Intelak is the Emirates Airlines startup accelerator in the UAE, backing aviation, travel and tourism startups. In 2025 it had four weeks to build a pipeline of seed-stage deep-tech founders in niche aviation verticals.
Growth Rhino built the founder list from Crunchbase data and qualified it in Clay. Our team ran the outreach by LinkedIn and cold email, and Intelak brought us back for 2026.
Intelak needed seed-stage deep-tech founders in niche aviation, travel and tourism verticals, from markets outside the UAE. Each one had to fit the program before anyone contacted them.
We pulled about 7,000 startups from Crunchbase and qualified each one in Clay, reading company websites, founder LinkedIn profiles and public news. A GPT pass scored each startup against Intelak's program criteria, leaving 3,000 qualified founders. Our team reached them by LinkedIn and cold email. 164 companies showed interest and were invited to information sessions about the program.
For the April to June 2026 intake, Intelak hired our team for a second round of founder scouting and recruitment.
Intelak's 2025 round produced 48 full applications from the 164 interested companies, inside a six-week engagement.
Intelak's 2026 round, April to June, brought in ~70 applications, 58% of the program's intake. That makes ~118 applications across both rounds.
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