Disney's Startup Accelerator Is About More Than Accelerating Startups

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In 2013, David Min came to Disney CEO Bob Iger with a big idea. Min, a founding partner at Disney’s investment arm, Steamboat Ventures, was now head of innovation for the entire company. He had concluded that something fundamental needed to be done about Disney’s relationship with the tech industry.

“We—meaning The Walt Disney Company—didn’t really have a very good reputation at the time for working with startups,” he remembers. Tech accelerators such as Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Techstars were changing how high-potential concepts got their shot at becoming thriving businesses. I thought Disney might learn something by investing in such an accelerator.

Iger’s take: That idea wasn’t big enough. “His response to me was like, ‘Why would we do that?—we should just do it ourselves,’” remembers Min.

So Disney did. The entertainment and media behemoth launched its own accelerator, partnered with Techstars to get it rolling, and gave it the most logical possible name: Disney Accelerator. In 2014, it unveiled its first cohort of 11 startups.

Eleven years later, corporate accelerators within large companies are no longer such a daring notion. Actually, they’re quite common. But Disney’s take on the idea has had time to grow well beyond its origins as an exercise in reputational repair.

On Wednesday, Disney Accelerator held its 2025 demo day on the Disney studio lot. The event served to introduce this year’s cohort of four startups: animation studio Animaj, microdrama producer DramaBox, 3D printer Haddy, and 3D projection company Liminal Space.

Bonnie Rosen and David Min (Photo: Courtesy of Disney)

The Disney employees who gathered at the studio’s Main Theater to watch a video presentation about this year’s cohort and then mingle with this year’s startups and alumni companies in person came from across the company’s myriad enterprises, including movies, broadcasting, theme parks, cruise ships, consumer products, and beyond. They represented a fraction of the almost 600 staffers who now engage with the accelerator program year-round.

“We had people all the way from facilities and maintenance to the chairman of that division coming in for this one particular company,” says Disney Accelerator general manager Bonnie Rosen, whose résumé includes time at Techstars as well as a startup that was part of Disney’s 2015 cohort. “Those types of vertical conversations happen within each division.”

More than any other long-lived Hollywood titan, Disney prides itself on being innovative to its core. It’s an understandable badge of honor given that Walt Disney himself embraced advances such as the talkies, Technicolor, and TV as they came along, making each fundamental to the way his namesake company entertained the world. Today, it’s usually no mystery why Disney was intrigued by any given company among the 60-plus that have been through its accelerator program.

At demo day, for example, Liminal Space showed off its technology in the studio’s Stage One building, where the original Mouseketeers filmed The Mickey Mouse Club in the 1950s. It projects particularly crisp, vivid 3D video that can be viewed using simple polarized glasses. It can also be interactive: One of the demos involved ‘s of the Galaxy’s Rocket Raccoon bantering with attendees. Liminal’s system isn’t currently in use at Disney’s parks, but it seems like a natural.

Liminal Space’s 3D projection technology is far more impressive in person than in a flat image like this. (Photo: Harry McCracken)

As for Animaj, it’s what Disney itself was in the beginning: a small but ambitious animation studio. Like Toonstar, which I recently profiled, the Paris-based company has built its own software platform that uses AI to help creators figure out which stories will resonate with audiences and then expedite the process of turning them into animation. In this case, they’re stories for little kids.

Paris-based Animaj produces kid-friendly animation using its own software platform. (Photo: Courtesy of Animaj)

“The vision that we have with all of our properties is to turn them into global franchises with all the different layers,” Antoine Lhermitte, the company’s CTO, told me. “So we start on YouTube. Then we create a premium production (version) to sell to linear platforms, digital platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, etc. Then we layer in consumer products, and then, if the traction continues, the idea is to go to theaters.” Lhermitte says he’s hopeful the accelerator might lead to Animaj and Disney creating content together; the startup doesn’t want to be a service provider that just licenses its software to other studios.

Then there’s Haddy. At first blush, it might seem a bit of an outlier in the Disney Accelerator portfolio. The Florida-based company counts military, maritime, and furniture among the verticals it’s pursuing for its 3D printing technology, which tariffs have made newly enticing as a way to bring manufacturing back to the US But the same factory that can crank out a 3D printed boat can also produce a full-size, real-world replica of King Louie’s throne from The Jungle Book—and has, as an experiment for Disney’s Imagineering theme-park designers. (It took about 20 hours to print.)

Furniture 3D-printed in Haddy’s factory (Photo: Courtesy of Haddy)

Haddy was already working with Disney when it was invited to join this year’s accelerator program. The company has networked with around 200 Disney executives as a result of this association, and has found that the experience redounds to the benefit of its other businesses, and vice versa. “You’re always learning,” says head of sales Erin Smith. “A boat that we print for Brunswick boats, for example, makes us more experienced and smarter when we print a boat for the Disney Jungle Cruise.”

The fact that Haddy is well down the path of applying its technology to fields not at all tied to its Disney association reflects the accelerator’s investment strategy, which has evolved over time. At first, it focused on early-stage startups and offered each one a standard $120,000 investment (the same figure once offered by Y Combinator). Eventually, however, Disney concluded that it was better off striking bespoke deals with growth-stage startups—ones whose future wouldn’t be overly skewed by Disney’s stake and the potential to sign up the company as a customer.

These further-along businesses “aren’t reliant on Disney for the health of their business development pipelines,” says Min. “Disney is a pillar of what they’re trying to accomplish, but it’s one of many things, and we encourage that.”

Which is not to say that even startups that are already booming can’t benefit from being well-connected at Disney. ElevenLabs is best known for its ability to turn real people’s voices into uncannily accurate synthesized speech. When it joined the accelerator’s 2024 program, it had fewer than 100 employees but was already a unicorn. Now it’s at 350 people and is still hiring, and the contacts it’s made within Disney remain valuable. “Sports, film, TV—we’re talking to all of them, because each of those divisions could use our product in so many different ways,” says head of partnerships Dustin Blank. “The conversations are always super interesting.”

In one case, the accelerator welcomed a company that was already a venerated institution, an unorthodox arrangement that seemed to have worked out well for all involved. When Epic Games—the creator of Unreal and the game development platform based on it—joined the 2017 Disney Accelerator program, it was more than 25 years old and on the cusp of releasing something called FortniteThe massive multiplayer game went on to truly epic success. In 2024, the two companies announced a partnership involving Disney taking a $1.5 billion stake in Epic and collaborating with it on new games based on Disney franchises.

Like anyone investing in startups, Disney aims to see a financial return from its accelerator’s portfolio. It also clearly sees the potential to apply some of the technologies it learns about to keep its many businesses growing. (CFO Hugh Johnston spoke as part of the demo day’s video, during a presentation that name-checked the company’s cofounder and original bean counter, Roy O. Disney, almost as often as his younger brother.) Min’s original goal of bolstering the company’s perception among techies remains crucial as well.

Yet another goal is allowing Disney to help shape the future of technology. Consider robotics, a hot topic at the moment that Rosen mentions when I ask her about emerging technologies that Disney Accelerator cares about (besides AI, of course). She notes the challenges a free-range Disney bot faces, such as safely weaving its way around theme-park visitors and food carts. But she also says the company might make a contribution to figuring out how to make robots more personable.

“It’s that personality part where Disney creatives are uniquely positioned to (initiate) a real momentum shift in how robotics are thought about,” she says. “Those are areas that are very exciting, and we wouldn’t look at them in the same way that the broader market is.”

Given that the company happens to have more than 60 years of experience in getting humans to bond with robots—dating to when Disneyland got its Enchanted Tiki Room and Mr. Lincoln first read the Gettysburg Address at the 1964 New York World’s Fair—it’s not an idle claim. And it’s one no mere stripling of a startup can match.

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