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"Since its first class started in 2007, TechStars has become one of the most well-known startup accelerators in the United States. Now it's also one of the best funded. The program announced Wednesday that it had raised a new $24 million fund \u2014 and that every new company admitted to the program will now have the option to take an additional $100,000 investment right off the bat.\n\"It's really a new external validation for what we've been doing,\" says CEO David Cohen, who founded the TechStars program in Boulder, Colorado. \"These investors got together and decided they wanted to take every single company we fund ... I think it shows the the maturity of the companies that is coming into the program now.\"\nOne might say that TechStars is all grown up.\nWhile a number of startup accelerators have popped up in the past 10 years, TechStars is arguably the most visible. It is one of the few accelerators that has more than one location, and it has four of them. The first class at its newest location, New York City, is the subject of a six-part documentary series that premiered on Bloomberg TV last Tuesday.\nThe show chronicles what New York City Program Director David Tisch calls a \"three-month, unsustainable, energy-filled, sleep-deprived process of getting your startup from wherever it is to a lot further.\u201D \n\n\n\n\nIt might sound unpleasant, but it's a process that young entrepreneurs are increasingly hungry for. Cohen's first class in Boulder had 302 applicants in 2007. TechStars New York City got about 1,000 applications for 11 spots. The acceptance rate, TechStar's marketing materials are fond of pointing out, is lower than that of Harvard.\nIn a way, TechStars has formed its own Ivy League or, if you prefer, a franchise of programs for startups.  And it's growing. Next year, TechStars is launching a program in San Antonio that will focus specifically on companies working on cloud computing, cloud infrastructure and OpenStack. \nAs with everything else TechStars does, Cohen refers to the new program as an \"experiment.\" His past experiments have worked out quite well. About 80% of the the 104 companies that have been through the program have either received additional funding or become self-sustaining. Eight have been acquired by companies such as AOL.\nCohen chalks up some success of the program to deep roots within the entrepreneurial community. Programs in each city are funded by a pool of local investors, and the program has hundreds of mentors for its small classes of nine to 12 companies. \nThat, and a tough admissions process.\n\"We're quite selective,\" Cohen says, \"so you would expect us to have a better than average startup success rate.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/09/21/techstars-funding/>