In September, we welcomed Reid Hoffman, Greylock, Mosaic, Founders Fund, Lakestar and some of the world’s best entrepreneurs into the EF family as investors. We were particularly proud that three of our exited alumni — Rob and Zehan of Magic Pony Technology and Bryan of Represent — participated in the round. We have big plans for deploying this funding to expand our mission in 2018…

Growing our community

In 2017, 47 new companies graduated from EF — including 12 in our first Singapore cohort. We’re currently running the ninth London cohort and the second in Singapore and we expect 30+ companies to graduate in the first quarter of 2018 alone.

We also participated in roughly one alumni follow on investment a week — 46 EF companies raised next stage funding rounds this year.

Reaching the world's most ambitious talent

More people than ever before are applying to join our community — applications in 2017 were over 3x the 2015 total. People joined us from some of the world’s most prestigious institutions and employers, from DeepMind and Goldman Sachs to Oxford and Stanford. (If you’d like to join us, you can apply here)

Expanding our team

About half of our London team this summer

Our team has doubled in size in 2017. We’re now 64 globally, across three continents and a span of 16 time zones. Thirty-two of us joined this year — partly because our Singapore operation has grown so fast: the Singapore team was just seven in January!

We’re still hiring for some of the most important roles for helping us fulfil our mission. If you’d like to join us, see a list of current openings here.

Connecting our startups to the biggest customers

The now traditional “post-commercial brief” selfie, with EF alumni and execs from Rolls Royce

Our commercial team works with our alumni to help them find the right corporate customers at the right time. This year we facilitated over 200 meetings between our startups and 67 different corporates. We’ve built on our partnerships with the Telegraph and Vitruvian Partners and these relationships have become a core part of how we support our founders.