Upcoming Cohorts
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
We run cohorts twice a year, in six different countries around the globe.
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 us – culminating in a demo day in front of the world’s best investors.
Where Outliers come together
We bring 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, an investment service into digital assets (read: crypto). 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
We bring 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 on the programme.
FabricNano
Grant Aarons Ferdinando Randisi
FabricNano designs artificial cells that produce chemicals 100x faster.
Fermentation powers a $5Tn chemical market, from bioplastics to sweeteners to emulsifiers for your soap and shampoo. Billions are spent bioengineering incremental improvements to the microbes that make these products.
At FabricNano, we extract only those microbial components necessary for fermentation, and fix them on a woven nano-fabric made of DNA. This gives 100x faster production, higher purity, and adaptability.
We are already prototyping our technology with 3 multibillion dollar chemical companies and we have filed the first of many patents for designing biology outside the living cell.
Grant Aarons
Grant is a former Economics PhD at London Business School where he taught microeconomics, markets and econometrics. Grant has studied systems engineering and developed the mathematical modelling behind the nowcasting platform released by the Federal Reserve in
New York; cited by the FT and Bloomberg.
Ferdinando Randisi
Ferdi has a Computational Biophysics PhD from Oxford University. He co-authored oxDNA, the world’s most accurate DNA simulation engine, known for its reliability and versatility in nanostructure analysis. His models study how small local changes can improve the global stability of DNA structures.
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
Entrepreneur First is backed by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn), the founders of DeepMind and PayPal, and some of the top investors in the world.