Kiksasa Is Reimagining How Accelerators Operate & Build Startup Communities

After a pivot, Kiksasa’s all-in-one platform is helping accelerators, incubators, and startup programs ditch disconnected tools and scale community impact.

When we first caught up with Kiksasa last summer, the “super app” startup was building a platform designed to help founders streamline their workflows and avoid bouncing between different apps all day. But as the team was building, they realized that their “super app” was resonating with a different part of the startup ecosystem.

Specifically, they saw that Kiksasa could solve major pain points experienced by incubators, accelerators, and startup support organizations.

Those groups often “struggle with a host of interconnected problems that are currently solved with a "hodgepodge" of discrete disconnected systems and operational processes,” Kiksasa Atlanta-based CEO Kelly Flynn told Hypepotamus. For example, a program might toggle between Slack, email, Notion, LinkedIn, Zoom, and internal portals to connect with applicants, participants, mentors and alumni.

Kiksasa brings all those types of work applications into one browser tab. The platform has a list of over 50 integrated applications, making it easier to keep track of important organizational data.

Building Community In One Browser

Importantly, the Kiksasa platform makes it easier to send out announcements and advertise schedules to their entire community with ease.

Flynn, alongside CTO Tim Chalk (both in featured photo above), went through a rapid product pivot, updating the Kiksasa platform to be more organization and enterprise-focused in the span of just five weeks.

“Kiksasa brings a level of alignment, interconnection, and consolidation not available in any other application,” Flynn added. This not only reduces the cost associated with ever-growing SaaS subscriptions, but also it helps with the problems of founder attention, program management, and alumni engagement, all things that startup organizations want to optimize and improve on.

I can also help organizations better connect with peer groups.

“The Atlanta metro ecosystem alone has over 50 incubators, accelerators, and entrepreneurship programs. However, very few of the managers of these programs know their peers in more than 5-10 other programs, which means they have no ability to effectively leverage their collective resources to help each other support the Atlanta startup ecosystem,” Flynn added. “ When these programs are in the Kiksasa Hub, interconnection is a chat away, associations can be maintained, and collaborative work is done in a singular shared environment. Finding each other is just a matter of searching our profile database.”

The new focus on bundling licences for communities has proven successful for Kiksasa’s team. Leading up to the launch of Kiksasa “2.0,” the platform saw a 45% growth in users, attracting organizations like Atlanta Tech Park and Georgia Tech’s Startup Exchange.

“While we still are seeing growth in the number of "traditional" individual users, bundles of users can give us bursts that, while slower to close, add a larger number of users in a single instance,” Flynn added.

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Photos provided by Kiksasa