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Found the future
Entrepreneur First is the world’s leading talent investor. We invest time and money in the world’s most talented and ambitious individuals, helping them to find a co-founder, develop an idea, and start a company. So far, we’ve helped 1,000+ people create 200+ companies, worth a combined $1.5bn.
Upcoming Cohorts
We run cohorts twice a year, in six different countries around the globe.
Why?
Right now, the world’s most ambitious people are held back by corporate and cultural convention. They are encouraged to join prestigious corporates, or top academic institutions and make slow and steady progress. This puts an artificial limit on what they can achieve, and how fast. EF exists to remove that limit.
We offer these Outlier individuals the opportunity to start a technology company and use their ambition to have a lasting, powerful impact.
How it works
Twice a year we select up to 100 people to join our programme, from thousands of applicants.
The first part of the programme focuses on finding the right co-founder, and developing your idea. We call this Form.
The second is called Launch and helps you grow your company – with investment from EF – culminating in a demo day in front of the world’s best investors.
“I was a software developer with a technical PhD, now I’m the CEO of Atlas ML. Without EF, I wouldn't have met my co-founder - our company wouldn’t exist.”— Robert Stojnic, CEO of Atlas ML
Where Outliers come together
EF brings together an extraordinary collection of people, from experienced industry experts to top technologists and academics – and even extraordinary people right at the start of their careers. Ambitious individuals have joined from Google and Goldman Sachs, Alibaba and Amazon, MIT and NUS. All of them saw starting a company as the best way to maximise their impact.
Dave Hunter
Founder, Optimal Labs
Dave rejected a PhD offer from Princeton to join EF and found Optimal Labs (EF7). Optimal applies bleeding-edge Deep Reinforcement Learning to create highly-intelligent autopilots for farms. Dave holds a first class Master’s in Computer Science from Oxford and previously ran the algorithmic trading quantitative strategies team at Deutsche Bank where his algorithms traded >5% of the European stock market volume.
Noor Shaker
Founder, GTN
Noor joined EF8 where she met her co-founder Vid and founded GTN, a company that offers a quantum leap in drug discovery. Noor is a professor from Aalborg University in Copenhagen with ten years of academic experience in machine learning. She has published more than 50 papers with 1000 citations and an entire book on generative networks. She has won a number of awards and grants for her research.
Rohit Jha
Founder, Transcelestial Technologies
Rohit cofounded Transcelestial Technologies (EFSG1). Transcelestial is developing a ground breaking satellite communications network, using proprietary laser technology to transfer data 1000 times faster than current wireless technologies, across any distance. He’s an Electrical Engineer by training, and worked for 4 years in RBS’ FX Electronic Markets Team on latency in communications before joining EF.
Sadaf Monajemi
Founder, See-Mode
Sadaf is co-founder of See-Mode, which empowers doctors to predict strokes and save lives with no additional test. She has a PhD and a BSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a dual degree in Biomedical Engineering. She has collaborated with leading AI and machine learning experts from UCLA, University of Oxford, and Imperial College.
Zehan Wang
Founder, Magic Pony Technology
Zehan is the cofounder of Magic Pony Technology (EF3), a video processing startup that was acquired by Twitter. Zehan joined EF after earning a PhD in Computer Vision and Biomedical Image Analysis from Imperial. He experimented with a number of ideas while at EF, before cofounding alongside another Imperial graduate he met at EF, Rob Bishop.
Neel Popat
Founder, Donut
Neel met his co-founder Jordan on the first Berlin cohort, and together they founded Donut, a fully regulated crypto investment portfolio. Prior to joining EF, Neel has over 7 years of deep finance experience having worked at 3 top-tier investment funds managing >$150bn. Neel started his career at Rothschild and holds a first class degree in Financial Mathematics & Statistics from LSE/Harvard. He built his first business out of his bedroom aged 14.
Where Outliers come together
EF brings together an extraordinary collection of people, from experienced industry experts to top technologists and academics – and even extraordinary people right at the start of their careers. Ambitious individuals have joined from Google and Goldman Sachs, Alibaba and Amazon, MIT and NUS. All of them saw starting a company as the best way to maximise their impact.
Our Companies
We fund people to build companies that transform industries or create new ones from scratch. Our founders are building everything from AI that beats humans at detecting cancer in mammograms, to a space laser communication network.
Our companies raise money from the world’s best investors, with many on course to build globally important businesses. We’ve also had companies achieve early success, like Magic Pony Technology, who were acquired by Twitter for $150m just 18 months after the founders met at EF.
GTN
Noor Shaker Vid Stojevic
GTN is a quantum leap in drug discovery. We search the astronomically large space of potential drug molecules with our patented technology based on quantum physics and machine learning, discovering drugs that were previously hidden from view. We can discover better drugs, more quickly, at half the cost.
Noor Shaker is a professor from Aalborg University in Copenhagen with ten years of academic experience in machine learning. She has published more than 50 papers with 1000 citations and an entire book on generative networks. She has won a number of awards and grants for her research.
Vid Stojevic has spent the past ten years working on string theory and tensorial methods in quantum physics. He has held postdocs at UCL and the University of Vienna, published in numerous high impact journals, and his work has been presented at leading conferences.
Please note these requests go to the EF team and are passed on to the company periodically.
Cleo
Barney Hussey-Yeo
Cleo is an A.I. assistant to manage your finances. Using machine learning we automatically classify your transactions, deliver relevant insights into your spending and give you a clear overview of your finances. And users can get all of this, just by sending Cleo a text.
Rather than creating a bank, Cleo sits on top of existing infrastructure to give our users an elegant and user-friendly banking experience. By integrating APIs for banks and other financial service providers, Cleo aims to become a hub for each user’s banking activity.
Barney Hussey-Yeo holds a Master’s in Machine Learning from the University of Bristol and has spent the last year working as a Decision Scientist at Wonga, analysing financial data.
Please note these requests go to the EF team and are passed on to the company periodically.
Kheiron
Peter Kecskemethy Tobias Rijken
Kheiron’s Machine Learning technology makes cancer diagnoses faster, easier, cheaper and more accurate. Our tailored application of Machine Learning, Kheiron can save up to 60% of a radiologist’s time. Our Deep Learning algorithms analyse medical images accurately and consistently and our software uses the analysis results to enable the automation of radiology reporting tasks.
Peter Kecskemethy has a CS background, did a postdoc and PhD in High Performance Computing and Statistical Genetics at Oxford, has worked at 4 startups and previously founded a related teleradiology startup. He comes from a family of doctors.
Tobias Rijken has an MSc in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning from UCL with a Deep Learning focus. He was a Machine Learning scientist at Stratified Medical applying Deep Learning in the pharmaceutical industry.
Please note these requests go to the EF team and are passed on to the company periodically.
Transcelestial
Rohit Jha Mohammad Danesh
Transcelestial is developing the fastest, long-distance, point-to-point wireless communication network possible. It will be delivered as a space data network for terrestrial and satellite applications, which will use lasers to transfer data at up to 1000x faster than what is currently available. The network will be difficult to jam and will not need any spectrum pre-allocation or regulation.
Mohammad Danesh has a PhD in NanoPhotonics from NUS. He has designed and built photonic systems for A*STAR, Sumitomo Electric Labs and FUNSOM Institute. He has published 10 papers in major photonics journals including Nature.
Rohit Jha has a degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from NTU. I have worked in The Royal Bank of Scotland’s FX Electronic Markets Team, on low-latency communications and highly scalable software systems.
Please note these requests go to the EF team and are passed on to the company periodically.
Tractable
Alexandre Dalyac Razvan Ranca
Tractable’s technology can automate the work of any expert that’s paid to inspect things, in any domain, at near zero marginal cost. We exploit big opportunities in different sectors by harnessing their clients’ distribution. They charge per inspection, at an 80% discount to humans, for the same accuracy, and return results in seconds.
Alex Dalyac holds a Computer Science (Distinction) from Imperial. Razva Ranca studied Computer Science (Distinction) at the University of Cambridge. They both left PhDs in Machine Learning at these institutions to found Tractable.
Please note these requests go to the EF team and are passed on to the company periodically.
Pencil
Will Hanschell Sumukh Avadhani
Pencil is the world’s first creative AI platform for digital advertising teams in brands and agencies. Their platform generates culturally inspired ad copy and visuals for any product and audience, while predictively optimising for creativity, conversion and brand relevance.
Will Hanschell is a systems engineer with 8 years in creative services, most recently as the Asia head of consulting at Iris, one of the world’s most creative agencies.
Sumukh Avadhani is an AI expert with 10 years’ experience in the field, from the Samsung Multimedia Lab to self-driving cars at Toshiba and anti-abuse at Google.
Please note these requests go to the EF team and are passed on to the company periodically.
Our backers
EF is backed by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn), the founders of DeepMind and PayPal, and some of the top investors in the world.