Twelve weeks of your life for a line on a slide that says Google product credits or a demo day in front of a room you didn't build. That's the actual trade. Most founders evaluating these programmes ask the wrong question, which is 'is it legit,' when the question that matters is 'what specifically do I walk away with on day 85 that I didn't have on day 1.' Three programmes in our catalogue take no equity at all. A much longer list takes equity but the cheque is the least valuable thing they hand you. Treat those as two different decisions.
The three that genuinely take nothing
Equity-free doesn't mean free. It means the cost is entirely your time and attention, not your cap table.
- Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First Latin America gives equity-free support, Google product credits, and the option to apply separately for cloud credits on top. No cash, no cap table line, rolling-style eligibility.
- NVIDIA Inception gives free cloud credits and preferred pricing on GPUs and software, explicitly no cash grant, rolling intake year round with no cohort deadline to miss.
- Together AI Startup Accelerator gives tiered platform credits: up to $15K at the Build tier, up to $30K at the Scale tier, and up to $50K at the top tier. No equity ask at any tier.
What "no money" actually buys you
If you're an AI company burning cloud spend before you have revenue, NVIDIA Inception's GPU pricing and Together AI's $15K-$50K credit tiers are worth more than a cash cheque the same size, because compute credits don't dilute you and a cash grant that size would barely cover a seed lawyer's invoice. The real asset in the Google for Startups track for LatAm founders is narrower and more specific: it's being inside Google's own distribution and support infrastructure for AI startups in a region, which is a door that doesn't open from a cold email. None of these three give you a demo day audience or warm intros to named check-writers, because that's not their model. If what you actually need is investor access, these three won't give it to you no matter how good your pitch is.
The equity programmes where the cheque isn't the point
This is the longer, more interesting list, because the real product being sold is access, and the equity is the price of admission to that access, not a reflection of the cash's size.
- Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator writes a $150K Post-Money SAFE for 6%, with cohorts W'27 and S'27 open. Its NYC base matters more than the cheque if your customers or investors are East Coast.
- a16z Speedrun invests up to $1M and has already deployed more than $180M across over 200 startups, but the figure that actually matters is the cohort, SR008, starting early 2027 in San Francisco, where the a16z partner network does the introducing.
- PearX invests $500K-$2M and runs two cohorts a year, winter and summer, with rolling applications in between, so the waiting-for-the-right-batch excuse doesn't apply here.
- gener8tor Investment Accelerator puts in $100,000 for 7.5% equity on a rolling basis, aimed at founders outside the obvious coastal hubs who need the network more than the capital.
- Capital Factory gives up to $100,000 for 1%, the cheapest equity on this list by far, which tells you the programme is pricing itself as a Texas network play, not a cash play.
- Alchemist Accelerator gives a $25,000 stipend for roughly 5% equity, negotiable, built specifically around enterprise and deep-tech founders who need customer introductions more than seed cash.
- Katapult Accelerator invests €150,000-€500,000 into impact-focused founders, a wide enough range that the number itself tells you less than the sector fit does.
- Conector Startup Accelerator takes 4-7% for the programme plus services, a structure that means you're paying for the services whether you use them fully or not.
The cost nobody puts on the term sheet
Twelve weeks at a cohort programme is not twelve weeks of your calendar, it's twelve weeks of your best hours, the ones you'd otherwise spend closing your first ten customers or shipping the feature that gets you retained. A $100,000 cheque for 7.5% from gener8tor or a $150K SAFE from ERA has a visible price on your cap table. The invisible price is every week you spend rehearsing a demo day pitch instead of running sales calls. Nobody prices that on the term sheet because it's not theirs to price, it's yours, and founders who skip this calculation are the ones who come out the other side of a cohort with a polished pitch and the same six customers they went in with.
How to judge one before you apply
Don't ask the programme what it provides. Ask three alumni from the last two cohorts, specifically, these four things:
- Name one investor or customer introduction the programme made for you that you could not have gotten yourself in a week of cold outreach.
- How many of the named partners or mentors in the programme's marketing did you actually speak with, and for how long.
- Did the demo day audience include people who write checks in your stage and sector, or was it mostly other founders and press.
- Would you do it again knowing what you now know about the time cost versus what came out of it.
Who should skip this entirely
If you already have warm access to the investors you need, a dozen paying customers, and a technical cofounder who can ship without a cohort's structure forcing deadlines on you, none of these twelve programmes are worth the equity or the twelve weeks. Take NVIDIA Inception's rolling, no-deadline credits if you're burning GPU spend, because that one costs you almost nothing to apply for and nothing to hold. Skip Conector's 4-7% or Alchemist's 5% if the service bundle attached to the equity isn't something you'd pay for in cash at that price. The honest test is this: if you'd turn down the cheque at that valuation from an angel with no programme attached, don't take it just because it comes with a cohort and a Slack channel.