An Irvine incubator wants to know why most startups fail, and it’s put no boundaries on finding the answer.
The Hungry Lab, based at the WeWork co-working space in the Irvine Spectrum area, has connections in Singapore, India, Latin America, Europe and Africa. It’s working with 20 startups all over the world, including Orange County, Seattle, Chile, Ghana and Mozambique. Eleven on the roster have their own space at 200 Spectrum.
Its main international partner is Singapore-based Asparagus Sprouts, which uses a private-equity/consulting approach to prepare startups for venture capital investment. It actively mentors and participates in operations, similar to having an investor as a co-founder. It’s currently working with five startups.
“It’s not enough to help entrepreneurs grow their business,” Hungry Lab Chief Executive Bian Li said. “To compete in a fast-changing global ecosystem, we must future-proof them. We are priming startups for long-term, sustainable growth in a dynamic, fast-changing world.”
The global reach exposes the incubated startups to international investors, shares knowledge and best practices, and introduces them to new customers and markets.
Li has an international pedigree, having worked as an investment banker in Chicago and Hong Kong and as a development and innovation consultant in various African countries. She ended up in OC in 2015 after getting a master’s degree in engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Global SCALE Program, short for Supply Chain and Logistics Excellence. She did her research through MIT’s Zaragoza Program in Spain.
She created The Hungry Lab under the auspices of Grow and Scale LLC. The incubator provides entrepreneurs with resources and support, both in-person and virtually. A mobile app is in the works as a personalized “coach on-the-go.”
Li’s lab opened in May. It’s a two-person office of about 90 square feet. The virtual access is what’s really in demand, Li said. It charges a monthly subscription fee for advisory services for entrepreneurs. And it’s incubating seed-stage companies in return for varying amounts of equity, depending on the company’s team, performance and growth potential, as well as market factors.
She didn’t disclose results from the first few months of operation.
Synergy of Spaces
Li met Gustavo Liu, founder and chief executive of Asparagus Sprouts, this year when he was at WeWork visiting a mutual connection, Kagen Atkinson, the co-founder and chief executive of Maxsys AI. That company is creating software that uses AI to analyze large amounts of data and help customers make good investment decisions. It started as an Asparagus Sprouts company with Liu intimately involved as a partner. Since it’s based in Irvine, it’s also an active member of Hungry Lab’s startup community, as Atkinson has spoken at Hungry Lab events and participated in its workshops, Li said.
Li and Liu discovered they had complementary goals and could benefit from partnering. While Liu was still in OC, The Hungry Lab hosted a roundtable on raising global capital, where he shared his insight.
“What was crucial with our compatibility was the global perspective and working experience, early-stage mentorship focus and ecosystem approach,” he said.
Together, Asparagus Sprouts and The Hungry Lab have created global “hubs” to enable their community of startups, investors and advisers to connect, grow and scale.
The Irvine hub was Hungry Labs’ first. With the help of Asparagus Sprouts, it created a second in New York City. The duo plans to work with German-based startups as part of an exploratory market research trip to create a potential European hub at the end of the month. They’ve also started development of a hub in Singapore. Li and Liu are on boards of startups in Latin America, Africa and Europe.
The goal is for both founders and their teams to do joint events in Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong by January, connecting local investors and businesses in those places, Liu said.
“This is the first step in building ‘glocalized’ ecosystems within hubs, where greater collaboration, education and investment can take place—a critical mass of investors, startups, vendors and advisers,” Li said.
The Hungry Lab has a growing, vetted vendor network—developed through the hubs—including branding, legal, finance and design services that are localized to each startup’s market. It’s negotiated preferred rates from the vendors for bootstrapped startups, Li said.
The Hungry Lab will also serve as a pipeline for investment opportunities for Asparagus Sprouts’ investment fund, Liu said. Asparagus Sprouts hopes to raise a $500,000 fund by the second quarter for a select number of promising seed-stage companies, Liu said. The first fund will intentionally be small in order to focus on investing in a select number of qualified, seed-stage startups, Liu said.
Global Reach
The India connection is with the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation. The foundation focuses on opportunities for poor women in rural areas. Swaminathan, a renowned Indian scientist, received the World Food Prize in 1998. It’s an international award recognizing achievements of those who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food.
The Latin America connections are with EARTH University in Costa Rica and ProChile, the export promotion bureau of the Chilean government.
Earth University is a four-year accredited school where students come from all over the world to learn about sustainability and entrepreneurship, including offering a master’s degree in agribusiness innovation.
The relationship was cemented last month after Li met with the university’s first president, Jose Zaglu. Their joint goal is to educate entrepreneurs in Latin America, focusing on “uplifting rural livelihoods by empowering entrepreneurs and sustainable businesses with a social impact,” Li said.
She’s in the midst of creating custom workshops that The Hungry Lab will deliver when it makes its first trip to Costa Rica, which is planned for next year.
The European and African connections include similar alliances.
Co-Parenting
Li and Liu are on each other’s advisory boards, and “co-parents” to their startups, from fundraising through growth stage. One startup that Asparagus Sprouts is incubating is Bikelite, founded by Paulina Barre. It’s essentially Waze for cyclists. It leverages the power of crowdsourced data to make streets safer for cyclists via an app. Waze is a GPS navigation software that works on smartphones and tablets with GPS support and provides turn-by-turn navigation information and user-submitted travel times and route details. Waze Mobile Ltd. was acquired in 2013 by Google.
