Supporting the super-large stage entrepreneurs in Europe seems to be in the rage all of a sudden. In March, “Project Europe” was launched by Podcaster and VC Harry Stebbings with a large fanfare with a handful of $10 million funds under the age of 25, reflecting Old's “Peter Thiel Fellowship” model. The new fund now hopes to make one better, but this time it's $68 million.
EWOR (short for “risk-free entrepreneurship”) launched its own “founder fellowship” and committed €60 million. It claims, on average, that graduates continue to raise between 1 million and 11 million euros during their fellowships.
This money goes to 35 entrepreneurs a year who fit the mold of “foresight, technical genius, deeply driven operators, serial entrepreneurs.”
Fellows receive virtual first support with 1:1 mentorship (including 1-5 hours a week with the “Unicorn Founder”), access to 2,000 mentors, VCS, and subject matter experts. In contrast, Project Europe offers a network of founder investors with 128 backers.
Founded in 2021, EWOR is run full-time by six entrepreneurs who were previously within companies such as Sumup, Adach, Proglove and United-Domains.
In his call with TechCrunch, Dippold contrasted with Project Europe's EWR fellowship offering. The latter trumpeted with entrepreneurs with “just an idea,” but he said EWOR would easily match the product.
As part of the 500,000 Euro investment, this includes 110,000 Euros from EWOR GMBH and an additional 390,000 Euros from investment funds via capless convertible notes or similar equipment.
One example of the previously supported startups is Aspect Health, a startup built in Moldova, which raised funds in Silicon Valley and New York, eventually reaching $50 million.
Dippold said: “The Vector database has 50,000 applicants who understand all the intricate details of a person's Github. If you need to hire someone with 10,000 lines of code and rust skills, you can find them in one question.”
“We run evil like a software company, build measurements, build measurements, build measurements, build measurements, build measurements, build measurements.
So far, 10 founders have been accepted into this year's cohort.
They include UK-based Mark Golab, a pioneer in 3D printing that applies the technology to organ transplants with a Cambridge surgical model after survival of a life-threatening infection. Vienna-based Viktoria Izdebezka is working on lead generation in a sales style.
Previous EWOR Fellows include Ricky Knox. Ricky Knox achieved two nine-digit exits with Azimo and Tandem Bank. Tim Seite led Tillhub to a bootstrap exit for nearly 100 million euros.
Jörgen Tveit of Ewor Fellow, founder of Thaleron, added in a statement: