Brilliant Lab (BL) is a startup accelerator services provider founded in 2011 by 2 Kuwaiti MBA graduates from IE business school (“IE”), Madrid, Spain. IE is one of top ranked universities by many ranking agencies including Financial Times, Forbes and Business Week ranking systems. Brilliant Lab's main aim is to help foster the growth of entrepreneurs and new family ventures in Kuwait and the GCC
countries. We believe that we have a plan and a journey ahead which will take us to be the biggest Entrepreneurship HUB in the Arab world. The founders, Neda Al-Dihany and Abdullah Al-Hassawi, enjoyed successful careers in their respective fields, where Abdullah started his career in 2005 in the Investment sector dealing with Asset Management, Valuation and Corporate Finance. While Neda dealt with business development in a major projects in both Educational and Oil sectors. The latest addition to the team was the IE Business School graduate Ms Fatima AlMattar, who comes from a background of Wealth Management, Sales & Marketing. Our global acceleration program has an association with significant multinational bodies such as “WAYRA”, Mind The Bridge, IE Business School, Stanford University and UC Berkeley. All these well known institutions have embraced the entrepreneurial spirit as a core value and are considered as an international reference in the field of entrepreneurship.
1- In early 2012, we’ve organize a program called “Pitch it “, the first acceleration program in Kuwait in association with the American University in Kuwait (AUK). The program, which had 22 participants, focused on the best way to present your business plan.
2- Brilliant Lab played a strategic partner role with Zain, a leading Kuwaiti Telecom Company, to manage one of the biggest entrepreneurial incubation programs in Kuwait which was from January 2013 until October 2013. The goal of the program was to unlock the participants’ potential by exposing them to the international entrepreneurship world. Zain Great Idea (ZGI) was launched to incubate 35 top Kuwaiti startups to enroll them in Brilliant Lab’s acceleration program, which had 4 different stages:
• Business components crash course
• Coaching and consulting business plans
• Prototype and applying concept realty checks
• Pitching their business
The program concludes with a Demo Day, which is the “Matching Point” between entrepreneurs and investors. All participants then prepare their final pitch and prototypes to address the audience. The audience is a mixture of investment firms, angel investors, media as well as the general public; this will ensure that the participant gets the exposure he needs to grow their business.
3- In April 2013 we have been invited to Blackberry acceleration program in San Francisco as testimonials from the MENA, where the founder of Brilliant Lab spoke at the opening of the program about the entrepreneurship experience in the Middle East.
4- Our latest launched initiative is program, which is is a Kuwaiti social initiative that aims to incubate Kuwaiti online and mobile apps startups in order to give them an exposure to the international standards applied in the world of Tech startups in Silicon Valley, which is a major city for online startups such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Google among many others. The aim is for entrepreneurs to be to reshape their business models according to the top standards. The program will also give the opportunity for those startups to pitch their business to a wide range of investors at the end program period.
