors and developers, in addition to the funding and prime Miracle Mile location, are really what differentiates Be Great Partners from the other 30 incubators and accelerators in the LA area, Miao said.

“I really believe that the key to all this is our philosophy that startups need, at this stage, more than just a check and they need more than just an office space,” Miao said. “If these startups really want to take things up to the next level, they should be in a world-class facility with readily accessible mentors.”