Recent years have seen the emergence of entrepreneurial acceleration as a means for linking innovative start-ups to resources and training. While sharing common characteristics, entrepreneurial acceleration programs differ across and within ecosystems. To address this issue, we inductively looked for differences across programs to find systematic evidence of variations in their overall design and approach to entrepreneurial acceleration. Grounded on the strategic management literature, nine characterizing variables and four major types of acceleration programs were found. The closing section of the paper addresses the implications for future.