If you lead an innovation hub or entrepreneurship center, you already know that talent and drive are plentiful on campus—yet scaling student and faculty ventures beyond national borders remains painfully hard. A lack of warm introductions to offshore mentors, investors, and corporate partners limits funding, credibility, and market access. The National University of Singapore (NUS) confronted this exact challenge. Despite its world‑class reputation, NUS startups found it difficult to secure the international relationships needed to compete globally. To close that gap, NUS and Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) partnered with the Founder Institute (FI) to give their founders direct access to Silicon Valley’s networks. This article explains the partnership model and how any university or college can replicate it.
Solution: Founder Institute’s Silicon Valley Gateway
The Founder Institute (FI) designed its accelerator to collapse that gap by putting founders face‑to‑face with the people, knowledge, and capital concentrated in Silicon Valley. The program begins with a nine‑day immersion that drops founders into an intense schedule of growth workshops, site visits to top tech companies, and live pitching sessions. Over 300 seasoned mentors, investors, and industry operators pass through these sessions, giving startups rapid‑fire feedback and—crucially—warm introductions.
But FI’s support doesn’t end when the plane touches back down. Each participating startup is matched with a lead mentor from the Valley who meets them weekly to refine business models, polish products, and tailor go‑to‑market strategies for international audiences. A second trip, timed around key investor demo days, deepens those relationships through curated one‑on‑one pitch meetings and strategic‑partnership talks with Fortune 500 innovation teams.
By weaving together immersion, mentorship, and investor access, FI turns geographic distance into an advantage: founders get Silicon Valley density without relocating, while maintaining the cost benefits and local insight of building in Singapore.
Measured Impact: What Happened in 6 months
The immediate impact was visibility: founders demoed to a standing‑room‑only crowd at FI’s San Francisco HQ and fielded questions from angels, VCs, and corporate scouts who rarely look beyond the Bay Area.
By program’s end, five of the twelve NUS startups closed financing or strategic‑partnership deals in the United States, collectively raising more than US $100 million. Beyond the headline numbers, founders report a permanent shift in mindset: product roadmaps now assume multi‑market launches; pitch decks lead with global TAM; and hiring plans include distributed teams. NUS itself has doubled‑down, weaving FI’s mentor network into its on‑campus incubator and positioning Singapore as a launchpad—not the finish line—for world‑class
Why Global Networks Matter
The NUS experience underscores a universal truth: startups that win fastest are those that plug into the right networks earliest. Global mentors compress learning cycles, investors unlock scale capital, and multinational partners open distribution channels that local ecosystems simply cannot match. In an era where procurement managers in Berlin, Shenzhen, and São Paulo can be reached as easily as those in your own city, ignoring international networks isn’t just a missed opportunity—it’s a strategic flaw.
For founders, the takeaway is clear: the moment your solution shows product‑market fit at home, your next milestone should be building the relationships that carry you abroad. FI’s model proves that with structured access to global expertise, even a pre‑seed team can leapfrog incumbents and claim first‑mover advantage on the world stage.
Ready to close your own network gap? Explore the full NUS success story and discover how the Founder Institute can connect your startup—or university cohort—to Silicon Valley’s most valuable resource: its people.
The Founder Institute is the world’s most proven network to turn ideas into fundable startups, and startups into global businesses. Since 2009, our highly-structured accelerator programs have helped entrepreneurs raised over $1.85BN in funding across over 200 cities worldwide.
Learn more about the Founder Institute at FI.co, join an upcoming startup event at FI.co/events, or subscribe to our Insights Newsletter.
