This study, which sought to fill significant gaps in Saudi Arabia entrepreneurship research, yielded multiple original findings. For a sample of 31 Saudi ICT startup firms, the study’s goals were to (1) identify primary funding sources and determine the effect of firm and founder characteristics on funding levels, (2) determine the extent to which acceleratorprogramme participation enabled funding, and (3) identify the role of social networks, both accelerator-related and non-accelerator-related, in startup funding efforts, three topics largely unresearched in the Saudi context. Information provided by the founders of 19 accelerator-participant and 12 nonparticipant firms indicated equity sources, particularly venture capitalists and business angels, provided the majority of funding; formal loans from banks, which interviewees cited as difficult to obtain, were few and relatively small; and friends-and-family (i.e., strong-social tie) funding was significant for nonparticipants. Among firm/founder characteristics, firm size (number of employees) and founder’s previous managerial and entrepreneurial experience were positively associated with equity and friends-and-family financing. Relative to the nonparticipant founders’ prior experience, that of the accelerator participants was minimal, meaning they had few or no business-related successes to show prospective funding sources and few business contacts. Thus, primary reasons interviewees provided for enrolling in accelerators were entrepreneurial and managerial training, networking opportunities, and mentoring, which all contributed to their funding efforts. In line with pecking order theory, the training accelerators provided signalled management competence to potential investors, thus alleviating investorentrepreneur information asymmetry. Although social networking was a factor in obtaining equity funding for both participant and nonparticipant entrepreneurs, participants obtained significant amounts through weak ties accessed through accelerator-programme participation, a finding in line with Granovetter’s Strength of Weak Ties. When translated into the firm resource social capital, accelerator-mediated social ties were shown to be valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and nonsubstitutable and so supported the resourcebased view of management.