GRAND RAPIDS

– Business accelerators, where entrepreneurs incubate ideas, get mentoring

help, and sometimes access to investment capital, have been springing up all

over Michigan. But the state’s newest accelerator takes a new tack by focusing

on working with very large enterprise companies to help them developing products to plug into the Internet of Things.

The Seamless

Accelerator is the latest iteration from the entrepreneurial mind of Rick

DeVos, the grandson of Amway co-founder Richard DeVos. Back in 2009, DeVos co-founded Momentum, a program perhaps a little ahead of its time that sought to

develop Internet-focused startups in West Michigan. Three years later, Momentum

morphed into Start Garden, an accelerator that also invested up to $500,000 new companies. Today Start Garden has about 50 companies in its portfolio. 

While Start

Garden remains, and has now upped its investment ante to $1.5 million per company,

Seamless has taken business acceleration in a different direction by working

closely with a half dozen of West Michigan’s largest companies that want to

work with startups in the hot new Internet of Things, dubbed IoT.

Steelcase,

Amway, Meijer, Faurecia, Spectrum Health and Priority Health have joined Start Garden in this new project. The big companies will give entrepreneurs access to their talent and

personnel, as well as expertise from industrial design to supply-chain management to retail.

For

entrepreneurs, Seamless offer a unique opportunity to not only build a

business, but with the help of these big companies, scale it up very quickly,

said Seamless Director Amanda Chocko, who has served in leadership roles with

Momentum and Start Garden.

“Over the

years, we’ve developed relationships with many enterprises in the area,” Chocko

said. “We want to support their innovation. Seamless is an opportunity to take

startups and emerging technologies and put a vast amount of resource behind supporting

them.”

Applications

are due by June 15 for the first batch of Seamless entrepreneurs who will start

the 12-week intensive mentoring instruction this fall. Up to 10 companies will

be accepted into the program, Chocko said. Then another batch of 10 will be

recruited to Seamless for the second cohort that will begin work in 2016.

To get

approved, two of the seven founding enterprises have to give the applicant a

thumbs up, she said.

“Seamless

supports IoT startups that are discovering ways to converge the physical and

the digital world to make people’s everyday lives more connected and enjoyable,”

Chocko said. “We are specifically interested in the following markets – Smart

Home, Healthcare, Workplace Productivity, Manufacturing and Enterprise

Solutions, Automotive, and Retail.

So if you

have a nascent company in these areas, or just a great idea, you need to apply

today. To do so, click on www.seamlessaccelerator.com