Over 500,000 startups are born in the UK each year, and it’s fair to say that these startups have access to plenty of support during the early days of their business. However one area where support is still perhaps patchy is in how later stage startups can make the shift from selling to SME’s to acquiring corporate clients.

Step forward Momentum London, a 3 month growth programme set up to help later stage B2B or B2B2C startups learn how to build relationships with corporate clients and validate targeted markets through corporate engagement.

The 3-month programme recognises the challenges many startups face when looking to acquire corporate clients during their growth stage. Some of these challenges are because of the lack of enterprise experience within a team but much of it comes down to the inherent nature of the corporate world.

Long sales cycles, navigating corporate complexity, lack of insight re internal processes, lack of access to key stakeholders, the list goes on. Enterprise engagement done poorly can have a huge impact on cashflow and ultimately be the demise of your startup, but the reward when done correctly is huge growth.

“After talking with hundreds of startups and large enterprise leaders, we’ve realised it's difficult for startups to validate different market opportunities and decide where to focus. At Momentum we bring startups and large enterprises together with the aim to bridge this gap to ensure a stronger business ecosystem is in place,” says Programme Director, Ricardo Simard

March 13th saw the launch of the Spring 2017 cohort – 10 later stage startups have been selected to join the Momentum London programme and develop market validation with some of the world’s largest corporates:

Applied  Blockchain  is  a  full  stack blockchain  applications  development and consulting firm. Using their Mantle technical framework, the company develops cross-industry blockchain  solutions for  both  startup  and  corporate clients.

Avvoka is a contract creation, workflow and analytics tool, transforming sales agreements in the cloud, enabling businesses to close deals in record time.

AVORA is a business performance platform for everyone. It improves a business's focus on commercial excellence and reduces cost of data storage, hosting and reporting.

DevicePilot provides live status dashboards, operational analytics and the ability to automatically remedy problems in live IoT device estates, allowing organisations to strengthen customer service reputation and reduce operational service time and costs.

Digitteria provides users and enterprises with easy to use, personal information management solutions that decentralise and equitably distribute the power of users’ personal information.

Divido is a 'Finance as a Service' provider; a platform for merchants, lenders and intermediaries that want to offer instant instalments as a payment option. Retailers that start to offer instant finance increase footfall, basket size and conversation rates.

NuCypher  is a security and encryption platform for organisation's big data platforms (namely Hadoop, Kafka, and Spark), whether on-premise or in the cloud. Unlike existing security and encryption tools, NuCypher doesn't require tradeoffs between security, performance, and functionality.

SentiSum is a technology startup which is leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Big Data to help enterprises gain competitive advantage. Our current focus is to help our clients reduce customer churn, improve user engagement and brand monitoring.

The future of regulation and compliance demands a shift in the way we operate. Waymark Tech offers a platform that breaks regulations down by turning the complex into prescriptive actions, leveraging the latest in natural language processing to deliver at a speed, scale and cost not currently possible using manual methods.

We Love Work is a hiring app that predicts culture fit and measures values alignment between individuals and teams. It can be used to benchmark the values and motivations of top-performing employees and predict candidates who are the best fit for the company culture.

Over the course of 12 weeks the teams will take part in several sessions that will help validate their proposition with industry verticals, understand corporate pain points and start conversations around commercial opportunities.

This ensures startups identify opportunities or roadblocks within industries, shape future product iterations and accelerate relationships with key stakeholders. The Spring cohort started on 13th March 2017 and concludes with Demo Day on 8th June 2017.

Applications for the Summer cohort will open in mid April for the fee only, zero equity programme. You can register your interest for the next Momentum London programme here.