Supporting super-early stage entrepreneurs in Europe appears to be out of the blue in vogue. Again in March, “Challenge 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$10 million fund to again founders aged solely 25 and beneath, riffing on the ‘Peter Thiel Fellowship’ mannequin of outdated. 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 (as compared, Challenge Europe presents on €200,000 for a 6.66% stake). It claims that, on common, alumni have gone on to boost €1million to €11M in the course of the fellowship.
The cash shall be going to 35 entrepreneurs a 12 months who match the mould of “visionaries, technical prodigies, deeply pushed operators, and serial entrepreneurs.”
Fellows will get virtual-first assist, 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 presents its founder-investor community of 128 backers.
Based in 2021, EWOR is run full-time by six entrepreneurs who had been beforehand inside corporations equivalent to 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 thought’ he mentioned EWOR will simply match that providing: “We do two fellowships, ideation and traction. You possibly can actually — like we had a 12 months in the past with the youngest machine studying researcher from Cambridge— haven’t any co-founder, no thought. You can begin at inception, no drawback.”
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 notice or related instrument.
One instance of a beforehand backed startup consists of Side Well being, a startup that was in-built Moldova, raised funding in Silicon Valley and New York, and ended up with a $50M.
Dippold mentioned: “We now have 50,000 candidates in a vector database that understands each intricate element of an individual’s GitHub. So if you should rent an individual with 10,000 traces of code and Rust abilities, I can discover that individual with one question.”
“We run evil like a software program firm, construct measure, Be taught, Construct measure, Be taught, Construct measure, be taught… The one factor that issues is it must be essentially the most helpful factor any founder can presumably do,” he added.
Ten founders have up to now been accepted into this 12 months’s cohort.
They embody UK-based Mark Golab, a 3D printing pioneer making use of the know-how to organ transplants with Cambridge Surgical Fashions, after surviving a life-threatening an infection himself. And Vienna-based Viktoria Izdebezka, who’s engaged on lead technology with Salesy.
Earlier EWOR fellows embody Ricky Knox, who achieved two 9-figure exits with Azimo and Tandem Financial institution; 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.”
