photo credit: Aidan Jones

Incubators (or business incubators) are programs aimed to accelerate the growth of entrepreneurial companies by providing them with an array of business resources and services. Incubators may vary in the style in which they deliver these services, in the type of clients they serve or the organizational structure they have.

Incubators are especially dedicated to growth and development of start up companies. Research and Technology parks on the other hand support large scale projects that support everything from corporate, government or university labs to very small companies.

A successful incubator I would like to mention here is Y incubator launched by Paul Graham in 2005. It has funded over 60 startups and still continues to inspire many others. The model followed by Y incubator has been imitated widely through out the world and hence there are many incubators around the world offering good services and seed funding to startups.

If you’re a startup founder looking for seed funding, here are a few incubators suggested by ReadWriteWeb: Y Combinator, TechStars, SeedCamp, Summer@Highland, Launch Box, Bootup Labs etc. For more details on this please visit

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/guide_to_seed_fund_incubators.php

While Graham may not like it, there are a large number of start up incubators following the model he created with Y Combinator and handing out microinvestments in web startups in return for a small stake.