Venture capital firm Solidus Co. has created a microfund to support Middle Tennessee entrepreneurs in the very early stages of business formation.

The fund, called JumpStart Foundry, will provide $15,000 each to between 10 and 14 entrepreneurs over the next year. Each selected executive will be teamed with three experienced mentors from a group of 18 participating entrepreneurs and receive special assistance with business services such as marketing and accounting.

The goal is to help accelerate the success of promising business ideas that fall into an “early-stage funding gap.”

“Traditional venture capital funds require investments to be at least $1 million to $5 million in size. This amount of capital is often much more than an entrepreneur can effectively utilize at the very early stage of concept development,” said Solidus President Townes Duncan in a statement.

(Disclosure: Solidus is a major shareholder in SouthComm Inc., the parent of NashvillePost.com.)

Solidus developed the concept over the past few months through discussions with JumpStart’s 18 founding entrepreneurs. The group drew upon similar funding/incubator models such as Y Combinator in Mountain View, Calif., and Tech Stars in Boston, Boulder and Seattle, to create the Nashville concept.

Christopher Parks, co-founder of change:healthcare and one of JumpStart’s founding members, explains that as the economy got worse over the last few years, it became more difficult for first-time entrepreneurs or those with smaller projects to find funding. A lot of investment capital was being funneled into bigger, more established companies and it became harder for people to call upon their friends, families and banks for start-up money. This prompted many would-be entrepreneurs to leave Nashville, he said.

“There has been a consistent and enormous brain drain of really smart, entrepreneurial, creative, problem-solving people to all these other cities where they have these seed and early-stage investments in little companies with big ideas,” Parks told NashvillePost.com. “That’s why this microfund is so important.”

Also among JumpStart’s founding members are Nashville serial entrepreneur Scott Kozicki, Artist Media Group founder Pinky Gonzales, CentreSource CEO Nicholas Holland, MoonToast’s Marcus Whitney, Nashville Technology Council leader Tod Fetherling, Jeff Cornwall of Belmont University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, and Germain Boer, director of Vanderbilt University’s Owen Entrepreneurship Center.

JumpStart will hold monthly meetings to review entrepreneur pitches and select ideas to fund. The program’s capital is provided by Solidus and some of the group’s founding members. In return, JumpStart gets a 10 percent ownership stake in the common stock of each business.

Though it will consider ideas of all types, Solidus partner Vic Gatto said JumpStart will have a particular interest in technology concepts – ideas like mobile applications, which are growing in popularity and can go far with only $15,000. In fact, JumpStart already has made its first investment in an iPhone application developer, though details of the investment are still forthcoming.

Though $15,000 may seem like a small amount of money for an entrepreneur who’s got little more than a business concept, Parks said it could be plenty to get some companies from concept to a launched business.

“For technology, or leveraging technology, it doesn’t take much money at all,” Parks said.

Plus, JumpStart is forming partnerships with several local organizations that can provide business services, like office space, marketing, legal services and technology at special rates. Believed to be among that first group are co-working firm CoLab, managed services firm Peak 10 and outsourced technology company W Squared.

Boer said the mentoring and expertise of JumpStart’s experienced entrepreneur participants could be far more important than the money and other resources.

“When you’re first starting, there are lots of obvious mistakes you can make that someone who’s already been through this process will help you avoid,” Boer said. He added that the participating entrepreneurs’ experience and connections should help each entrepreneur stretch their $15,000 farther than they might have been able to otherwise.

Looking forward, JumpStart’s founders hope the program will complement other local efforts around entrepreneurship and innovation – like the Nashville Entrepreneur Center and the TNInvestco program – to help make Nashville one of the country’s best start-up communities.

“We’ve got arguably a deeper talent pool than any place on earth for health care and music and content,” Kozicki said. “Why do we not have 50 start-ups in each of those areas trying to change the ways those worlds work? This could be the spark that ignites that.”