Deadline: 22 September 2023
Designer Fund Partnership is a strategic investment offer of $500K along with hiring support, expert design advice, and a community of design leaders you can call upon.
Designer Fund Partnership helps you hire and manage exceptional design teams, provide expert product and brand design advice, accelerate your fundraising process, and connect you to the community of top designers, founders, and advisors.
After Designer Fund invests, they have a kickoff meeting and then are available for monthly design help tailored to what you need throughout the next 12 months. They’re not an accelerator and they don’t have a curriculum you have to follow. Rather, they focus on the following types of collaborative work sessions when you need them most:
- Kickoff: They start with an onboarding meeting to better understand your milestones for the next year and how they can best help you accomplish them.
- Hiring: They assess your design hiring needs, recommend curated contractors and full-time design talent, and participate in your interview process.
- Design management: As you hire a team, they can coach them to overcome challenges while scaling high-performing design teams.
- Design advice: They host office hours to provide feedback on your product, brand and how to use design strategically across your business.
- Community: They connect you to design leaders and advisors in their community for specific expertise via the Designer Fund Collective private Slack workspace and invite you to members-only events and trainings.
- Fundraising support: They help improve your pitch, develop an outreach plan, and make warm introductions to potential customers and value-add investors.
What are they looking for in a Company
These are some key traits they look for in a company:
- Founders who are mission-driven, value design, and come from diverse backgrounds.
- Businesses that are inherently good for the world and align with their desired impact outcomes: prosperity, health and sustainability for all.
- Orders of magnitude better products compared to alternatives.
- Multi-billion dollar addressable markets which currently have poor user experiences.
Who can apply?
- Designer Fund is primarily looking for early stage tech startups, Pre-seed to Series A, with mission-driven founders who value design and are based in the US. However, they’ll consider making exceptions for both later stage and international companies.
- Designer Fund mostly invest in U.S. companies however they’ll consider exceptional international companies.
For more information, visit Designer Fund.
