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$10 million fund to again founders aged solely 25 and underneath, riffing on the ‘Peter Thiel Fellowship’ mannequin of outdated.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