Are EWOR fellowships the real project Europe is looking for?

Supporting super-early stage entrepreneurs in Europe appears to be instantly in vogue. Again 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$10 million fund to again founders aged solely 25 and beneath, riffing on the ‘Peter Thiel Fellowship’ mannequin of outdated.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 danger”) has launched its personal ‘founder fellowship’, committing €60 million, which can supply chosen founders €500,000 in capital for a 7% stake (as compared, Mission Europe affords on €200,000 for a 6.66% stake). It claims that, on common, alumni have gone on to boost €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 assist, 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. In contrast, Mission Europe affords its founder-investor community of 128 backers.

Based in 2021, EWOR is run full-time by six entrepreneurs who have been beforehand inside corporations akin to SumUp, Modify, 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 Mission Europe. Whereas the latter trumpeted taking entrepreneurs with ‘simply an thought’ he stated EWOR will simply match that providing: “We do two fellowships, ideation and traction. You possibly can actually — like we had a yr in the past with the youngest machine studying researcher from Cambridge— haven’t any co-founder, no thought. You can begin at inception, no downside.”

As a part of the €500,000 funding, this contains €110,000 from EWOR GmbH and a further €390,000 from the funding fund by way of an uncapped convertible notice or comparable instrument.

One instance of a beforehand backed startup contains Aspect Health, a startup that was in-built Moldova, raised funding in Silicon Valley and New York, and ended up with a $50M.

Dippold stated: “We have now 50,000 candidates in a vector database that understands each intricate element of an individual’s GitHub. So if you have to rent an individual with 10,000 strains of code and Rust expertise, I can discover that particular person with one question.”

“We run evil like a software program firm, construct measure, Be taught, Construct measure, Be taught, Construct measure, be taught… The one factor that issues is it must be essentially the most helpful factor any founder can presumably 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 know-how 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. 

Earlier 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 virtually €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.”