What is "techstars"

Techstars is a mentorship-driven startup accelerator founded by David Cohen, Brad Feld, David Brown, and Jared Polis that holds 13 week programs for startups in Boulder, New York City, Boston, Seattle, San Antonio, Austin, Chicago, LA, Atlanta, Detroit, Minneapolis, London, Tel Aviv, Cape Town, and Berlin . It is considered one of the best startup accelerators in the world. Fewer than 1% of the companies that apply to Techstars are accepted.

As of mid-2016, Techstars has accepted over 800 companies into its program. Collectively, these companies have raised over $2,300,000,000 USD. Program mentors include Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, tumblr CEO David Karp, HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah, and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures.

A notable competing accelerator is Y Combinator, to which it is often compared.