Grindstone Seeks To Accelerate The Growth Of Small Businesses
Grindstone Seeks To Accelerate The Growth Of Small Businesses. Grindstone Accelerator was founded in 2013 with the goal of helping businesses to grow and reach the point of scaling. It is a structured entrepreneurship development programme. It takes South African SMEs with proven traction through an intensive year long review of their strategies and provides them with the necessary support to build a foundation for growth in becoming more investable, sustainable, marketable and exit ready. Grindstone is a structured entrepreneurship development programme that assists high growth innovation driven companies to get the fundamental building blocks in place to scale quickly and become sustainable and fundable.
The company is jointly owned by venture capital fund manager Knife Capital and SME market access company Thinkroom Consulting. The Grindstone Programme selects top twenty innovative scale-ups to provide them with knowledge, networks and funding readiness through growth measurement, gap analysis and deep interventions designed to build a foundation for growth. The company transfers skills, creates relevant business networks and enable these companies to take advantage of market access opportunities.
“Grindstone is a tough, eye opening challenge for an entrepreneur. The facilitators, experts and team enlighten founders to take a reality check on themselves, their teams and business. We have grown as founders and entrepreneurs because of Grindstone, with Farosian experiencing more prosperity over the last 12 months in comparison to the previous four years.” said Farhad Bhyat, co-CEO of Farosian
The company has managed to partner with SA SME Fund, Google for Startups, Knife Capital and Think Room to make sure that the small businesses its working with receive full support to make their business a success. Some of the businesses that have completed Grindstone’s programme are Granite Warehouse Management Systems, Ashanti, Quicklet, iKubu, Lead Robot, Msat Global and Farosian.
Will Green, the programme director at Grindstone said, “We are extremely satisfied with the collaborative efforts of our team, partners and friends from the ecosystem for curating complementary cohorts from more than 200 applications received. We invested significant time and diligence to ensure we can add value to the top 20 entrepreneurs and their ventures in achieving their business goals and growth prospects.”
