Supporting super-early stage entrepreneurs in Europe appears to be out of the blue in vogue. Again in March, “Project Europe” was launched to nice fanfare by podcaster and VC Harry Stebbings with a small $10 million fund to again founders aged solely 25 and underneath, riffing on the ‘Peter Thiel Fellowship’ mannequin of previous. Now a brand new fund hopes to go one higher — however this time with $68 million.
EWOR (shorthand for “entrepreneurship with out threat”) has launched its personal ‘founder fellowship’, committing €60 million, which is able to supply chosen founders €500,000 in capital for a 7% stake (compared, Challenge Europe gives on €200,000 for a 6.66% stake). It claims that, on common, alumni have gone on to lift €1million to €11M through the fellowship.
The cash will likely be going to 35 entrepreneurs a yr who match the mould of “visionaries, technical prodigies, deeply pushed operators, and serial entrepreneurs.”
Fellows will get virtual-first help, with 1:1 mentorship (together with 1 to five hours per week with a ‘unicorn founder’), entry to 2,000 mentors, VCs, and subject material consultants. In contrast, Challenge Europe gives its founder-investor community of 128 backers.
Based in 2021, EWOR is run full-time by six entrepreneurs who had been beforehand inside corporations reminiscent of SumUp, Modify, ProGlove and united-domains: Daniel Dippold, Alexander Grots, Florian Huber, Petter Made, Quinten Selhorst, and Paul Müller.
In a name with TechCrunch, Dippold contrasted EWR’s fellowship providing with Challenge Europe. Whereas the latter trumpeted taking entrepreneurs with ‘simply an concept’ he stated EWOR will simply match that providing: “We do two fellowships, ideation and traction. You’ll be able to actually — like we had a yr in the past with the youngest machine studying researcher from Cambridge— haven’t any co-founder, no concept. You can begin at inception, no downside.”
As a part of the €500,000 funding, this consists of €110,000 from EWOR GmbH and an extra €390,000 from the funding fund through an uncapped convertible word or related instrument.
One instance of a beforehand backed startup consists of Aspect Health, a startup that was in-built Moldova, raised funding in Silicon Valley and New York, and ended up with a $50M.
Dippold stated: “We now have 50,000 candidates in a vector database that understands each intricate element of an individual’s GitHub. So if you might want to rent an individual with 10,000 strains of code and Rust expertise, I can discover that particular person with one question.”
“We run evil like a software program firm, construct measure, Study, Construct measure, Study, Construct measure, study… The one factor that issues is it must be probably the most helpful factor any founder can probably do,” he added.
Ten founders have to this point been accepted into this yr’s cohort.
They embrace UK-based Mark Golab, a 3D printing pioneer making use of the expertise to organ transplants with Cambridge Surgical Models, after surviving a life-threatening an infection himself. And Vienna-based Viktoria Izdebezka, who’s engaged on lead technology with Salesy.
Earlier EWOR fellows embrace Ricky Knox, who achieved two 9-figure exits with Azimo and Tandem Bank; and Tim Seithe, who led Tillhub to a bootstrapped exit at nearly €100M.
EWOR fellow Jörgen Tveit, founding father of Thaleron, added in a press release: “The founders of EWOR are deeply technical and perceive the challenges of constructing a world-changing tech firm.”