ACCEL-KS at Groover Labs
Welcome to the Accelerating Concept to Commercialization in Kansas, or ACCEL-KS, grant program.
We’re glad you’re here!
And if you’re here, it’s probably because you read the announcement that Kansas Commerce has authorized a second ACCEL-KS cohort for 2026-2027, and they’ve selected Groover Labs and KU Innovation Park as partners.
Like last year, Groover Labs’ program will focus on proof-of-concept startups in hardware and software.
We’ll announce a program timeline soon, along with the day the applications will open and close. Then, a Review Committee will evaluate every application.
Some will be selected for an interview.
Winners will be selected from that pool.
Then, the real fun begins. There will be no rest for the weary. Based on last year’s cohort, those founders who engage with the program fully are more likely to see rapid success.
Together, we’ll sprint from the first tranche distribution all the way to the end of the program in July 2027.
This is Groover Labs’ second year partnering with the Kansas Department of Commerce on the program. Last year, we received nearly 70 applications and funded 25 founders who built incredible products in agtech, contech, defense tech, edtech, aerospace tech, AI tech, and more.
You can read more about the 2025-2026 cohort here.
What is Accel-KS?
ACCEL-KS is a proof-of-concept grant program developed by the Kansas Department of Commerce.
The state agency partners with Groover Labs to identify technology startups across the state of Kansas to provide them with grant funding ranging between $5,000 and $25,000 to help them move early-stage concepts and develop them into working prototypes for ready for commercialization.
As part of the program, Groover Labs partners with organizations active in the regional technology startup ecosystem to provide founders with programming and consulting that founders need to prototype and scale their products.
Benefits include:
Comped membership at Groover Labs in either the Maker Lab or hotseat area, depending on what you need
Technical consulting from experts in hardware product development, Go-to-Market strategy, Product-Market-Fit, intellectual property, commercialization strategies, and more
Startup programming for ecosystem support organization with wide-ranging topics from identifying customers to raising capital
Who Can Apply?
Kansas founders from any county and any zip code. We’re looking for products in their early stages of development, but if you’ve got something up and running, we’d like to hear from you, too.
Your product needs to be scalable. We’re saying this now because we know the Review Committee will ask about it.
We’ll fund hardware and software products. If you’re not aware, we have a rapid product prototyping lab inside our building, so, if you’re not sure where to start, don’t fret.
Submit what you’ve got.
But we caution this: ChatGPT or Claude telling you that you’ve got a great idea won’t be enough.
When we meet with founders, we typically ask if they’ve tried to build a prototype. If they haven’t, we suggest they go to the local hardware store, buy some duct tape and bailing wire, and give it shot.
v1 doesn’t have to be perfect. But we need to see that you’ve done more than rip some engineering schematics off an LLM that provides you with inferential concepts. The odds that you’re going to build a Thorium reactor on the moon are low, even if ChatGPT says otherwise.
Same for you, vibe coders.
We’re all for it. Founders from last year’s cohort vibe coded SaaS concepts, won awards, and then hired engineers to rebuild their product concepts. But a website telling us what your SaaS product does is not the same as demonstrating a v1 of your SaaS product doing it.
For complete guidelines on who can apply, click here.
How It Works
The Review Committee will select from the pool of applicants and assign award amounts. You might not receive the total amount you apply for.
They make these decisions to optimize the amount of funding we get to help the greatest number of promising products.
Once selected, the founder will be presented will a contract that includes a Milestone, or a gate they need to reach by or near the midpoint of the project.
The founder signs the agreement (or, if they’re unsure about the Milestone description, they can contact us), and we release the first tranche of funding.
We will then present them with of programming and consulting that they are eligible to engage. They don’t have to choose which programming or consulting sessions to enroll in right away, but by knowing the dates and the nature of the programming, they’ll have an idea of what comes next.