Breakthroughs

Wexler joined Legora, bringing its Fact Intelligence technology to a platform serving 1,500 customers and 100,000 users. Wexler built AI capable of ingesting millions of pages of evidence across complex disputes and investigations, helping lawyers reconstruct what happened, when it happened and why it matters. The acquisition will make that technology an integral part of Legora’s product as the companies work together to redefine legal work.

ZeroEntropy was acquired by Notion. The team had already been working closely with Notion, with its reranking models running in production inside Notion AI and delivering significant improvements in latency. Following the acquisition, the entire ZeroEntropy team is joining Notion, while its models have been made open source under Apache 2.0.

Moongate was acquired by MoonPay. Moongate built embedded wallet and onboarding infrastructure for the Solana ecosystem, helping users create, fund and use wallets through social login, embedded wallets, onramps, swaps and dApp integrations. The acquisition brings that infrastructure into one of the world’s largest crypto payments platforms.

ThinkSono received FDA clearance for ThinkSono Guidance, its AI-powered ultrasound guidance software for evaluating suspected deep vein thrombosis. Backed by Breakthrough Device Designation and multicenter clinical studies involving 1,691 patients across 24 sites, the technology enables frontline healthcare professionals to capture DVT ultrasound exams at the point of care, expanding access to assessment for a condition affecting hundreds of thousands of people in the US each year.

Asteroid launched Asteroid Integrate, giving healthcare companies access to hundreds of pre-built integrations with EHRs, payer portals and government systems that lack modern APIs. The platform enables AI agents to operate across web portals, Citrix environments and Windows desktop applications, covering workflows including scheduling, prior authorization, eligibility, claims and provider enrollment. Asteroid already has more than 250 agents running across 40+ systems and 700,000+ executions.

Familiar, formerly MetaVoice Labs, announced backing from BMW i Ventures as it builds full-duplex speech models for production outbound voice agents. Unlike traditional voice AI systems that rely on sequential speech-to-text, language and text-to-speech models, Familiar’s architecture listens while it speaks, allowing agents to handle interruptions, overlapping speech and conversational cues in real time.

Fundraising updates

OLIX raised a $312M Series B at a $3.3B valuation to build the infrastructure for frontier AI inference. Founded by James Dacombe in London in 2024, OLIX is designing complete rack-scale systems across chips, photonics and networking. Its X-1 platform uses specialised chips connected by light to make frontier AI models faster and more efficient to run. The round included Fundomo, Arm and Hudson River Trading, with existing investors increasing their commitments. OLIX plans to deliver its first systems to customers in H2 2027.

Callosum raised a $100M Seed round led by Atomico to build the platform for heterogeneous intelligence. Callosum is developing infrastructure that orchestrates different AI models across different chips to deliver the best combination of capability, cost and speed for each problem. Alongside the round, the company announced a flagship partnership with Cerebras, new global compute partnerships and became the first-ever investment from the UK Sovereign AI Fund.

Syntetica raised a $30M Series A to scale its nylon recycling platform and bring its technology to industrial production. The round was led by the Ecotechnologies 2 fund, managed on behalf of the French government by Bpifrance, with participation from SWEN Capital Partners, lululemon, MAS Holdings, EQT Ventures and several family offices. Syntetica is developing technology to recycle Nylon 6 and Nylon 6,6, two materials that are difficult to separate from post-consumer textile waste.

Peripheral raised an $8.7M Seed round, co-led by Inovia Capital and Deloitte Ventures, to bring spatial intelligence to live sports. The company applies technology developed for self-driving cars to live video, turning footage into photorealistic 3D environments where viewers can move around the action and watch from any angle. Peripheral is already working with the Toronto Raptors, recently surpassed 2M views on one of its demos and plans to launch its first consumer product later this year.

Build.inc raised an $8.5M Seed round led by Index Ventures to accelerate industrial infrastructure development with AI. Build automates the complex pre-construction work behind large-scale infrastructure projects, including site sourcing, technical due diligence, power assessment, early design and permitting. The platform has already been deployed across more than 100 projects in 15 countries for governments, Fortune 500 companies and institutional real estate groups.

Uncovr raised a $7M Seed round led by Index Ventures to build the system of intelligence for surgery and endoscopy. Uncovr automatically generates operative reports and procedural coding from surgical video and intraoperative workflow data, helping hospitals improve documentation, reimbursement and coding accuracy. The company is already working with leading hospitals and surgical robotics companies across the US and Europe, with a deployment pipeline covering 400 operating rooms.

EverSettled raised a $5M Seed round led by Emergence Capital to help families across the US navigate estate settlement with less confusion, cost and burden. Its AI-native platform guides families through the process, answering questions and taking action on their behalf around the clock across all 50 states. The company is already supporting thousands of families.

Juno Bio raised $3.8M from investors including Ada Ventures, Artesian and Illumina Accelerator, alongside the opening of its first sequencing lab built entirely for women’s health. Juno Bio has built one of the largest repositories of vaginal microbiome data and is using it to help women access more precise testing and treatment. Its new Oakland facility marks the next step in expanding access to clinically relevant microbiome testing.

Rig raised a $2.8M pre-Seed round to unblock companies’ internal data. Rig is building secure infrastructure to connect company databases to AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor, then enable teams to build applications and agents on top. The platform acts as a traffic controller between AI systems and internal data, allowing companies to define access rules and protect sensitive information.

Quite a summer. Bring on September.

Earlier this year, we made a bet.

We launched the inaugural EF North America Investment Fellowship based on a belief we’ve held for over a decade at EF: exceptional talent doesn’t always raise their hand.

The traditional funnel rewards visibility. It rewards polish. But many of the most extraordinary individuals are still early - before the idea, before a cofounder.

So, we empowered 16 Fellows across the US and Canada to find and advocate for exceptional talent within their communities.

Six months later, that bet is already compounding.

Our Fellows expanded EF’s talent reach and introduced us to individuals we otherwise may never have met - some of whom we ultimately invested in. One Fellow has since joined our team as a Talent Investor. Our first-ever US intern came through the Fellowship process.

The Fellowship reinforced what we have always believed: finding exceptional talent early changes everything.

Today, we’re excited to announce our second cohort of EF North America Investment Fellows. We’ve selected a new group of individuals with the judgment, curiosity, and genuine desire to back others early.

We want our Fellows to notice the person with intensity, curiosity, and raw potential. To become a trusted partner long before someone is obvious. To be the first believer.

Because belief compounds.

To our inaugural Fellows: thank you for showing us what’s possible.

To our second cohort: go find the next generation of founders everyone else will wish they found earlier.

Meet the Fellows

Meet the Fellows

Sophie Zhang, Columbia

Deven Wells, Rose-Hulman

Chase Witzansky, Claremont McKenna

Leon Khoshnevis, UC Santa Barbara

Yash Alluri, Georgia State University

Jamie Gao, Western University

Andrew Fan, University of Pennsylvania

Naisha Patel, Purdue University

Shaamak Goyal, University of Chicago

Carolyn He, Stanford University

Hasan Bhimani, McMaster University

Bradley Wong, University of British Columbia

Andrea Kim, University of Chicago

Tanayjyot Singh Chawla, University of Toronto

Hollis Griffin, UT Austin

Breakthroughs

Cofounders Elio Pascarelli, Jacopo Madaluni and Emilio Pascarelli have introduced Audiogen, a new way of making music. Watch their short film here.

Bluevia Health, cofounded by Ali Mahomed and Abhyuday Roychowdhury, has announced their collaboration with the Mayo Clinic Platform to make perioperative care safer for every surgical patient in the US.

Asymmetric Security has lifted the hood to show what they mean by AI-native DFIR. Cofounded by Alexis Carlier, Zainab Ali Majid and Pippa Thompson, Asymmetric Security is the first full-stack AI Digital Forensics and Incident Response company, responding to cyber incidents for their customers, using AI tools built in-house.

niostem announced that their 24-week study on 81 men with Androgenetic Alopecia has been published in Dermatology and Therapy (Springer Nature). Cofounded by Carlos Chacon and Samuel Jellard, niostem is unlocking the body’s regenerative potential, and now has the gold-standard clinical proof that their Stem Cell Reactivation Technology works.

Fundraising updates

Scope has raised $20M led by Index Ventures to build the future of inspection. Inspection is the most common way physical data is collected, underpinning the integrity, operation, and safety of every industry. Yet the software these inspections run on hasn’t changed in 20 years. Founded by Jonathan Low and Jakob Cassiman in 2024, Scope is building the AI-native paradigm for the 10x inspection engineer to speed up industrial inspection workflows, from reporting to asset integrity.

Davis AI raised a $5.5M pre-Seed round led by Heartcore Capital and Balderton Capital to accelerate early-stage real estate development with AI. Founded by Mehdi Rais and Amine Chraibi, who met during the first edition of our Bridge residency program in a German castle in 2025, Davis helps developers and investors compress early-stage development timelines from months to days, from feasibility studies and site constraints to ROI, volumetrics, floor plans, and space planning. The team is also introducing Gaudi-1, its first proprietary model for automated architectural generation under regulatory constraints, already achieving state-of-the-art results on floor plan generation benchmarks.

Certo has raised a $4M seed round led by Daphni to build the AI-powered compliance operating system for beauty and consumer goods brands. Founded by Bastien Deliège-Coste and Jean Duquenne, Certo helps regulatory teams review products across ingredients, formulas, claims, labelling and market entry, turning checks that used to take days into minutes. The platform is already used by leading beauty and CPG companies across Europe and the US to navigate regulatory complexity across 40+ markets.

Asterix Health has raised a £2.1M pre-Seed round led by TriplePoint VC to expand remote GP services for UK healthcare providers. Founded by Julian Titz and Max Thilo in 2024, Asterix combines global clinical talent, strong clinical governance and AI to help GP practices deliver better care while saving time and cost. In 9 months, the team has delivered 3,000+ hours of GP care and is live with NHS surgeries serving 250,000 patients.

Standard Intelligence raised $75M from Sequoia and Spark to build models that explore and learn like humans do. Founded by EF alum Galen Mead, Standard Intelligence has built the first fully general computer action model that can explore complex websites, complete multi-action CAD modeling sequences, and drive a car in the real world, all at 30 fps.

Breakthroughs

Arago announced a landmark milestone for the company and the semiconductor industry: the successful production of the world’s first digital-optical AI chip in standard silicon. Cofounded by Nicolas Muller and Eliott Sarrey, Arago is fusing semiconductor reliability with light speed to power the agentic era.

Lodestar Space, cofounded by Neil Buchanan and Thomas Santini in 2023, has launched Mission ALECTO. They will be deploying their on-edge software payload across multi-modal sensors aboard Vigoride-7 in partnership with DPhi Space and Momentus. The mission will validate on-orbit software performance, OTA update capability, and its core data pipeline. Launched via SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, Lodestar Space has confirmed successful separation, marking a key milestone in de-risking future missions.

Aztec, cofounded in 2017 by Thomas Pocock, Zachary Williamson, Arnaud Schenk, and Joe Andrews, has launched Alpha, the first feature-complete privacy stack on Ethereum. Developers can now build apps and contracts with ground-up customizable privacy, from execution to settlement.

Gensyn has rolled out Delphi, an AI-settled decentralized information markets platform where anyone can create markets and earn fees based on trading volume. The platform is aimed at opening a new category of niche, creator-owned markets. Once a market is live, no single centralized entity controls it; outcomes are settled by AI, with revenue distributed to the creator automatically via USDC.

Level Zero, cofounded by Ula Rustamova and Irene Jia in 2024, has shown that real-time, clinical-grade hormone measurement without a blood draw is possible. Their platform measures estradiol, progesterone, LH, cortisol, and testosterone directly from interstitial fluid through a single-use skin patch. They are now accepting proposals from research institutions and clinical organizations.

Fundraising updates

Eigen has raised a $15M Seed round led by Benchmark to build something new: the world’s mutual friend. Eigen’s thesis is simple: the problem isn’t that we don’t have enough friends, it’s that we don’t have a shared one. Founded by Paul Scherer in 2025, Eigen is building technology that brings people closer together, not deeper into their own bubbles.

SquareMind, cofounded by Ali Khachlouf and Tanguy Serrat in 2019, has raised $18M led by Deeptech 2030 and Sonder Capital to make high-quality skin exams more efficient and accessible. Their flagship product is the Swan imaging robot, which can scan the entire skin surface in just a few minutes, digitizing it, mapping it, and using its AI software to analyze the images and identify anomalies.

Crewline has raised a $7.1M Seed round led by Initialized Capital and Nebular to build self-driving construction equipment. Founded by Freddie Filz and Mo Sadek in 2025, Crewline is starting with autonomous vibratory rollers: the foreman draws an area on an iPad, hits go, and the machine compacts on its own.

Round has raised a $6M Seed round to build the AI-powered finance automation platform for modern finance teams. Founded by Pac O’Shea and Hayyaan Ahmad in 2022, Round combines financial infrastructure with AI to automate treasury, payments and payroll end-to-end. The round was led by Alstin Capital, with participation from Backed VC, Love Ventures and leading angels.

Bubble Robotics has raised a $5M pre-Seed round to build the ocean’s autonomous workforce. Founded by Patricia Apostol and Jean Crosetti in 2025, Bubble is deploying a new class of AI-driven robotic systems that can operate continuously at sea, without vessels or human crews. The round was led by Episode 1 Ventures, Asterion Ventures, and Norrsken Evolve.

Neptune Robotics, cofounded by Elizabeth Chan and Jacky IM in 2018, has announced a major manufacturing and R&D expansion with a $12M investment in Singapore. This is part of the company’s continuing ambition to tackle biofouling, one of the shipping industry’s costliest issues with significant environmental impact. On the back of a $52M Series B round led by Granite Asia in September 2025, the new facility will accelerate Neptune’s mission to slash maritime carbon emissions and fuel waste through automated hull maintenance. The company plans to increase its local cleaning capacity by 400% by the end of 2026, with a target of handling up to 60 vessels per day by 2027.

Thymia, cofounded by Emilia Molimpakis and Stefano Goria in 2020, has announced a strategic partnership with Agora (NASDAQ: API). Together, they are enabling a new class of voice applications: ones that understand the complete human signal, not only what is being said but how it is said, bringing real-time health and safety intelligence across all voice communications.

Icarus Robotics, cofounded by Ethan Barajas and Jamie Palmer in 2024, has announced their partnership with Voyager Technologies as their mission management provider for JOYRIDE-1, their year-long free-flying robotics deployment to the ISS, scheduled for early 2027.

We went inside Aule Space’s office in Bangalore and discovered:

• Harsh lighting to simulate space conditions

• Dark rooms to train computer vision models

• Clean rooms where every particle is controlled

Cofounded by Jay Panchal, Nithyaa Giri, and Hrishit Tambi at EF in 2025, Aule Space is on a mission to make space robotics affordable and scalable to unlock a sustainable in-space economy and expand humanity’s reach in space exploration. They are starting with extending the life of satellites that are running out of fuel with their compact in-space propulsion jetpacks that dock with GEO satellites to extend mission life.

Watch the full office tour.

Breakthroughs

Kyron.bio, founded by Emilia McLaughlin, has partnered with Servier to advance next-generation glycan-engineered therapeutics, combining Kyron.bio’s proprietary glycoengineering platform with Servier’s drug development capabilities. The partnership is an important step in unlocking the under-exploited potential of glycans in next-generation biologics, expanding how antibody medicines are designed, and ultimately enabling better therapies for patients.

Limbic, cofounded by Ross Harper and Sebastiaan de Vries, has published a Nature Medicine study demonstrating how its proprietary Limbic Layer™ transforms frontier language models into clinically effective behavioral health specialists. The company has developed a cognitive reasoning architecture that separates clinical decision-making from the underlying model, enabling safer, explainable, and clinically aligned AI mental health support. Limbic has also made the Limbic Layer™ available as an API for responsible teams building mental health AI solutions.

Spore.Bio, cofounded by Amine Raji, Maxime Mistretta and Mohamed Tazi, has unveiled TMSI (Transformer-based Multimodal Spectral Imaging), the world’s first technology capable of simultaneously detecting, quantifying, and identifying viable microorganisms, without prior culture or enrichment and in just 10 minutes, where conventional methods take five days on average. Spore.Bio’s results have been validated following regulatory requirements and delivered directly in the field, making it the first rapid microbiology platform in the world to publish validation data in only three years.

Noah Labs, cofounded by Oliver Piepenstock and Marcus Hott, has announced that Noah Labs Vox™, their voice-based algorithm that detects worsening heart failure weeks before hospitalization, has received US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Breakthrough Device Designation (BDD). This recognition expedites Noah Labs’ upcoming clearance and commercial activities, including the company’s upcoming FDA trial, set to kick off shortly.

Fundraising updates

Hadean has secured new growth funding to accelerate its expansion across the UK and US defence ecosystems. Cofounded by Alec Mocatta and Rashid Mansoor, Hadean builds AI-powered wargaming, command and control, and battlefield training systems used in live operational environments. This round will support deeper deployments, continued US expansion, and Hadean’s ambition to become the UK’s next defence and dual-use tech unicorn.

Amatera has raised $7M to accelerate climate-smart crop development by addressing a major screening bottleneck in agriculture. Cofounded by Omar Dekkiche and Lucie Kriegshauser, Amatera has developed a high-throughput phenotyping platform that enables faster, more precise crop trait analysis. The company has focused on improving breeding efficiency, helping agri-food companies bring resilient, higher-yielding crops to market more quickly.

Lemrock has raised a $7M Seed round to build the infrastructure for agentic commerce. Cofounded by Roxane Laigle, Clément Nguyen and Sasha Collin, Lemrock connects product catalogs directly to AI agents, enabling real-time availability, transactions and performance tracking inside conversational environments.

Level Nine has raised a €4M Seed round to build the critical technology layer for fossil-free value chains. Founded by Seadna Quigley and Emily Sheridan, Level Nine is developing next-generation industrial catalysts to unlock the production of drop-in chemical building blocks from locally biobased feedstocks that can compete with petrochemicals on both cost and performance.

Pathfinder has raised a $4M Seed round to put education back into the hands of parents. Founded by Amaan Ahmad and Sidharth Jain, Pathfinder’s mission is to give families control over how and where their children learn, making it easy for parents to access education funds and decide how to use them to piece together their dream education for their kids.

Rama has raised $3M to rebuild the electronic component supply chain. Founded by Matt Francis and Aidan Holmes, Rama is rethinking how electronic components are sourced and distributed, unlocking faster, more reliable ways to build physical products at scale. The round was led by Wischoff Ventures, with participation from Stage 2, Liquid 2, Rebellion Ventures, and leading angels.

Mutable Tactics has raised a $2.1M pre-Seed round to allow unmanned systems, such as aerial, maritime, or ground drones, to operate and make decisions even when communications are lost or unreliable. Founded by Colin MacLeod and Enrique Muñoz de Cote, Mutable Tactics is building “Mastermind”, the edge-native software layer for scalable human-machine teaming.

General Reasoning, cofounded by Ross Taylor and Kip Parker, has launched OpenReward, an open platform for serving RL environments at scale. OpenReward hosts environments as simple API endpoints that can be used for both training and evaluation. It already features 330+ high-quality environments, including community efforts such as SWE-rebench-v2, SETA, Endless Terminals, and more.

Before EF, Ben Fielding was finishing his PhD in the North East of England, obsessed with privacy-preserving machine learning.

He had what most people would call “great”: a startup in motion, a team around him, even desks waiting for them in an accelerator.

Most people would have stayed on that track. But deep down, Ben knew he was not in the right environment.

When he first met Jonny, they spoke for an hour about ambition, life, and career. They kept circling the same tension: Ben’s level of drive, and the room he was trying to build in.

A month later, Ben called again. He had made the hard call to walk away from that company.

He was willing to move cities, move everything, do whatever it takes. He was unwilling to settle for mediocrity.

Ben also had an unusually rare trait: clarity of thinking. When you listen to him, you can tell he is a deep thinker, instinctively working through second and third-order effects.

Then Ben found his environment.

He met Harry Grieve even before the program officially started. Harry became his thought partner. They pushed each other hard, swapped roles as the company evolved (Ben CTO to CEO, Harry the reverse), and built Gensyn together. Through EF, they also built key relationships with Chris Mairs and Matt Clifford, both crucial early on.

Fast forward to 2023: Gensyn raised a $43M Series A led by a16z.

But the real inflection point came earlier: a founder recognizing a local maximum, and choosing to escape before it became his life.

If you’re ready to found now

Apply to one of our programs

If this speaks to you, but you’re not quite sure you’re ready to press go

Connect with our team

In this episode, they sit down with Charlie Songhurst, one of the world’s most prolific angel investors and a Meta board member, for a conversation about ambition, young talent, the Bay Area, and how exceptional people should think about building their career. Charlie has invested in more than 600 companies and worked alongside founders like John and Patrick Collison and Mark Zuckerberg.

Together, they discussed:

> Why are exceptional young people still so undervalued?

> Why might philosophy graduates make better founders than people expect?

> Why is the Bay Area still the best hub in the world for ambitious builders?

> Why does being around stronger peers change your trajectory so dramatically?

> In the age of AI, what founder traits will matter more?

If you want the answers, this episode is for you.

It also comes at a meaningful moment for EF. More than 10 years ago, Charlie was one of the first people to really believe in Alice and Matt, and in EF’s mission.

Today, EF has raised $200M of fresh capital to keep backing the next generation of founders before the world knows their names.

If this conversation speaks to you, and you think you might be one of them, read more here.

If you’re ready to found now »

Apply to one of our programs

If this speaks to you, but you’re not quite sure you’re ready to press go »

Connect with our team

Breakthroughs

Magdrive has successfully completed its first in‑orbit demonstration mission. Launched onboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Transporter‑14 mission on June 23 2025, the mission marked the debut of Magdrive’s next‑generation electric thrusters in space, validating performance and durability in orbit. Cofounders Mark Stokes and Thomas Clayson have said the test results will accelerate commercial adoption as they work with satellite manufacturers to deliver higher thrust, more efficient propulsion for next-generation spacecraft.

ThinkSono, cofounded by Fouad Al-Noor and Sven Mischkewitz, received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation, an important step on their path toward improving access to deep vein thrombosis (DVT) diagnostics in the US. They are building the world’s first ultrasound AI for blood clot detection, to enable any non-ultrasound-trained healthcare professional to perform proximal compression ultrasound DVT exams at the point of care.

Fundraising updates

OLIX has raised $220M to build the first Optical Tensor Processing Units (OTPUs) and close the growing gap between AI demand and available compute. The round was led by Hummingbird Ventures and brings the company’s total funding to roughly $250M since launching in 2024. Founded by 25-year-old James Dacombe, OLIX is building a new generation of optical chips designed to run AI faster, more efficiently, and with lower cost than today’s GPU-based systems.

Aerska has raised a $39M Series A co-led by EQT Dementia Fund and age1 to build systemically delivered RNA medicines for the brain. Founded by Jack O’Meara, Aerska is developing a brain shuttle platform that delivers RNAi therapeutics across the blood-brain barrier, with the goal of treating genetically driven neurological diseases such as forms of Alzheimer’s and other CNS disorders.

Callosum has launched publicly and announced a $10.25M pre-Seed led by Plural, alongside support from ARIA and leading angels. Founded by Danyal Akarca and Jascha Achterberg, Callosum is building an entirely new class of company at the intersection of frontier AI and compute. Their platform orchestrates AI workloads across heterogeneous chips and multi-cloud environments, unlocking step changes in cost, speed, and capability for complex, real-world systems.

Upside Robotics has raised a $7.5M Seed round led by Plural to tackle fertilizer waste with autonomous farm robots. Cofounders Jana Tian and Sam Dugan started Upside Robotics to replace early-season mass fertilizer sprays with lightweight autonomous robots that apply nutrients exactly where and when crops need them, cutting waste, emissions and costs for row crop farmers.

Seamflow has raised a $4.5M Seed round co-led by Initialized Capital and Northzone to bring AI to the testing, inspection, and certification industry. Cofounded by Konstantin Klingler and Yusufhan Kırçova, Seamflow is helping experts handle growing complexity, reduce structural backlogs, and scale safety and trust across the system, starting with medical certification.

The Compression Company has raised a $3.4M pre-Seed round led by Long Journey to tackle limited satellite bandwidth with AI-driven compression that runs directly onboard satellites. Cofounded by Michael Stanway and Joe Griffith, The Compression Company is unlocking one of the main bottlenecks in satellite data delivery, reducing file sizes by over 95% and enabling satellites to transmit far more data back to Earth during each short ground-station pass.

The Bland Company has raised a $2.67M pre-Seed round led by Initialized Capital to turn underused plant side streams into high-performance proteins that can replace eggs in baked goods, condiments and confectionery. Cofounded by Yash Khandelwal and Micol Hafez, The Bland Company uses a proprietary biochemical process to transform agricultural side streams into highly functional proteins that plug into existing manufacturing, giving food companies egg-like performance with far greater supply chain stability.

pleasefix.ai has raised a $2.1M pre-Seed round led by Pitchdrive to build an AI execution layer for finance and strategy teams. Cofounded by Séverine Nolf and Maxime Lahy, pleasefix.ai lets finance and strategy teams describe what they want in natural language and executes the work directly inside tools like Excel and PowerPoint, with no new software to learn and no change to existing workflows.

Cleo’s founder Barney Hussey-Yeo has announced that the company is launching its AI-powered financial assistant back in the UK, after its proven success in the US market. The news comes as Cleo hits $350M ARR (~2x YoY growth), while maintaining a firm grasp on profitability.

QFlow has secured a £2M strategic investment from Autodesk to fuel its plan to link construction data back with design intent. Cofounded by Brittany Harris and Jade Cohen, QFlow is a digital platform that captures real-time materials and waste data at the source, enabling project teams to make informed decisions on cost, carbon, and quality.

That only happens if you start with talent.

There is an abundance of talent in the world. But there is also a very specific kind of talent EF exists for - people with intensity, curiosity, and raw potential who are often overlooked, underestimated, or still forming conviction. These are individuals who may not yet call themselves founders. They may not have a fully formed idea or a cofounder, but they have something harder to manufacture: resilience, bias to action, and the drive to run through walls.

With the right environment and belief, they can end up on an outsized trajectory.

We’ve believed this for the last decade across Europe and Asia - now we’re scaling it in North America.

Today, we are so excited to announce our 16 inaugural Investment Fellows across the US and Canada, individuals who will help us find and advocate for that kind of exceptional talent within their communities.

Why We Created the Investment Fellowship

One thing has become increasingly clear: exceptional talent doesn’t always raise their hand. The traditional funnel rewards visibility. It rewards polish. It rewards people who already know how to navigate startup ecosystems.

But many of the most extraordinary individuals are still early. They may not yet believe they are “ready.” They may not see a clear path and are often missed.

For over a decade, EF has built its model around identifying trajectory before there is proof. As we expand in North America, this fellowship is a commitment to operationalizing and scaling what we have always believed: that finding exceptional talent early changes everything.

It requires judgement, care, and trust.

This work ultimately matters because belief compounds. We want to empower these fellows to be the first believers, to be the ones who become these trusted partners for individuals long before they are obvious.

A Bet on People

The most important investment decision happens before a company exists.

The 16 Fellows we’re announcing today understand that. They are individuals we trust deeply - people with strong judgment, curiosity, and a genuine desire to back others early.

As EF continues building in North America, this Fellowship represents a defining next step in amplifying how we discover and support exceptional talent. We are doubling down on proactive discovery - accelerating our ability to find these individuals before anyone else.

To our inaugural cohort: thank you for leaning in, for believing in talent-first investing, and for being the first advocates for the next generation of founders.

Meet the Fellows

Charlotte Chang (University of Southern California)

Aryan Mahajan (Columbia University)

Devansh Taliyan (Pomona College)

Chris Mesch (University of Chicago)

Ayush Gupta (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Jonah Gleitman (UT Austin)

Ammielle Wambo Becker (University of Waterloo)

Sahil Agarwal (Northwestern University)

Ramya Iyer (Stanford University)

Ryan Whalen (Harvard University)

Sam Elyaszadeh (New York University)

Skye Lam (Harvard University)

Ash Gozli (University of British Columbia)

Krishiv Thakuria (Toronto)

Abdul Wahaj (Western University)

Hamza Pereira (Carnegie Mellon University)

We’re excited to build this chapter with you all!

Breakthroughs

Open Cosmos has been awarded High Priority Ka-band radio spectrum filings by the Principality of Liechtenstein, marking a major milestone in Europe’s push to build sovereign space-based telecommunications infrastructure. The authorization enables Open Cosmos to deploy and operate satellite systems supporting secure connectivity and data services across Europe and beyond, strengthening the company’s position as a key provider of end-to-end satellite missions. Following the award, Open Cosmos has launched the first two satellites of its new sovereign LEO constellation, moving from planning to orbit in record time.

French biotech Spore.Bio has secured multi-million-euro support from the Google.org AI for Science Fund and launched Spore.Labs, an AI-native research unit focused on unlocking advances in microbiology and public health. The Paris-based company combines biophotonics and machine learning to deliver near real-time microbial testing, drastically faster than traditional methods. Spore.Labs will use the funding and Google Cloud credits to build open datasets, publish research findings and collaborate with academic and clinical partners. Spore.Bio has raised €29.9M to date.

Gensyn has launched Delphi, a real-time open marketplace where machine learning models compete on benchmarks and users can back the models they think will perform best, creating the first live market signal of model intelligence. Delphi operates on Gensyn’s decentralized infrastructure and uses on-chain mechanics to provide continuous liquidity and transparent performance pricing. Gensyn previously raised over $50M in Seed and Series A funding, led by Eden Block and a16z.

Becoming has announced its progress growing and sustaining placenta outside of a body. The company built a closed-loop robotic metabolic exchange system that allows for sustained and perturbable access to development over long time horizons. The implications include testing new treatments for safety, modeling disease progression, creating personalized tissues, supporting development itself, and much more.

EF alumni Matt Wilson and Saaras Mehan, who cofounded Jack & Jill last year, recently launched Jack 2.0. The company Matt previously built at EF, Omnipresent, held the record for fastest to £1M ARR. Jack & Jill has already passed this milestone. Six months into founding the company, they raised £20M led by Creandum. They’ve built two AI agents: Jack, an AI Agent to help people find and land jobs in startups and scaleups, and Jill, an AI Agent to help top startups hire their best people. Jack just evolved from job search assistant to full career coach, offering Career Clarity calls, salary benchmarking, negotiation coaching, and mock interviews. All completely free. In 9 months, Jack has helped 70,000 people take the next step in their career.

Fundraising updates

PolyAI has raised $86M in a Series D funding round led by Georgian, Hedosophia and Khosla Ventures, with participation from NVentures, British Business Bank, Citi Ventures, Squarepoint Ventures, Sands Capital and others. PolyAI has developed conversational voice AI that handles millions of customer calls for more than 100 enterprise customers including Hilton, Marriott and FedEx, and will use the capital to enhance its technology and expand adoption.

Automata has raised $45M in a Series C funding round led by Dimension with participation from Danaher Ventures, Tru Arrow Partners and Octopus Ventures, as it scales its integrated AI-ready lab automation platform. Automata has developed modular robotics, orchestration software and unified data infrastructure to help labs automate experiments and improve throughput and reproducibility. The funding will expand global deployments, build the next iteration of its software stack and grow engineering, product and customer teams while deepening a strategic partnership with Danaher to integrate automation with leading lab instruments.

Unbox Robotics has raised $28M in a Series B funding round led by ICICI Venture to scale its warehouse automation and robotic sortation technology for logistics and ecommerce operators. Unbox Robotics has developed AI-powered robotic systems that automate parcel sorting and handling using swarm intelligence, which allows them to coordinate like a digital hive. The company will use the funding to grow its engineering team, accelerate product development, and expand deployments across India and international markets.

Biographica has raised $9.5M in a Seed funding round to advance its AI-driven platform for designing next-generation crops with improved yield, resilience, and sustainability traits. The company has developed computational models that simulate plant metabolism and genetics to accelerate crop innovation timelines. The funding will support R&D expansion and additional industry collaborations.

AgileRL has raised $5.4M in a Seed funding round led by Fusion Fund with participation from Flying Fish, Octopus Ventures and Counterview Capital as it builds infrastructure to accelerate reinforcement learning training for enterprise AI. This recent round brings total funding to $7.5M. The company’s Arena platform streamlines RL model training and deployment, has been downloaded 300,000+ times and is used by companies including IBM, Airbus and JPMorgan. Capital will fund a San Francisco office and hiring.

Radical Health has announced its $5M pre-Seed funding round led by Khosla Ventures, emerging from stealth with its AI-driven cancer care product. Radical Health has developed an AI oncologist that analyzes data from over 11M patient cases to generate personalized treatment insights and support patient conversations with clinicians.

Asymmetric Security has raised $4.2M in an oversubscribed pre-Seed funding round led by Susa Ventures with support from Halcyon Ventures, Overlook Ventures and angel investors, as it emerges from stealth to automate cybersecurity investigations using AI. Asymmetric Security has developed an AI-native cyber forensics and response platform, paired with experts who validate results and make judgment calls in high-risk edge cases. The funding will be used to expand engineering and incident response teams and deepen AI capabilities.

Peripheral Labs has closed a $3.6M Seed funding round led by Khosla Ventures with support from Daybreak Capital. The Toronto-based startup is applying AI and volumetric video tech from autonomous vehicle sensors to create photorealistic 3D sports replays for broadcasters, teams and fans. The new capital will fund team growth and product refinement.

Aule Space has raised $2M in a pre-Seed funding round led by pi Ventures with participation from angel investors including Eash Sundaram and Arvind Lakshmikumar to build autonomous “jetpack” satellites capable of docking with legacy spacecraft in orbit. Aule Space will use the capital to expand its engineering team, establish ground infrastructure for docking tests, and develop its first demonstration satellites slated for launch next year. The technology targets rendezvous, proximity operations and docking (RPOD) to extend the life of expensive geostationary satellites and reduce orbital waste.

I was wrong about that.

Today I’m a partner at Emergence Capital, investing in the next generation of iconic AI companies. I work with some of the most ambitious founders in the world, many of them immigrants like me. Eric Yuan was denied a U.S. visa eight times before getting approved on the ninth try. He went on to build Zoom. Vipul Ved Prakash of Together.AI, William Ross and William Steenbergen of Federato, Tony Jamous of Oyster — these founders (just to name a few in the Emcap portfolio) came here knowing the system wasn’t built for them, and they built anyway.

I’m drawn to founders like this. The ones playing on hard mode. The ones who see obstacles as friction to work through, not reasons to quit. The ones who have something to prove… not to investors, but to themselves. They’re often the best builders because they’ve had to be. They don’t take shortcuts or assume anything will come easy. They know how to work around complex systems because they’ve been doing it their entire lives.

This essay is for founders like them. For anyone navigating an invisible game while trying to build something that matters. You’re not underqualified. You’re not late. You’re just playing a harder version of the same game, and nobody handed you the rulebook.

America Runs on Invisible Code

Silicon Valley loves its meritocracy myth. Work hard, build something great, and you’ll win. There’s truth in that…ideas do matter, execution matters, the best products often rise to the top. But merit doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It runs on infrastructure most people never see.

When I arrived, I didn’t know you could apply to more than one college. Back home in Italy, you pick a single path at fourteen and that’s it. I didn’t know what credit scores were, or Greek life, or why everyone cared so much about college sports. I didn’t understand office hours, networking events, or that talking about your accomplishments wasn’t arrogance, it was just how things worked here.

Here’s what I got wrong: I was terrified to ask for help. I watched American classmates build personal advisory boards while I tried to brute-force everything alone. I judged self-promotion as shallow (in European culture, understatement is valued). Here, if people don’t know what you’re building, they can’t support you. But the game isn’t rigged. It’s just coded. Once you crack the code, you can remix it. That’s where the most interesting innovation happens…at the edges, by people who see the system from the outside.

What finally changed everything was finding people willing to US-plain me what I couldn’t see. Other immigrants who’d figured it out a few years ahead of me. Americans who took the time to translate their world. One of them was my now partner at Emergence, Santi Subotovsky, who had a similar path from Argentina:

“I didn’t know anyone. No network, no credit history, no safety net. I couldn’t even rent an apartment. Every VC firm told me my background wasn’t right—wrong schools, wrong clubs. What changed everything was finding a few people who cared about me, not just what I could do for them.”

This is why I invest the way I do. I’m drawn to founders with intensity and resilience. People who’ve proven they can break through walls when everyone said it wasn’t possible. But here’s what separates good founders from great ones: understanding that relentless effort isn’t enough. The founders I back actively look for ways to figure out the game, to find the shortcuts others miss. They turn constraints into competitive advantages. Often those founders are immigrants, but not always. What matters is the mindset.

The Real Risk Immigrant Founders Carry

Silicon Valley worships failure. The scrappy garage startup that pivots three times before finding product-market fit. The founder who crashes and burns, then comes back stronger. Failure here is a badge of honor.

But that narrative only works if you’re allowed to stay in the country when things go wrong.

When an American founder’s company fails, they take time off, maybe join another startup, maybe become an advisor or investor. When an immigrant founder’s company fails, they might be rebuilding from another continent. Your visa was tied to that company. That job. That spouse’s job. One bureaucratic error, one funding round that takes too long to close, one policy shift in Washington, and you’re out.

This creates a low-grade anxiety that never fully goes away. You don’t realize how much energy it drains until it’s gone.

I came to the U.S. full of optimism, as this place felt full of possibility. Then reality hit. No safety net. No family. A visa that could disappear (and almost did, many times!) with one misstep. That optimism gave way to survival mode. For twenty years, I went through a dozen different visas, all tied to my status as a student, a wife, an employee at a specific company. I took “safe” jobs in traditional finance partly because the legal path was predictable. I wanted to take risks earlier, to explore, to bet on something uncertain. But you can’t explore when your work permit depends on continuous employment.

The day I got my green card, something shifted. My career at Emergence accelerated. I could finally make high-conviction bets without hedging my entire existence. And when I became a U.S. citizen (twenty years after arriving, seven months pregnant) I sobbed in relief holding my little paper flag. The fog finally lifted. I could be bolder. More creative. More willing to be wrong. That optimism I’d arrived with two decades earlier? It came flooding back. But this time, I had solid ground beneath my feet.

This transformation fundamentally shaped how I invest. I know what it’s like to operate under constraints that feel impossible. I know what it takes to bet big when the stakes are highest. And I know how much it matters when someone sees your potential before you have proof. That’s the kind of investor I want to be: someone who backs founders early, believes in them deeply, and helps them build the systems they need to go from survival mode to building something extraordinary.

People told me I’d get the green card and still want something else. Hedonic adaptation, they said. They were wrong. A new car or a bigger apartment, sure, those lose their shine. But legal permanence doesn’t. The freedom to take real risks, to build something ambitious without wondering if a visa denial will erase it all… that changes everything.

Should You Move Here to Build?

That transformation taught me something crucial about risk. When I was constantly hedging my legal status, I couldn’t fully commit to the big bets. It can take a long time for that weight to lift... twenty years in my case. Is it worth the pain? For me, it was. But I also recognize it’s a deeply personal choice.

Which brings me to the question immigrant founders ask me constantly: is it worth moving to the U.S. to build a startup?

If you’re building an AI company and targeting American customers, the answer is simply yes. You need to be here. Not your head of sales. Not your advisor. You.

The U.S. isn’t just leading AI development…it dominates AI adoption. Last year, $109 billion flowed into private AI investment here. 78% of U.S. organizations now use AI in at least one business function, up from 55% the year before. AI startups captured nearly half of all venture capital deal value. This is where enterprise buyers are most willing to experiment, where feedback loops are fastest, where the infrastructure for scaling actually exists.

And here’s something most people don’t realize: it’s easier to start from scratch in the U.S. than to “convert” traction from elsewhere. American investors rarely give credit for modest international revenue. A clean slate with a sharp U.S. go-to-market plan will get you further than a few foreign customers.

That said, moving here is not a small decision. You’re not just risking capital, you’re risking everything. Your ability to stay in the country. Your relationships. Your proximity to family. For American founders, failure means regrouping financially. For you, it might mean leaving.

The U.S. offers access to scale, capital, sophisticated buyers, and second chances that most countries don’t. If you’re playing for maximum upside—if you want to build something truly big—this is still the best place to do it. But the cost is real, and only you can decide if it’s worth it.

The Playbook I Wish I’d Had

If you’re an immigrant founder in the early stages, here’s what actually matters:

Get legal help early. Even a few hours with the right immigration attorney can save you months of stress later. Start your green card process the moment you’re eligible. The gap between how fast you can build a company and how slowly you can secure residency is absurd.

Find mentors five to ten years ahead of you, especially people who’ve navigated visas while building. The immigrants I met early on carried me when the system felt crushing. Many mistakes are avoidable if you can get someone to help you see around the corners.

Build credit immediately. Open a credit card as soon as you arrive, even if it has terrible terms at first. These invisible systems shape everything from renting an apartment to getting a loan.

Create whatever safety net lets you sleep at night. It doesn’t have to be huge. A few months of savings. A strong legal team. A tight circle of friends you can call at 2 a.m. Standing on solid emotional ground makes it possible to take the big swings.

The weight doesn’t disappear overnight. But the more systems you build around yourself—legal, financial, emotional—the lighter it gets. And eventually, you’ll have room to bet big.

Why This Matters

The numbers tell the story: 1st gen immigrants make up about 16% of the U.S. population but found 55% of billion-dollar startups and 65% of America’s top AI companies. That makes them roughly 3.5 times more likely to build a unicorn than someone born here (and 4 times more likely in AI specifically).

This isn’t a coincidence. These are people who’ve left everything behind to follow their vision. Who’ve already overcome more than most will face in a lifetime. Who understand what it means to build without a safety net and turn adversity into fuel. They’re creative problem-solvers who see opportunities others miss because they’ve spent their lives navigating systems that weren’t built for them.

The environment has only gotten harder. Immigration policy now shifts weekly, adding layers of anxiety and confusion to an already Byzantine process. As of January 1, 2026, nationals from 17 countries face complete visa bans, with an additional 19 countries under partial restrictions (including Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa). Roughly 1 in 5 people seeking to legally immigrate to the U.S. are now barred from doing so. International students face deportations for expressing their perspectives on social media. And visa petitions for entrepreneurs trigger page-long interrogatories and rejection rates we haven’t seen in years.

Starting a company is already a moonshot. Doing it while your legal right to be here is under constant review, or while watching your home country added to a travel ban list, takes extraordinary courage.

To every immigrant founder out there shipping product at midnight and filing visa paperwork at 2 a.m.: I see you.

Though I’m now a U.S. citizen, I’ll always be an immigrant in my heart. I’ll always have deep respect for the resilience it takes to build in a system that wasn’t designed for you.

And if you’re building something truly ambitious in AI, I want to hear from you. Let’s build what’s next. Together.

Lotti Siniscalco is a partner at Emergence Capital, where she invests in early stage AI companies. 80% of the companies she has backed have at least one 1st generation immigrant founder. She became a U.S. citizen in 2024 after twenty years and more than a dozen visas.

What is Personal Exceptionalism?

Personal Exceptionalism is one of Michael Dearing’s Five Cognitive Distortions of People Who Get Stuff Done. He discusses this on the Twenty Minute VC podcast:

“Personal Exceptionalism means that they [founders] see themselves as special and their outcomes are going to be outside the bounds of normal.”

It’s the belief that you are not like other people. You are different and can achieve what others can’t.

It’s not arrogance or overconfidence. Many arrogant and overconfident individuals seem to lack Personal Exceptionalism. It’s a quiet belief that even if the world is falling around you, you will be the one who is ok.

In his piece How to be Successful, OpenAI founder Sam Altman says that you should “have almost too much self-belief”.

“Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.”

Having high Personal Exceptionalism is not sufficient to become a world-class founder, but it is necessary.

Deciding to found a company is an irrational thing to do. The majority of founders will have a ‘bad’ outcome where their company fails. Being a founder is taking on a power law. Very few individuals succeed, but when they do succeed, they succeed to an insane degree.

You could say it’s like playing the lottery. But not all the lottery tickets in this gamble are made equal. High PE individuals believe that the odds of their lottery ticket are different. They believe they have improved odds of building a successful startup one day.

We see this at EF in the cohort members who aren’t focused on avoiding failure, but on realizing their potential.

Why does Personal Exceptionalism matter for a founder?

A Google of Personal Exceptionalism describes it as destructive; by believing you are different, you don’t fit in with normal life.

But, founders aren’t normal, they are the exceptions to the rule and often don’t fit in with normal life.

Personal Exceptionalism allows early-stage founders to:

1. Take on insane goals

This is the most important factor with Personal Exceptionalism. Individuals with high Personal Exceptionalism often overestimate their level of skill and expertise. They aren’t afraid to take on goals that do not match their level of experience.

A good example of this is Rob Bishop, CEO of Magic Pony Technology. When he was selling his company to Twitter, instead of following the norm of using a private bank to sell, he managed the entire process himself (age 25). It was unorthodox, but he secured a great outcome for MPT (a reported $150M exit). He then went on to found Macroscope, for which he’s recently raised $30M in a Series A, bringing the total raised to $40M.

2. Break the rules

Individuals with high Personal Exceptionalism believe rules are for other people. This could be social norms, legal requirements, or industry norms. What others see as breaking the rules, they see as lateral thinking. Their belief in their uniqueness means they aren’t constrained by barriers ‘made for other people’.

This is frustrating if you are the manager of someone with high Personal Exceptionalism. But, as an investor, this is exactly the kind of characteristic we are looking for.

For example, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t put off building Facebook when Harvard shut down an early version because it violated university policy.

There are of course examples of where individuals with high PE take this too far in regulated industries, for example Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX and Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos.

3. Be resilient

As a founder, you are told “no” daily. My cofounder and I experienced this when first starting Entrepreneurs First. The ecosystem told us it was impossible to build startups from strangers who didn’t know each other. $13B of companies later, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

High Personal Exceptionalism individuals stick to their vision, even when critics tell them that their idea won’t work. No ideas are born great, but founders need to be sticky to a mission and vision to create greatness. This is easier as a high Personal Exceptionalism individual as you have an unshakable belief in your own ability.

4. Push themselves

One of our values at Entrepreneurs First is to “push yourself and others to greatness”. EF is there to help push individuals to outcomes they would never have achieved otherwise.

High Personal Exceptionalism individuals are likely to show dissatisfaction with how they are progressing. They are aware of the delta between their current performance and what they are capable of. Having high Personal Exceptionalism and a growth mindset is an unstoppable combination.

Many of the founders we work with at EF are from technical backgrounds who often haven’t done commercial work in the past. The best of these founders push themselves out of their comfort zone. They throw themselves into learning to sell for example, and use feedback to improve.

5. Upside thinking

When a new EF cohort starts, there will always be someone who asks the question “what can I do to avoid failure?”. This is often a clear signal this individual has low PE.

Low Personal Exceptionalism individuals spend much of their energy on avoiding failure, not on how to succeed. High Personal Exceptionalism individuals ‘know’ that they will succeed and so focus on how they will get there as fast as possible. Both are problem solving, but to achieve very different outcomes.

How do you get high Personal Exceptionalism?

Individuals develop high Personal Exceptionalism through repeatedly testing their ability and chances of success compared to others. They have gathered sufficient data to build the confidence that they can outperform on a given task. They then apply this confidence and self-belief to adjacent tasks.

Most will have been building their Personal Exceptionalism from a young age (they’ve outperformed every peer group they’ve ever been part of).

Some may build it as their career progresses. This often happens when they upgrade their peer group as they grow up (e.g., joining university, their first job) and use that moment to recalibrate themselves against the others. This is then used to inform their Personal Exceptionalism.

Of course, some people are just deluded. This is typically where they believe they have outperformed their peers in the past, but their peers are not sufficiently exceptional to justify their conclusion.

Personal Exceptionalism doesn’t guarantee success

Personal Exceptionalism isn’t a magic bullet. It’s necessary, but not sufficient to succeed.

Personal Exceptionalism also has some downsides. High Personal Exceptionalism individuals are not always easy to work with. They can seem irrational in their belief in themselves. They can appear to be slow to take on feedback as they’re more likely to filter the feedback for relevance to their particular situation.

A key lever for making Personal Exceptionalism a positive personality trait is to combine it with a growth mindset. Believing that you can have extraordinary outcomes, coupled with openness to learning and personal development, is a potent mix.

In How to Be a Founder, they outline how success depends on two things - how well cofounders fit with each other, and how well they fit with their idea. You and your cofounder earn the right to win if you have the combination of knowledge, skills, experience, and network to tackle the right problem, create the right solution and build the right team.

At EF, we now know that finding a cofounder and an idea to work on are symbiotic processes that should happen simultaneously. The best way to achieve this is to lean into your Edge.

Finding your Edge

Your Edge is the unique combination of skills, knowledge, behaviors, and experiences that put you in a better position than almost anyone else to build a particular company. Think of it as a deck of cards. Your cards are shaped by the skills or experience you already have. You need to know the strength of the cards in your hand in relation to each other and other people.

It’s tempting to believe that anyone can build anything, as long as they work hard enough. But in practice, the best founders play to their strengths. They build companies where their Edge gives them an unfair advantage.

Investors and early employees will inevitably ask, “Why you?” Edge is how you answer that question. It demonstrates why you are uniquely placed to solve this problem now, and why you are credible as a founder.

The three types of Edge

At EF, we’ve seen that our founders’ Edge usually falls into one of three categories: Tech Edge, Market Edge, and Catalyst Edge.

Tech Edge

You have a Tech Edge if you have developed expertise in a technical domain that others don’t yet fully understand, and you see how it can be applied in new ways. A Tech Edge often comes with the compulsion to solve problems and push boundaries, to build and create something new. It gives you the ability to see possibilities that other founders overlook, because you know what the technology can - and can’t - do.

Zachary Williamson, cofounder of Aztec, was a former physicist at CERN and T2K Japan. Alongside Thomas Pocock, a Maths graduate from the University of Cambridge, he created Aztec Protocol, applying their deep technical expertise in a novel way to address blockchain’s fundamental lack of privacy.

Market Edge

You have a Market Edge if you have had sufficient exposure to a particular industry to understand the status quo and want to challenge it. The key word here is “sufficient”. If you have too much time in a particular industry you become entrenched in the status quo. You need to have developed a good enough understanding of the space to be able to generate non-obvious insights into its challenges and opportunities - insights that someone outside of the industry could not have uncovered.

Barney Hussey-Yeo, who founded Cleo, a leading financial advice app for millennials and Gen Z, had worked for eighteen months at London’s biggest fintech before becoming a founder. He wasn’t a finance expert, but he had enough experience helping people manage their money to understand the status quo and how it could change. During that time, he also built an invaluable network: the founder of the fintech he worked for became one of his seed investors. Cleo has recently surpassed $250M in ARR, and is contemplating an IPO in London or New York.

Catalyst Edge

You have a Catalyst Edge if you have the ability to bring people together, assemble resources, and generate momentum that others can’t. Founders with a Catalyst Edge come from a range of backgrounds, but all show some key traits: they are competitive, ambitious, hard-working, and never satisfied.

If you’re super young and fresh out of college, you’re likely to be a Catalyst Edge. You will win by moving faster than everyone else around you. A great example would be the founders of Mercor, which hit $75M ARR in two years.

Jacob Haddad, cofounder of AccuRx, excelled during his studies at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. He was student union president, set up a TEDx conference, worked as a first-aid responder at the London Olympics and was a finalist in a top TV cooking show.

While Tech and Market Edges are helpful in generating an idea, a Catalyst Edge will give you an advantage in executing it.

Building with Edge

Identifying your Edge (or Edges, and ranking them) is just the first step. The real power comes from finding a cofounder that amplifies your strengths and helps align your unique Edge(s) to the right problem.

Icarus Robotics cofounders Ethan Barajas and Jamie Palmer, used their Edges to form their team and as the foundation for their idea: building the robotic labor force for space. Jamie had a strong Tech Edge: a roboticist from Columbia’s ROAM Lab, specializing in dexterous robotics. He had deployed hospital robots at AKARA and F1 cars at Mercedes AMG. Ethan, a mechanical engineer by trade, had a Tech Edge too, but additionally he had a strong Market Edge, having designed agricultural nanolabs for NASA and the ISS in high school and developed lunar rovers with NASA JPL at Caltech. Icarus Robotics, which recently raised an oversubscribed $6.1M Seed led by Soma Capital and Xtal, was founded because Ethan and Jamie recognized each other’s strengths, and that they were collectively worth more than the sum of their parts.

To learn more about Edge, and other frameworks we use at Entrepreneurs First, check out How to Be a Founder.

Fundraising updates

Transcelestial has raised an additional $9.7M, bringing its total funding to $34.7M, to fund deployment of its laser-based connectivity across Japan. The company builds high-capacity, wireless laser links designed to support disaster response, national defense, and emerging space communications. The round was led by MPower Partners, with follow-on investments from SEEDS Capital, NTT Finance, Kickstart Ventures and others. The new capital will accelerate rollout of resilient, non-cable communications infrastructure where traditional fiber is slow or impractical.

LightSpeed Photonics has secured $6.5M in a pre-Series A round led by pi Ventures with participation from 500 Global, Indian Accelerator, 8X Ventures, Java Capital and angel investors. The deep-tech company builds high-speed optical interconnects designed for AI and high-performance computing systems, aiming to enable energy-efficient and scalable data movement. The funds will be used to set up a dedicated R&D facility for faster pilot deployment and to scale its hardware development across Singapore, India, the U.S. and Japan.

immunitoAI has raised $6.1M in a Series A round to advance its AI platform for designing antibody therapeutics from scratch. The Bengaluru-based startup uses generative AI to create antibody sequences without relying on animals or human donors, reducing development time from the usual 4-5 years to around 11-12 months. The round was led by investor and fund manager Ashish Kacholia, with participation from pi Ventures, Anicut Capital, 3one4 Capital, AC Ventures and others. The funds will be used to build the company’s antibody-development pipeline and produce IP for pharma clients.

Mirantus Health has secured €5.5M in a Seed round to expand its mira eye screening service across the DACH region. The company has created a low-threshold screening service that gives patients faster access to care by enabling opticians to detect potential abnormalities early and return assessments in as little as one day, avoiding long-term follow-up costs for the healthcare system. Revent led the round, joined by Redstone, Noaber and Arve Capital. The new funding will help the company grow from about two hundred sites to more than one thousand by 2027.

Interface has raised $3.5M in a Seed round led by defy.vc with participation from Precursor Ventures, Rock Yard Ventures and angels including Charlie Songhurst. The recently founded San Francisco-based startup has built an AI platform that audits industrial operating procedures for compliance and safety risks. Its system has already identified 10,800 errors across three sites in two and a half months for one of Canada’s largest energy companies. The funding will support expansion across energy and heavy industry throughout North and South America.

Fleetcraft has raised $3.2M in a Seed round led by Susa Ventures to bring AI-powered efficiency to aircraft maintenance and overhaul operations. Fleetcraft has built a system that captures repair findings through voice input, automates compliant maintenance logging, and uses AI to interpret complex regulatory documents, reducing paperwork from hours to seconds. The funding will allow the San Francisco-based company to expand its platform across maintenance facilities worldwide.

Fit Collective has raised £3M in a pre-Seed round to tackle fashion’s fit crisis. The London-based startup uses artificial intelligence to help fashion brands fix sizing and reduce returns by analyzing returns data, fabric behavior and sales patterns before clothes are produced. The platform is already working with brands such as Rixo, Ro & Zo and Boden. With the new funding from AlbionVC, SuperSeed, True Global and January Ventures, alongside an Innovate UK Smart Grant, Fit Collective will expand the team, advance product development, and deepen integration with global apparel brands.

It’s a very bad idea to try to convince people to start startups. They’re treacherously seductive enough in their own right and anyone who needs convincing is probably not going to have a great experience. This seems particularly true if you grew up in any sort of physical or cultural proximity to Silicon Valley: if that’s the case, you certainly know that startups are an option, perhaps even an attractive one; by the time you reach the point of deciding what you want to do with your life, it’s quite unlikely that you’ve not at least implicitly considered whether you might want to start one.

Europe and the UK are not like that. One of the most important ways in which they are not like Silicon Valley is that for smart, ambitious young people, starting or even working in a tech company is not close to being the most desired option, let alone the default. In fact, it’s quite possible that you could be an exceptional engineer or computer scientist here, reaching the end of your degree or your first job, and never have considered that you could start a company.

I wrote this - and we started EF - for those people. I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you have a lot of options. Perhaps you’re considering (or already are) working in a bank or hedge fund, in a big technology company or in professional services. These are very much the European “default” options for ambitious people - and for most people they may be good options. My goal is not to try to convince you to start a startup, but to walk through what kind of person starting a startup might be a good idea for. To keep it as simple as possible, it boils down to two questions:

Do you have a good reason to want to do it?

Is it worth trying (for you)?

There are lots of bad reasons to start a startup, particularly any that remotely conceive of startups as a get-rich-quick scheme. Startups are hugely difficult, stressful, and time-consuming. They are harder than you expect, even when you take that into account. Worse, the median financial outcome is zero, even though lots of the people who start companies are smart and hardworking.

Why start a startup?

The only good reason to start a company is because there’s something you want to exist - and you believe you can build it. The startup is just the vehicle for that creation.

You don’t need a perfect idea. You need an obsession.

Ask yourself: If I had six months of time and space to build anything I wanted, what would it be?

If nothing comes to mind, you probably shouldn’t start. But if something instantly excites you - even if it’s more an area you’d want to explore than a product you’d want to build - you might be the right sort of person at the right sort of time. Many of EF’s most successful startups began exactly this way.

Good ideas don’t appear fully formed. They emerge from building, experimenting, and talking to users. Waiting until you have a “perfect idea” means waiting forever.

Is it worth trying (for you)?

If everyone’s chances were equal, starting a company would be a terrible bet. Most startups fail.

But, as Peter Thiel memorably phrased, you are not a lottery ticket.

Everyone’s chance of succeeding is emphatically not equal and, for exceptional people, the expected value is probably very high indeed - not just financially but professionally, intellectually, and in terms of impact.

The interesting thing is that there appear to be no really reliable predictors of who will make an exceptional founder. At EF, we’ve seen that intelligence, credentials, and experience only take you so far. They’re the foundation - necessary but not sufficient. Working out how good a founder you are is a discovery process, not an analytical one. Your abilities as a founder are to some extent procedurally generated by your experiences once you get started.

Think of it as an option, not a gamble

Starting a company is more like buying an option than a lottery ticket.

You’re buying the right to find out whether you could build something big. The upside is huge, and the downside is limited.

So what does this option cost? What are you giving up when deciding to try starting a startup?

Career cost: almost zero.
After six or seven months, if it doesn’t work out, you’ll still qualify for the same jobs you could have had before - and probably better ones. EF founders who don’t succeed often go on to roles at startups, big tech companies or AI labs, or VC funds.

Financial cost: lower than ever.
If you join our program, it means you’re literally paid to test whether you could be a great founder. It’s not a luxury lifestyle, but it’s enough time and space to try.

You are an underpriced option

For talented, ambitious people early in their careers, who think they might have what it takes to succeed, this option is wildly underpriced.

For a small investment of time, you can learn one of the most valuable things about yourself - whether you can build something extraordinary. If you’re a smart, ambitious engineer, scientist, or hacker, you have an option that didn’t really exist a couple of decades ago. And it’s worth taking.

Breakthroughs

Following the release of their foundational model, maestro, Beatoven.ai (W20 BA) is pushing the boundaries of creative tech with the launch of its generative AI sound effects, bringing fully licensed, production-ready audio to filmmakers, game developers, and other creatives in the entertainment industry – now available via API for enterprises via fal.ai.

Maestro lets users control and tweak their outputs to unlock new sounds or specific ideas, including everything from animal and vehicle sounds to sci-fi bleeps and fun swooshes. They can control the sound’s duration up to an industry-leading 35 seconds long and can specify how wildly outputs deviate from a text prompt, harnessing AI “hallucinations” to generate something never heard before. Users can state what they don’t want and add context to achieve more nuanced results, as well as adjust the steps to yield higher output quality.

Fundraising updates

Founded in 2018 by then 18-year-old James Dacombe, CoMind has raised $102.5M in funding. The company’s most recent round of $60M was led by venture capital firm Plural, with participation from LocalGlobe, Latitude, Octopus Ventures, Crane, and Angelini Ventures. The London-based health-tech startup is revolutionizing how clinicians monitor the brain. Their non-invasive device measures cerebral blood flow, intracranial pressure and cerebral autoregulation without puncturing the skull. The company will use the funds to advance regulatory approval in the U.S., complete further clinical trials and scale manufacturing.

Phagos has raised €25M in a Series A funding round co-led by CapAgro, Hoxton Ventures, CapHorn and Demeter. The Paris-based biotech startup is developing AI-enabled bacteriophage therapies as precise, sustainable alternatives to antibiotics—initially for animals (e.g., livestock and aquaculture) with plans to expand into human health. The funds will support the deployment of its veterinary treatments, further development of its patented AI discovery platform, and global expansion.

Aerska has raised $21M in Seed funding, with the latest round co-led by Age1, Backed VC and Speedinvest. Founded in 2025, the Dublin-based biotech startup is developing systemically administered RNA interference (RNAi) medicines for diseases of the brain by leveraging an antibody-oligonucleotide conjugate platform with “brain-shuttle” delivery to cross the blood-brain barrier. Its leadership team has deep expertise in RNA medicines, CNS drug discovery, and clinical product development. The company will use the funds to expand its Dublin and London operations and accelerate its drug discovery timeline.

Jack & Jill has raised $20M in funding, led by Creandum. The six-month-old, London-based startup is developing conversational AI agents to transform job hunting: one agent (Jack) has already coached 50,000 job seekers through a 20-minute AI-powered profile interview, while the other (Jill) supports employers by matching and screening thousands of candidates. The company will use the funds to expand into the U.S., scale its two-sided platform, and deepen its AI matching capabilities. The company is also looking to acquire smaller startups to accelerate team growth.

PACT has raised $20M in Series A funding to scale production of its biofabricated collagen-coated material, “Oval.” The Cambridge-based startup is creating sustainable alternatives to animal and plastic-based leather for use in footwear, interiors, and automotive manufacturing. The round was co-led by Forbion and HV Capital. The funds will be used to scale up to meet surging demand from leading luxury maisons and lifestyle brands.

nPlan has raised £11.9M in Series B funding, led by CapHorn, Chevron Technology Ventures, and Suffolk Technologies. The London-based startup uses machine learning to forecast and de-risk large construction projects, drawing on data from more than 750,000 past schedules. Its technology helps identify potential delays before they occur, saving clients millions in cost overruns. The company will use the funds to expand internationally and strengthen its AI models.

altrove has raised $10M in Seed funding, led by Alven with participation from Bpifrance Digital Venture, Contrarian Ventures, and Emblem. The Paris-based deep-tech startup is developing AI-designed alternatives to critical materials, including rare-earth-free and cobalt-free magnetic materials for high-performance motors. The company will use the funds to expand its labs, grow its team, and scale production from grams to industrial volumes within two years.

ClarityCare AI has raised $3.5M in Seed funding. The company is developing an AI-driven platform targeted at healthcare operations. The team is developing the industry’s first fully comprehensive suite of highly specialized AI agents streamlining and improving administrative healthcare operations, with a focus on prior authorizations and utilization management. The round included Maverick Capital, firstminute capital, and Top Harvest Capital.

Belidor has raised $3.1M in pre-Seed funding, from Angular Ventures and Max Ventures. The startup is building an AI-native platform for preconstruction teams to analyze and level bids with full cost transparency. Users can drag and drop bid PDFs, and Belidor’s AI automatically extracts line items, aligns scopes, flags gaps, and highlights best-value options. The company will use the funds to accelerate product development and expand market reach. They are also actively hiring to grow their team.

In the press

PolyAI, Omnea, Tracelight, Jack & Jill, sensmore, Arago and Ameba have been featured in Sifted’s AI 100 report.

If you don’t succeed with your first startup it shouldn’t be a catastrophic career-ending thing. It should be that you gave it a good shot and now try again.

In some ways this is so obvious – so why is the idea of a career as a founder still so alien?

Being a founder is portrayed as the antithesis of a career

In a career you develop and build on your experience over time and there is a legible path to success. For example, if you wanted a career as a surgeon or a lawyer you would learn your craft from day one and then progress up to roles with more responsibility. You’d be expected to build your skills and, importantly, your intuition, over time. High pressure roles require strong intuition so that you can make decisions fast under extreme stress.

Being a founder is portrayed as the antithesis of a career. The typical advice given to a future founder is to “get experience” in a big company. Founding is seen as something you do once and if the time is right and you’re lucky, you might make it big. If you don’t, you revert back to whatever previous life path you were on. There is little acknowledgement that you can found multiple times within your life and that with each attempt you build skills, experience and intuition that will enable you to succeed.

Defining the Founding Career Path

We need to define the Founding Career Path and make it legible for the next generation of founders. We need to clarify what skills and experiences are most likely to help a potential founder succeed, both now and in the future.

I believe the principles behind the Founding Career Path are that:

• The best way to hone your founder intuition and skill is through starting a company;

• To maximize learning you should found now; and

• Your founder ability will compound with each startup attempt and increase your likelihood of building a globally important company.

The data shows that the Founding Career Path works

The data supports the efficacy of the Founding Career Path. Ali Tamaseb‘s book Super Founders compares unicorn founders to a control group of founders that raised Series A funding from VCs. He found that the billion dollar founders were far more likely to have already been a founder compared to the control group. HBS data shows that founders with a prior successful venture had a 30% success rate on their next attempt, whereas first-time founders had an 18% success rate.

The world’s most notable founders follow this pattern. Patrick and John Collison, the founders of Stripe (and our investors at EF) started their first company at 19 and sold it for $5M – their next company was Stripe. Mark Zuckerberg made dental software before founding Facebook. And Elon Musk founded Zip2 after leaving university, before being part of the founding teams of PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity. Twitter is his first corporate job at the age of 51! These founders didn’t pursue adjacent career paths, they started building.

So what’s next for those who want to pursue the Founding Career Path?

My advice for someone who wants to follow a Founding Career Path:

• Get started, right now. Even if you don’t quit your job, start building a product and getting people to use it. You will learn the skills that are particular and peculiar to starting a company. You will begin to build your founder intuition.

• Surround yourself with founders. Don’t surround yourself with people who want to be founders – most of them won’t ever take the leap. University entrepreneurship clubs produce management consultants.

• Don’t tell your friends and family. It is too easy to slip into validation seeking. If you take an alternative path, it is unlikely they will understand your choice. Parents are more likely to be conservative – they want you to have a great mean outcome, with limited downside risk. Peers will seek to protect their status quo, and your career choice might undermine the confidence they have in their own life path.

Founding may not work out the first time. In fact, it probably won’t. Regardless of the financial outcome, the experience will build your founder intuition and increase the likelihood of success next time around. Your founder mental muscles will have been flexed and will be ready to go. This is the Founding Career Path.

If you want to follow the Founding Career Path, check out Entrepreneurs First. We help exceptional technologists build startups from scratch.

The Bay Area is the world’s tech epicenter. The streets may be paved with gold, but it’s also brutally competitive. I want European founders not just to survive here, but to thrive.

Fundraising in the US is different to fundraising in Europe – probably more than you realize. VCs will ask different questions and expect different answers. This post breaks down some of my most important observations and gives advice on what you need to do differently.

Some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies were built by Europeans; why shouldn’t you be next?

How to land your pitch in SF

If you’re coming from a European context, you will need a different style and tone of pitch compared to what you’re used to. Let’s go through the high notes you need to hit to smash your seed raise.

Speed is ambition made visible

One of the most common tropes about US vs. European startups is “Europeans lack ambition.” Too often, European founders try to fix this with a lofty vision statement or inflated market size.

But ambition isn’t a slide in a deck, it’s a mindset. It’s not just about a dazzling long-term vision (though that helps), it’s about how you show up in everything you do.

Ambition isn’t just about what you could achieve, it’s about what you’re achieving right now. When I ask seed investors what they look for in founders, the most common answer is speed (also called velocity, productivity, pace, or intensity). Ambition shows up in how fast you move.

One of the biggest criticisms of European founders is that they’re too methodical and careful with product development and delivery. Compared to their US peers, they simply move slower and more cautiously.

Fast product development drives fast learning. Fast learning accelerates PMF and capital efficiency. Investors want to see “lines, not dots”: evidence of how quickly you’re progressing, not a static snapshot. Meeting VCs before you’re ready can give them a negative data point to draw the wrong line. You want to control the story they hear.

As one VC put it: “The best teams make insane amounts of progress between each meeting or email, often within just a couple of days.” The speed of company building has never been faster, you need to show that you aren’t just keeping up, but that you’re setting the pace.

Most startups have very limited defensibility. Your momentum is your moat.

Things to say:

• “Since our launch, 4 weeks ago, we’ve generated $X MRR”

• “This week we’ve [insert 3 insanely impressive things you’ve made happen]”

• “In the next two weeks we will close 1 more customer, make 2 hires, and release the next version of our product – and we’re only a team of 2”

Things not to say:

• “We first incorporated 6 months ago and since then have made $X MRR”

• “Over the next quarter we plan to…”

Make sure you read this post by Sarah Guo, founder of Conviction VC, on pace.

$ Pitch profits $, not products

So how do you communicate your big vision?

European founders often talk about changing the world; lives saved, children educated, deep social impact. It’s powerful, but it’s missionary, not mercenary. US investors want to hear how you’ll dominate and expand a market and generate extreme profits. They’ll only invest if they believe you can make them a lot of money i.e., hundreds of millions of dollars.

Some tips:

• Lead with the size of your market and be specific. Don’t wave your hands with “our TAM is $1 trillion.” Show your bottom-up numbers. (Mike Vernal’s post at Sequoia on this is excellent.)

• Don’t frame your product as a cost saver, that caps your market size. Frame it as a market maker. Show how you help customers expand their markets and make more money.

• Be ready to answer:

  • How do you get to $1M ARR?

  • How do you get to $100M ARR?

  • How do you get to $1B ARR?

  • How fast can you get there and how ambitious can you be about that speed?

• Understand the “idea maze” of your market. SF VCs have a deep, nuanced understanding of most market mazes. You need to do the work to know the history, in particular why similar ideas have or haven’t worked before.

• And finally: What’s your secret? What do you know that others don’t? Peter Thiel coined the phrase Secret in his book Zero to One and you can see my explanation of how to find a secret here.

Pitch what’s possible, not what’s probable

A US VC who works with European founders told me their most common mistake: being too “realistic” with sales numbers. They pitch what they think will happen instead of what could happen.

When US VCs see projections from American founders full of possibility, a measured European forecast can look timid, or worse, make them wonder if you know something worrying about the market.

The answer isn’t to hype numbers you don’t believe. It’s to ask: “What’s the most ambitious target we could hit and what would it take to get there?” Then pitch that. Pitch the possible, not the probable.

To give you some benchmarks: Lovable hit $30M ARR in two years; Mercor hit $75M ARR in two years.

Bessemer shared their view that the top performing AI SaaS, the ‘Shooting Stars’ “reach the ~$3M ARR range within their first year of revenue while quadrupling in YoY growth with ~60% gross margins, and ~$164K ARR / FTE in their first years.” Read more here. We’ve seen this kind of growth in our portfolio; this is what it takes to be a top performing AI startup today.

Are you all-in on the US?

You need a simple story for what you’re doing in the US; where you’re based, why you’re there, and how you’re going all-in. Without a clear US plan, it’s much harder to get US VC money at seed.

You need to show that you’re fully committed to the US. Be ready to answer:

• Where will your team be based?

• What’s your US relocation plan?

• How quickly can you permanently be here?

• How will you secure your O-1 visa? What visa firm are you using?

Some VCs won’t even meet founders until they have the right to remain in the US. Yet it’s also easier to get your O-1 after your round closes. Make sure you know your plan and can communicate it crisply.

It’s worth using a visa firm such as Plymouth to help you navigate the O-1 process.

“The O-1 visa is much more accessible than founders often expect. Many are already qualified and for those who aren’t yet, eligibility can be boosted through steps like judging hackathons or securing press about their startup.” Lisa Wehden, founder and CEO of Plymouth

Badges ≠ credibility: US investors don’t understand your European accolades

This is a tough one: the badges and logos you’ve worked so hard to get on your team slide often won’t translate to a US VC audience. They may not know your university, or if they’ve heard of it, they won’t know how good it is. They may not know the companies or startups where you built your experience.

Be ready to sell why your background is impressive. Don’t assume the same level of knowledge or context you’d get from a European audience. Spell it out for them.

What was your childhood like?

You may be surprised by how personal some of the questions you get from VCs are.

Many SF VCs quietly look for evidence of resilience and they believe serious early challenges help forge it. You should be prepared for questions that can feel unusually personal.

Prepare your personal story that highlights how you’ve taken unconventional paths, risen above your peer group, and dealt with adversity. This isn’t about oversharing private pain, it’s about showing grit, resourcefulness, and the ability to overcome obstacles.

For example:

• Tell me about your relationship with your father?

• Where do you get your motivation from?

• What was your childhood like?

“Most of the VCs I spoke to focused on the business, but some spent the entire time focusing on childhood trauma. It’s worth being prepared!” French founder that raised in SF

DM velocity = data

Everything is data while raising your seed round. Investors will pay very close attention to how quickly you respond to emails and messages. You need to have a 1-60 minute turnaround time at all times between 7am-11pm, 7 days a week.

This shows that you are on top of your fundraise and are a high velocity founder who can get a ton done, even while juggling a raise and building your company.

I’ve had VCs messaging me an hour after they’ve sent an email or message to a founder asking why they haven’t replied yet. We’ve seen teams lose Tier 1 VC interest because they didn’t reply to their email that day. This may be the easiest way for founders to screw up their fundraise when they don’t understand the cultural norms of the Bay Area.

At seed, you’ll raise on a SAFE and you’ll get the money the same day

In Europe, you’ll typically do a priced round with a lead investor. In the US, you’ll often raise on a SAFE, frequently as a party round with multiple investors.

Y Combinator developed the SAFE as a very founder-friendly way to raise seed capital. You can read all about it here. One of the particular benefits is that you can run a ‘rolling’ raise where you can get money in the bank the day you sign each SAFE.

Lenny’s newsletter explains “You don’t need a lead investor to start taking on capital in a seed round. In fact, it is often better to open a SAFE (simple agreement for future equity) at reasonable valuation and start collecting the checks of smaller angels while you are having conversations with larger funds. Not only will you be taking on capital, but you’ll build social proof for the larger investors.” You can read the rest of this excellent post on raising here.

That’s a wrap

I’ll be continuing to post about how Europeans can nail their fundraises in the Bay Area, so make sure you subscribe. Also check out Entrepreneurs First if you’re thinking about founding a startup.

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