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For most of the last two decades, ambitious founders outside the United States have asked one question: how do I get to San Francisco? EWOR, a fellowship founded in Berlin in 2021, has spent five years arguing that they should not have to. Its pitch is that talent is spread evenly around the world and opportunity is not, so it sends capital and mentors to founders wherever they happen to be. The odd thing about the past twelve months is who has been applying.
Applications from founders already based in the US, the one place where the opportunity is supposedly not in short supply, rose 237 percent. Today EWOR announced what it is doing about that: a San Francisco leadership team led by Charles Ferguson, an Oscar-winning filmmaker who sold his first company to Microsoft and now writes some of the earliest cheques in AI, alongside Katie Madding, who was the third US hire at Adjust and later ran Emhance, plus Gigi Brett, a three-time founder who moves from Cape Town to become chief investment officer. The first San Francisco Demo Day follows on 9 October.
EWOR is not an accelerator in the usual sense. There is no batch, no fixed curriculum and no requirement to move. Each year it takes about 35 founders from more than 35,000 applications, a rate of roughly one in a thousand, which is a tenth of what Y Combinator admits and well below the 3 to 4 percent Harvard College lets in. Each fellow gets up to €500,000, structured as €110,000 from the company and €390,000 from a dedicated investment fund, plus a weekly one-to-one session with a founder who has built a company worth somewhere between €100 million and €10 billion.
The mentors work for EWOR full time; they include people behind Adjust, ProGlove and SumUp. The model is expensive to run and deliberately small, which is what makes the applications figure interesting. A 237 percent rise in US demand for a fellowship that admits 35 people is not a sign that EWOR needs more places. It is a sign that a specific kind of founder, one who could walk into any office on Sand Hill Road, wants something Sand Hill Road does not sell: a unicorn founder at their side every week from the idea stage, plus a cheque larger than most pre-seed rounds.
Charles Ferguson's career reads like three careers. He finished a PhD in political science at MIT in 1989, co-founded Vermeer Technologies in 1994, shipped FrontPage in 1995 and sold the company to Microsoft for $133 million in January 1996, at the height of the browser wars. He wrote about that experience in High Stakes, No Prisoners and has published five books in all. Then he made films: No End in Sight took the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2007; Inside Job, his account of the 2008 financial crisis, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2011. Since 2022 he has been an early-stage investor.
The names on his list are the ones that define this AI cycle: Etched, Perplexity, CopilotKit and Paradigm. He is a senior fellow at Brookings, sits on the board of the French-American Foundation and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. For a European fellowship trying to become a fixture in San Francisco, that is a useful combination: a founder who has sold to Microsoft, an investor whose portfolio opens doors at the frontier labs and a public figure who is comfortable arguing with the financial establishment on camera. His own framing of the role is that great founders everywhere need the same three things, best-in-class mentors, access to the San Francisco ecosystem and a global network; EWOR now has the first and third and is building the second.
Katie Madding brings the product side. She was chief product officer and the third US employee at Adjust, the mobile measurement company that AppLovin bought for $1 billion in 2021. She then ran Emhance, Google's official partner for game playtesting, from an idea to recurring revenue with customers including Activision Blizzard King. Her reason for joining is the one most founders will recognise: the nights as a pre-seed chief executive when she sat alone with decisions and turned to an AI model for answers, when what she needed was a founder who had been where she was.
Her brief is to build what she calls the world's best product for founders, so they can spend their energy on the work only they can do. Gigi Brett takes the chief investment officer seat. She built Batelle with a unicorn founder and a team of 60, then launched Upstream, a preconception product for men that ran a pilot with US Navy SEALs. She most recently founded PreSeed, whose donor database now covers about a tenth of registered sperm donors in the US. Her line about the job is that her whole career has been about beginnings; the further upstream you go the higher the impact, which is a fair description of a role that means finding founders at the idea stage. Between them, Ferguson, Madding and Brett cover the three things a fellow needs in a new market: capital and introductions, product and operating judgement, plus someone whose full-time job is picking.
EWOR's argument is that a small number of people with the right support produce outsized outcomes. It has some numbers to show for it. Fellows raise $10 million on average after Demo Day. A quarter of recent joiners have raised at nine-figure valuations in the past six months. Among the alumni: Leonard Dorlöchter took peaq to a $3.5 billion valuation within two years of joining; Alfons Huber raised €20 million at a €277 million post-money valuation for REPS, which turns roads into power plants; Jörgen Tveit's Thaleron raised a €13 million pre-seed, the largest in Europe by a first-time founder at the time; Ricky Knox arrived with two nine-figure exits already behind him, Azimo and Tandem Bank.
This year's intake has the same shape: Martin Varsavsky, a six-time unicorn founder, building Certuma, an AI doctor seeking FDA approval; Lars Hinrichs, who founded Xing, building Simsalasim, an AI-native mobile carrier offering unlimited data across 100 countries for €10 a month; Carter Laren, with €300 million of previous exits, building Sprite, AI agents directed by thought; Maya Polackal of Harvard Medical School building the frontier lab EOMIND; and Thiri Shwesin Aung, a Harvard-trained environmental scientist, building Nyxium for energy and industrial infrastructure decisions. These are not first-time founders looking for a first cheque. Several of them could raise a round on a phone call. They are joining because the weekly mentor and the size of the cheque are worth more to them than the round would be.
EWOR was founded in 2021 by Daniel Dippold with a group of unicorn founders whose companies were worth more than €12 billion between them. In April 2025 it raised €60 million, half to run the company and half for the fund that writes the €390,000 portion of each fellow's cheque. It told Sifted it intended to challenge Y Combinator. The San Francisco team is the next step in that plan. The sequence explains why now. The money came first, then the record, then the American applicants, then the office.
Dippold's line is that the job is to close the gap between talent and opportunity for the world's best founders wherever they are. For a growing number of them that now means San Francisco, so that is where EWOR is. It is a neat inversion of the usual story. The fellowship built to stop founders needing the Bay Area has opened there because the Bay Area's founders asked it to.
The 9 October Demo Day is the first test: ten founders pitching to several hundred investors is a modest event by San Francisco standards. What matters is who shows up and what the rounds look like afterwards. The second is whether the US share of the annual 35 keeps rising, because a European fellowship whose intake tilts American is a different institution from the one that was founded. The third is Ferguson's network in practice. Early cheques into Perplexity and Etched are an unusual calling card for a fellowship. The question is whether those relationships turn into introductions, follow-on capital and hiring for the fellows who come through San Francisco.
EWOR has spent five years telling founders they do not need to move to Silicon Valley. The founders in Silicon Valley heard the message and applied anyway, in numbers that more than tripled in a year. So the fellowship moved instead. It sent an Oscar winner to run the office.
Don’t forget to like and share the story!
Image by: Kiran Ridley, Photojournalist
Applications from founders already based in the US, the one place where the opportunity is supposedly not in short supply, rose 237 percent. Today EWOR announced what it is doing about that: a San Francisco leadership team led by Charles Ferguson, an Oscar-winning filmmaker who sold his first company to Microsoft and now writes some of the earliest cheques in AI, alongside Katie Madding, who was the third US hire at Adjust and later ran Emhance, plus Gigi Brett, a three-time founder who moves from Cape Town to become chief investment officer. The first San Francisco Demo Day follows on 9 October.
What EWOR is and why the number matters
EWOR is not an accelerator in the usual sense. There is no batch, no fixed curriculum and no requirement to move. Each year it takes about 35 founders from more than 35,000 applications, a rate of roughly one in a thousand, which is a tenth of what Y Combinator admits and well below the 3 to 4 percent Harvard College lets in. Each fellow gets up to €500,000, structured as €110,000 from the company and €390,000 from a dedicated investment fund, plus a weekly one-to-one session with a founder who has built a company worth somewhere between €100 million and €10 billion.
The mentors work for EWOR full time; they include people behind Adjust, ProGlove and SumUp. The model is expensive to run and deliberately small, which is what makes the applications figure interesting. A 237 percent rise in US demand for a fellowship that admits 35 people is not a sign that EWOR needs more places. It is a sign that a specific kind of founder, one who could walk into any office on Sand Hill Road, wants something Sand Hill Road does not sell: a unicorn founder at their side every week from the idea stage, plus a cheque larger than most pre-seed rounds.
The man who sold FrontPage
Charles Ferguson's career reads like three careers. He finished a PhD in political science at MIT in 1989, co-founded Vermeer Technologies in 1994, shipped FrontPage in 1995 and sold the company to Microsoft for $133 million in January 1996, at the height of the browser wars. He wrote about that experience in High Stakes, No Prisoners and has published five books in all. Then he made films: No End in Sight took the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2007; Inside Job, his account of the 2008 financial crisis, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2011. Since 2022 he has been an early-stage investor.
The names on his list are the ones that define this AI cycle: Etched, Perplexity, CopilotKit and Paradigm. He is a senior fellow at Brookings, sits on the board of the French-American Foundation and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. For a European fellowship trying to become a fixture in San Francisco, that is a useful combination: a founder who has sold to Microsoft, an investor whose portfolio opens doors at the frontier labs and a public figure who is comfortable arguing with the financial establishment on camera. His own framing of the role is that great founders everywhere need the same three things, best-in-class mentors, access to the San Francisco ecosystem and a global network; EWOR now has the first and third and is building the second.
The operator and the investor
Katie Madding brings the product side. She was chief product officer and the third US employee at Adjust, the mobile measurement company that AppLovin bought for $1 billion in 2021. She then ran Emhance, Google's official partner for game playtesting, from an idea to recurring revenue with customers including Activision Blizzard King. Her reason for joining is the one most founders will recognise: the nights as a pre-seed chief executive when she sat alone with decisions and turned to an AI model for answers, when what she needed was a founder who had been where she was.
Her brief is to build what she calls the world's best product for founders, so they can spend their energy on the work only they can do. Gigi Brett takes the chief investment officer seat. She built Batelle with a unicorn founder and a team of 60, then launched Upstream, a preconception product for men that ran a pilot with US Navy SEALs. She most recently founded PreSeed, whose donor database now covers about a tenth of registered sperm donors in the US. Her line about the job is that her whole career has been about beginnings; the further upstream you go the higher the impact, which is a fair description of a role that means finding founders at the idea stage. Between them, Ferguson, Madding and Brett cover the three things a fellow needs in a new market: capital and introductions, product and operating judgement, plus someone whose full-time job is picking.
The record the model is being judged on
EWOR's argument is that a small number of people with the right support produce outsized outcomes. It has some numbers to show for it. Fellows raise $10 million on average after Demo Day. A quarter of recent joiners have raised at nine-figure valuations in the past six months. Among the alumni: Leonard Dorlöchter took peaq to a $3.5 billion valuation within two years of joining; Alfons Huber raised €20 million at a €277 million post-money valuation for REPS, which turns roads into power plants; Jörgen Tveit's Thaleron raised a €13 million pre-seed, the largest in Europe by a first-time founder at the time; Ricky Knox arrived with two nine-figure exits already behind him, Azimo and Tandem Bank.
This year's intake has the same shape: Martin Varsavsky, a six-time unicorn founder, building Certuma, an AI doctor seeking FDA approval; Lars Hinrichs, who founded Xing, building Simsalasim, an AI-native mobile carrier offering unlimited data across 100 countries for €10 a month; Carter Laren, with €300 million of previous exits, building Sprite, AI agents directed by thought; Maya Polackal of Harvard Medical School building the frontier lab EOMIND; and Thiri Shwesin Aung, a Harvard-trained environmental scientist, building Nyxium for energy and industrial infrastructure decisions. These are not first-time founders looking for a first cheque. Several of them could raise a round on a phone call. They are joining because the weekly mentor and the size of the cheque are worth more to them than the round would be.
Five years to San Francisco
EWOR was founded in 2021 by Daniel Dippold with a group of unicorn founders whose companies were worth more than €12 billion between them. In April 2025 it raised €60 million, half to run the company and half for the fund that writes the €390,000 portion of each fellow's cheque. It told Sifted it intended to challenge Y Combinator. The San Francisco team is the next step in that plan. The sequence explains why now. The money came first, then the record, then the American applicants, then the office.
Dippold's line is that the job is to close the gap between talent and opportunity for the world's best founders wherever they are. For a growing number of them that now means San Francisco, so that is where EWOR is. It is a neat inversion of the usual story. The fellowship built to stop founders needing the Bay Area has opened there because the Bay Area's founders asked it to.
What to watch
The 9 October Demo Day is the first test: ten founders pitching to several hundred investors is a modest event by San Francisco standards. What matters is who shows up and what the rounds look like afterwards. The second is whether the US share of the annual 35 keeps rising, because a European fellowship whose intake tilts American is a different institution from the one that was founded. The third is Ferguson's network in practice. Early cheques into Perplexity and Etched are an unusual calling card for a fellowship. The question is whether those relationships turn into introductions, follow-on capital and hiring for the fellows who come through San Francisco.
EWOR has spent five years telling founders they do not need to move to Silicon Valley. The founders in Silicon Valley heard the message and applied anyway, in numbers that more than tripled in a year. So the fellowship moved instead. It sent an Oscar winner to run the office.
Don’t forget to like and share the story!
Image by: Kiran Ridley, Photojournalist