ePowerhouse Helps Entrepreneurs Find Cofounders, Mentors, and Investors

Kira M. Newman Nov 30, 2012 Tweet

Most accelerators give startups intensive help for a few months, then send them off into the world. ePowerhouse, a startup based in Boston, wants to give startups a long-term helping hand.

ePowerhouse is a social network. You can create a startup profile, then post what you’re looking for: cofounders and team members, investors, or mentors. Then you can search other members by location or area of expertise.

“Entrepreneurship is all about looking for the right connections to help you succeed,” says cofounder David Zhou.

Zhou was inspired to start ePowerhouse by his time at MassChallenge, a startup competition and incubator in Boston. It was a valuable experience but ended all too soon, and Zhou’s team was still in need of more connections and publicity. He studied the shortcomings of other startup accelerators, and came up with an outline for ePowerhouse.

With over 120 startups using the platform today, ePowerhouse hopes to sign up more by extending their suite of services. In the future, they plan to recommend specific mentors to startups, and help them expand overseas. The cofounders have a diverse background – Zhou is from China, Jaideep Advani from India, and Fady Saad from Egypt – and they’ve already started to connect entrepreneurs to mentors and investors in those countries.

And startups aren’t the only ones in need of connections. ePowerhouse was just crowned a finalist for the City of Boston’s Technical Assistance Challenge, and they will be building a new website for the city that helps any small business find volunteers, experts, and investors.

The services ePowerhouse provides are already available elsewhere, but separately: you can find cofounders on FounderDating, mentors on Clarity, and investors on AngelList. Will bringing it all together make them a powerhouse? We’ll have to see.