CELTA Incubator (Fundação CERTI) — Brazil's First Technology Business Incubator

Fundação CERTI is a non-profit applied-research institute founded in 1984 in Florianópolis, linked to the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC); in 1986 it created CELTA (Centro Empresarial para Laboração de Tecnologias Avançadas), described by the Brazilian incubator association Anprotec as the country's first technology-business incubator.

What it does: CELTA selects early-stage, technology-based startups and gives them infrastructure, mentoring and networking support until they are mature enough to operate independently, at which point they 'graduate' from the incubator.

Results: as of its 35th-anniversary review by Anprotec, CELTA had graduated 118 companies, currently houses 33 resident companies generating roughly 800 direct jobs and about R$67 million a year in combined revenue. Its best-known graduate is RD Station, a marketing-software company sold to Totvs for R$1.86 billion in early 2021 — widely reported as Brazil's first unicorn-scale incubator exit. Anprotec has named CELTA 'Incubator of the Year' four times (1997, 2006, 2011, 2016), the only incubator to win the award that many times, and credits it with inspiring similar incubators in Mexico, Venezuela and Peru.

Why it's a good practice: it shows a single regional non-profit research institute sustaining a technology incubator for close to four decades, with an independently recognised track record and at least one exit of national economic significance.

Read the full analysis: https://celta.certi.org.br/

Read the full analysis: https://celta.certi.org.br/