Fast Forward Adds Funding to Tackle Silicon Valley's Growing Inequality

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Fast Forward, a San Francisco-based accelerator of tech nonprofits, has raised $5 million in new philanthropic funding from big companies, such as Google.org, Twilio.org, Blackrock, the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Foundation, Okta, PagerDuty, AWS, and GitHub among others.

Fast Forward chooses a batch of early-stage startups that work on addressing and solving large-scale social challenges, such as inequality to housing, education, and healthcare.

The accelerator then helps them scale up their products, reaching a series of three demo days in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and New York City. The company also invests an open $25,000 in each startup.

According to the accelerator's co-founders Shannon Farley and Kevin Barenblat, an emerging pattern is the depth of engagement from tech workers. They have since doubled the number of partners that support them. The partner list now includes more than 40 tech companies. This summer's batch includes 10 startups already.

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