CEO Sam Davidson today told VNC that Nashville Entrepreneur Center currently has no plans for further iterations of the nonprofit's cohort-centered Project Fintech accelerator in 2026 or beyond.
He explained that the long-anticipated end of a federally funded grant that the EC had obtained via Launch Tennessee has led the EC to decide to shift away from offering an intense 12-week accelerator cohort in Spring 2026.
Thus, Davidson said the EC will instead convene ad hoc an array of fintech-centric panels, industry gatherings, social meetups and related "one-off" events. He plans to announce details in the coming week.
"If we had the funding, we'd do it again," said Davidson, adding that re-commiting to the fintech accelerator would require grants from one or more sources that would be certain to total at least $200K per year, for three consecutive years.
Asked whether, apart from the ending of the LaunchTN grant, the accelerator initiative had been worth continuing, Davidson immediately responded, "Program content and cohort participants were always top notch."
The most recent fintech cohort is listed here.
Davidson said EC efforts to recruit other grants for the Project Fintech cohort accelerator have thus far proven unsuccessful, due in part to the "changing funding landscape." He added that "the funding environment for nonprofits is very tough, right now."
There may be a rough parallel to all this in the history of the EC's launch and eventual downscoping of the Project Music accelerator, which was formed in 2014, activated the following year, and reduced to ad hoc program status by year-end 2021.
Music-industry icon Joe Galante was and likely remains one of the greatest advocates for Music industry innovation and entrepreneurship.
In addition, almost from the start, Project Music attracted support from Country Music Association, Creative Artists Agency, Vector Management, Ryman Hospitality Properties, Universal Music Group, Spalding Entertainment, DevDigital, Red Light Management, as well as Galante Entertainment.
See these VNC stories related to the fate of Project Music: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Davidson has several times previously said that he monitors closely the music, sports, entertainment and other elements of the "attention-economy" sector, thus the fate of Project Music, by whatever name, seems to remain a live ball.
NOTES
LaunchTN confirmed today the exhausted grant had been made under the Federal Build to Scale program.
In spring 2015, Venture Nashville teamed with Bay Area fintech advisor Steve McLaughlin and Nashville's Joe Maxwell, who later founded FINTOP Capital, to host a special fintech event at the EC that was designed to gauge local interest in some type of fintech initiative. See reports here and here.
It was about seven years later that, with the help of Maxwell and others, the EC launched Project Fintech. Queried today by VNC, Maxwell said he was unaware of plans to set aside the cohort accelerator program.
Lest it go unacknowledged, since the 2016 launch of the EC's Project Healthcare, the existence of that accelerator has seldom, if ever been in doubt, due largely to the Greater Nashville region's shares of health- and healthcare-related expertise, capital, education and employment.
Indeed, with the EC's Project Healthcare's 10th Anniversary looming in 2026 and what seems a very strong accelerator cadre now at work, Project Healthcare seems to reflect the validity of accelerator models.
Those accelerator models have evolved and mutated quite a bit since the founding of sector-agnostic Y-Combinator in Boston in 2005, 14 years before its headquarters relocated to San Francisco.
Y-combinator is sector agnostic. However, it lists 562 businesses among the best of the larger pool of healthcare startups it has funded. VNC
. last edited 1619 6 December 2025