TEN Habitat

TEN Habitat is the brainchild of its founder, Selwyn Cambridge who started his own venture more than 20 years ago. His experience led him to do something to help other entrepreneurs avoid the hardships and hurdles he encountered. And in 2009 the first iteration of The Entrepreneurial Network (TEN) was created. After several revisions, in 2015 a more robust TEN Habitat was introduced to entrepreneurs. The result is a comprehensive system designed to build sustainable ventures with the ability to scale and attract investment.

Today TEN Habitat is a Barbadian based, Caribbean-focused, startup community and non-profit organization designed exclusively to nurture innovative ideas to help the creators of those business ideas gain funding and scale. The programme today, is part funded by the Inter-American Development Bank and the European Union, along with CIBC First Caribbean International Bank. It has been

developed around the concept of a nurturing habitat by providing entrepreneurs with all of the essential support and networks to build, fund and grow their businesses in a sustainable and cohesive manner.

Supported by a global network of experts, programmes and institutions, the organisation is able to build strong communities of support around entrepreneurs and their ideas to foster growth. TEN Habitat runs the Caribbean region’s only Hybrid Accelerator for businesses and uses technology to enhance innovative and scalable ideas that create lasting impact on existing and burgeoning economic sectors. It runs an entrepreneur-focused 4000 Sq Ft co-working space which brings together founders at all stages in the same space to learn from each other and build effective support networks. The space also is able to provide entrepreneurs with cost effective office space, meeting space and mentorship. The orgaisation also created and stages in Barbados every year the Caribbean Startup Summit which brings together founders and business experts from across the globe to share ideas, experiences and insights with Caribbean entrepreneurs.

Continuing in its work to build a robust and highly effective startup eco-system, TEN Habitat launched the first and only code academy in the Eastern Caribbean. The Source Code Developer Academy delivers an in-person immersion into coding that equips from non-coders to advance level developers with software development skills enhanced with entrepreneurship integration. Its focus is to use the process of startup acceleration to shape passionate coders with immersive training to meet industry needs and improve the quality of talent on the tech scene within very short periods of time. It combines the startup acceleration process used in at the TEN Habitat hub to create a Stacked Learning approach. With this approach, students are introduced to a new topic each day while adding to their understanding of previous concepts. The Academy is able to produce software engineers and developers is 22 short weeks and web developers and Full-Stack Developers in even shorter periods.