San Antonio — Another week, another announcement from VelocityTX, the rapidly expanding startup program launched last month to promote and aid young tech and bioscience businesses in South Central Texas.
VelocityTX is now working to bring Brazilian startups from Rio de Janeiro to San Antonio as a part of a program it is starting with Outsource Brazil (OBr), a group of tech investors and executives that run an accelerator program, boot camps, and provide business advice to startups in the South American country. OBr and VelocityTX are starting a fast track program, called 6+3, that aims to prepare Brazilian startups for international expansion.
The program aims to run startups through a six-month program in Rio de Janeiro that prepares them to go international, and then have the businesses operating permanently in San Antonio within three months after that, according to a press release from VelocityTX.
“Emerging markets have a longer path and bigger challenge to overcome—startups from emerging markets must automatically go global,” said OBr CEO Robert Janssen in a news release. Janssen currently leads another OBr accelerator program in Silicon Valley, where he is also an angel investor, according to his LinkedIn.
The Texas Research & Technology Foundation, a bioscience and technology economic development group in San Antonio, announced it was launching VelocityTX in September as a “superhub” for entrepreneurs and startups. The group is focused on bioscience, cybersecurity, and other emerging technologies. It plans to provide capital, mentorship, access to manufacturing facilities, and other resources to startups and early stage companies in town, and plans to open an “innovation center” in a group of warehouses the foundation acquired.
Since then, VelocityTX has been busy. It announced another program at the start of October that will have VelocityTX collaborate with a bioscience incubator in Valdivia, Chile, called Austral Incuba. Like its work with OBr, it is part of VelocityTX’s Global Reach program to bring more international startups to the U.S.
In mid-October, VelocityTX announced it is taking over the operation and management duties of the Alliance of Texas Angel Networks, a group that coordinates 14 accredited angel investor networks across the state.
“Our partnership with OBr this week, and with Astral Incuba from Chile a few weeks ago, will result in companies coming to the Merchants Ice campus in 2018,” said David Fonseca, VelocityTX’s vice president for global development, in the news release. Merchant’s Ice is the name of the warehouses that will house the new startup center. “VelocityTX’s team is fully focused on economic development for San Antonio by bringing in the best growth companies in emerging markets.”
