Types of Seed Funding
1. Crowdfunding: Crowdfunding platforms have become a very popular destination for seed funding. These platforms are generally open, and anyone can share the idea, concept, or product, and others can support the idea by contributing.
2. Corporate Seed Funding: Corporate Seed Funding is a good source of seed funding as start-ups gain more visibility with the help of big corporate investors. Large companies like Google, Intel, Apple, and Microsoft support start-ups regularly with seed funding. Such investments will prove to be very useful for new firms to build their brand and compete with established business houses.
3. Angel Investors: These are the investors who invest seed funds in a start-up in exchange for equity ownership or convertible debt.
4. Incubators: Incubators not only help with providing small seed funds but also focus on helping the new ventures through training, and they also provide office space. Many leading educational institutes, like IITs and IIMs, also provide such assistance for startups. Also, most of the time Incubators do not ask for equity holdings from start-ups.
5. Accelerators: These investors mainly help the new firms in scaling up rather than supporting them in early-stage innovation. They also provide help through various training, mentoring, and giving network reach. Unlike most incubators, accelerators usually take equity in exchange for their assistance and support.
6. VC Funding: Venture Capitalists are those high-end investors that invest in a new venture after looking into various parameters such as market conditions, founder vision, growth potential, etc. An example of VC funding is SoftBank, etc.