The Number Missing From Every Accelerator Term Sheet: Follow-On Money for Your Vertical

Seven percent is easy to compare. It sits right there on the program page, next to the check size, and founders line it up across five tabs like grocery prices. But a percentage on its own tells you what you give up, not what you get back. Whether that stake ever pays off depends on whether your company survives to the next round, and that often hinges on a number almost no accelerator publishes: how much follow-on money the program has actually set aside for companies in your vertical.

That is the question this post answers. Equity without follow-on context is half a number.

Why equity alone is half the picture

An accelerator stake is a bet that your company gets bigger. The check you receive at the start buys a few months. What happens after demo day decides whether the bet works for you and for the program.

Here is where vertical matters. A biotech team running wet-lab experiments and a fintech team building a compliance stack are not burning the same money on the same timeline. A program that writes small follow-on checks across every company may be well matched to software and badly matched to a lab. Same equity percentage, very different odds of reaching the next round.

So when you compare two programs at similar terms, the useful question is not "which takes less?" It is "which one has money waiting for a company like mine?"

What we found reading 105 programs' primary documents

Accelerator Atlas reads the accelerator's own documents for 105 US programs across 14 verticals. 102 of them are verified against primary sources. The pattern is consistent: check size and equity are usually published. A budgeted follow-on reserve broken out by vertical almost never is.

Some programs mention a follow-on fund. Fewer say how big it is. We rarely see one that says how much of it is earmarked for climate versus fintech versus biotech.

When a figure isn't in the source, we show a blank rather than a guess. A blank you can trust beats a number you can't, and in this case the blank is itself the finding. If you want the longer version of why stated follow-on promises deserve scrutiny, read Does This Accelerator's Follow-On Promise Actually Mean Anything?.

The glossary, over coffee

If you are a technical founder and these terms feel like legal fog, here is the plain version.

Follow-on

A follow-on is a second investment in your company by someone who already invested. For an accelerator, it usually means putting more money in at your seed or next round, after the program ends. It is optional for them.

Pro-rata

A pro-rata right lets an existing investor buy enough of your next round to keep their ownership percentage from shrinking. The key word is lets. A pro-rata right is permission to invest later, not a promise to. Plenty of term sheets include it, and having the right says nothing about whether the program has the cash or the intent to use it.

SAFE

A SAFE (simple agreement for future equity) is how many accelerators invest. You get money now, and the investor gets shares later, when you raise a priced round. It connects to future money because its value depends on that next round happening.

MFN

An MFN (most favored nation) clause says that if you later give another SAFE investor better terms, this investor can take those terms too. It protects the accelerator's deal. It does not obligate them to put in another dollar.

Notice the common thread: every one of these terms describes rights around future money. None of them guarantees it. Our terms benchmarks show how these clauses show up across programs.

Questions to ask a program before you apply

This is education, not investment or legal advice. Talk to a lawyer before you sign anything. But these questions are fair to ask any program, and a good one will answer them without flinching.

• Is there a dedicated follow-on fund? Not "do you sometimes follow on" but a separate pool of money with a size.
• Has that fund ever backed a company in my vertical? A follow-on record in software doesn't tell a biotech founder much. How to Check If a Vertical Accelerator Has Actually Placed Companies in Your Subsector walks through how to dig.
• Is any of this written down? Ask where. A fund memo, an LP letter summary, a page on the site. Spoken intentions are nice. Documents are better.
• Does a pro-rata right in my SAFE come with any reserved capital behind it? This separates permission from plan.

A note on why we can suggest these: Atlas takes no success-based or funding-tied fees. We make money from flat subscriptions, newsletter sponsorships, and disclosed affiliates, so we have no stake in where you apply or whether you get in.

As you research, look at each program's confidence tier. Every listing is labeled Verified, Secondary, or Unverified, with the source and check-date for each figure. Verified tells you what's confirmed in the program's own documents. Secondary and Unverified tell you what still needs asking. Treat those labels as your question list.

Late October: a last look at terms

The fall application wave is in full swing, and many of you are polishing answers this week. You don't need to rush. You do need enough runway between now and a deadline to email a program and wait for a reply. If a follow-on answer comes back vague, that is useful information, and it's better to have it before you commit time and equity than after.

To operators: print the number

If you run an accelerator, here's an open invitation. Publish your follow-on reserve, ideally broken out by vertical, and Accelerator Atlas will show it with its source and check-date like every other figure we list. Founders are already asking you this question privately. Answering it once, in writing, saves everyone a round of emails.

And if your follow-on is strong for climate or biotech, a published figure is the clearest way to show it. A program confident in its follow-on has every reason to print the number. The ones that don't print it leave founders to draw their own conclusions.

Before your next fall application, open the side-by-side terms comparison at https://acceleratoratlas.com, check which programs in your vertical are Verified, and set deadline alerts so you have time to ask about follow-on money before you commit.