Leipzig is an awesome place to live, work, and grow, and your startup will truly be taken to the next level if you’re accepted into one of our classes. To summarize some of the key points that will be of interest to founders looking to apply, here’s what you can get excited about:
Strong business relationships and first customers are crucial for helping an early stage startup grow and scale quickly. We can help you land pilot projects with global players such as Porsche, Deutsche Bank, DELL, Leipziger Gruppe, VNG, and AOK.
Our accelerator operates in both English and German, as long as your startup can communicate fluently in one of these languages we welcome you to apply! Furthermore, if you want to expand internationally, we have excellent partnerships with international companies and the HHL that can help you plan your internationalization right from the start.
We’re unique in the sense that we take ZERO equity, shares, or intellectual property from your startup. Your company stays as much yours when you finish our program, as it was before you ever started with us. Our main goal is to push you to success.
We’re housed at Spinnerei, a re-invigorated cultural and art industrial hub in Leipzig. The environment here will inspire you to be your best, day in, and day out.
Startups accepted into our program will receive 6,000€ in free funding from us to help cover your living costs in Leipzig while you are attending our program. Additionally there are prizes available for best pitch and most sustainable idea at our Investors Day, which can bring your total of free money up to 15,000€.
Average Investment Per Startup
SpinLab Startups' Survival Rate
Startups Supported Since 2015
First you should upload your current and up-to-date pitch deck as a PDF (10-15 slides) or pitching video (7-10min).
Your pitch should include all typical information (What is the problem? What is your solution (product or service)? Who are customers? What is the size of the market? Who are competitors? How do you make money? Who are you (team)? Action plan. Financial planning).
Applying to our program is easy and straight-forward. Simply submit your application on f6s.com, a popular international startup platform that is used by many leading accelerators worldwide, before the above-stated deadline.
Nobody said it was easy. We're looking for the world's brightest and most driven entrepreneurs to come to Leipzig so we can help you smash your goals and elevate to the next level. But we won't take just any old startup through our coveted doors. Check out the requirements below.
We expect all applying startups to have a complete founding team of 2-4 founders, with all crucial skill sets and necessary experience, already in place. Teams must have business level fluency in German OR English.
Your startup's idea and concept should be truly outstanding, unique, and most importantly, scalable. We're looking for companies that have the potential to be the next European Unicorn.
We're not looking for founders who want things to come to them easy. We're going to invest 100% into you, so we expect founders to have the passion, energy, willingness, and drive to make their startups come to life.
Your startup should ideally be in the pre-seed or expansion phase. But we are also looking for mature startups: Find out how to benefit from our program the most.
The SpinLab has a focus on startups that are developing concepts in the areas of eHealth, Smart City, and Energy and are somehow technology-based. Hardware, IoT, Apps, SaaS are some of the things we love!
Startups applying to our program should have acquired less than a total of 1 Million USD in revenue from all sources (Investments, Customer Acquisition, etc).
If you are an excellent team of passionate and entrepreneurial founders with a scalable, technology-based concept, in the later pre-seed, seed, or expansion phase, we want you in our program! One founding team member must be fluent in business level English, as our demo day is conducted entirely in English, including the startup pitches.
Early pre-seed projects will only be chosen in exceptional cases.
We came from Munich to Leipzig and were happy about this young, inexpensive city in which we immediately felt welcome. Through the great support by SpinLab we made rapid progress, built three prototypes and found our third co-founder Martin. The support of our mentor Prof. Kirchgeorg opened up many doors and we got into contact with many potential customers.
For Texlock, the time at SpinLab was the foundation to grow our idea into a company that, 2 years after market launch, has 20 employees and makes several million Euros in sales per year. We were particularly impressed with the high standards the SpinLab founders set for the professionalism and performance of the teams. Our learning curve was immensely steep - and the feel-good factor of the industrial architecture was unmatched. Thanks for the jump start and all the best for you and all new teams!