Business accelerator offers $100,000 and mentoring for insurance entrepreneurs

April 17-- Apr. 17--Pooja Shah is offering $100,000 to entrepreneurs who will come to downtown St. Paul or Uptown Minneapolis for 12 weeks and help her improve the insurance industry.

Be warned: Her standards are high. Shah holds a mechanical engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master's degree in engineering management from the the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

These days the former health care analyst with Barclays Capital isn't so much focused on making money as on giving it away. Instead of engineering new systems, she's eager to see entrepreneurs launch startups of their own within a variety of disciplines.

Shah this week was named as a managing director of gener8tor, a business accelerator that, three times a year, invests $100,000 in each of five startups. This is the first time the accelerator, which started in summer 2017, has focused on the insurance industry.

For gener8tor's inaugural insurance class, she's looking for five companies that operate in, or are looking to operate in, some aspect of the insurance field, even if they are only tangentially related.

With financial backing from Allianz Life and Securian Financial, the 12-week OnRamp Insurance Accelerator offers a "concierge experience" for entrepreneurs, matching them up with mentors, technologists, corporate partners and angel investors.

The gener8tor program announced this week that it will be located in co-working spaces at the Osborn 370 building on Wabasha Street in downtown St. Paul and WeWork Uptown on Lagoon Avenue in Minneapolis.

Applications are due April 28. More information is at onlineinsuranceaccelerator.com.

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