lvl1 Accelerator
How lvl1 Accelerator uses Runway to know what's happening across its portfolio before a founder has to say a word.
20+
portfolio companies visible in one dashboard
0
spreadsheets chased from founders each month
Before
a founder has to ask — not after they escalate
Overview
lvl1 Accelerator runs a hands-on, pre-seed accelerator program in Chennai, backing early-stage founders (including The Hype Loop) with mentorship, a structured cohort program, and capital. Runway itself is a product of lvl1 Accelerator, built first to solve the accelerator’s own problem: knowing how its portfolio companies were actually doing, financially, without waiting for a founder to raise a hand.
The challenge
Every accelerator hits the same wall once it has more than a handful of portfolio companies: founders are heads-down building, updates arrive late or not at all, and the numbers that do arrive are self-reported, inconsistently formatted, and already weeks old by the time they land in an inbox.
- •Portfolio reviews depended on founders sending a spreadsheet, on their own schedule, in their own format.
- •By the time a startup’s runway problem surfaced in a monthly update, the accelerator had already lost weeks of the window to help.
- •Producing a portfolio-wide health report for a demo day or an LP update meant manually collating a dozen inconsistent spreadsheets.
- •There was no consistent way to compare startups across a cohort — who’s actually growing, who’s burning too fast, who needs a mentor conversation this week rather than next month.
How lvl1 Accelerator uses Runway
One dashboard, every startup, standardised
Every startup in the cohort connects its own payment gateway, accounting tool or bank feed to Runway. The accelerator team sees revenue, burn and runway for the whole portfolio on one screen, computed the same way for every company — so a comparison across the cohort is genuinely apples-to-apples.
Cohort and batch management
Startups are grouped by intake batch or program track, so the team can see a batch’s overall health at a glance, and move a startup between cohorts as it progresses, without rebuilding a tracker.
Signals before the check-in
Because the data updates continuously rather than at the next scheduled review, the team can see a portfolio company’s runway tightening or burn spiking in real time — and start a mentor or bridge-financing conversation while there’s still runway left to act on, rather than after a founder finally sends the “we have a problem” email. Each founder controls what the accelerator can see, and every view is logged, so this happens without anyone feeling watched.
Reports in one click, not one week
Demo day decks, LP updates and program reports that used to take a week of manually collating spreadsheets across a dozen startups now generate from the same live portfolio data in a click.
The impact
Real-time
portfolio view, replacing monthly self-reported spreadsheets
Earlier interventions
runway and burn signals surface while there is still time to act
One click
to produce a portfolio-wide report for demo day or an LP update
The shift isn’t just speed — it’s posture. The accelerator moves from reactive (waiting for a founder to escalate) to proactive (seeing the signal and starting the conversation first). That’s the difference between helping a portfolio company steer around a cash problem, and finding out about it after the runway is already gone.
“The best support we can give a founder is the conversation they didn’t know they needed yet. Runway is what lets us have that conversation in week one of the problem, not week eight.”
lvl1 Accelerator investment team
Why lvl1 Accelerator built Runway this way
This is also why Runway is free for accelerators managing up to five startups, and priced to scale from there: the accelerator’s incentive and the founder’s incentive point the same direction only if neither side has to choose between visibility and trust. Founders keep control of what’s shared; accelerators get the live view they actually need to be useful.