GiveForward Declared a Finalist by Chicago’s Newest Technology Incubator

The GiveForward team is proud to announce that we have been selected — alongside nine other great startups — to receive financial support and mentoring from some of the tech world’s best following a competition held by Excelerate Labs, a new Chicago-based accelerator program.

Established by entrepreneur Sam Yagan (@SamYagan) — founder of the online dating site OKCupid (where I will be registering after I post this, come find me) — and a number of other investors, Excelerate Labs aims to support projects and business ideas that they think have the potential to transform Chicago into “the Silicon Valley of the Midwest.” The program will be modeled after the highly regarded Tech Stars and Y Combinator accelerator programs, which have helped launch dozens of startups over the past few years, including Reddit, Dropbox, Posterous.

What does this program mean for GiveForward in the immediate sense? Well, this summer, each of the finalists – including us – will receive between $10,000 and $15,000 in financial support. For those of you keeping score at home, that equals out to a very high number of burritos. But way more importantly, we will also have the guidance of an elite “brain trust” of technology experts, CEOs and venture capital firms.  Guys like Steve Chen (Co-founder of YouTube ) and Lee Hower (Co-founder of LinkedIn) will be helping us take GiveForward to the next level.

At the conclusion of the summer program, each participating company will have the chance to present their plan to a large group of angel and institutional investors who have the power to transform startups like us into major players. We’ll certainly keep you all posted as the summer progresses, and we’ll hopefully have more good news to share at the start of the fall.