5th Sept 2024 Bengaluru, Karnataka, India Entrepreneur First (EF), the world’s first “Talent Investor”, has launched a new office in South Park, San Francisco to connect the world’s best founder talent with the world’s best funding ecosystem. Five Indian companies built from scratch in EF’s Bangalore program will be invited to relocate to San Francisco following EF’s pre-Seed Investment Committee.
These Indian startups will have the opportunity to continue their journey in San Francisco, growing what they’ve built into an early-stage company while gaining access to US investors, customers, and markets. This immersive program further reinforces EF’s commitment to strengthening the India-US corridor, helping exceptional Indian founders build global-first companies from their very inception.
The inaugural San Francisco batch will be made up of 33 global teams who will be working on everything from non-invasive brain-computer interfaces to decode language-related thought in the brain to Figma for spatial computing. EF has also upgraded its investment terms for founders joining their programs across the globe. Teams that pass their pre-Seed Investment Committee will be offered a $125,000 investment for an 8% convertible instrument. In addition to the $125,000 investment amount per company, every founder will receive a pre-seed advance of up to $5,000 investment amount upon acceptance into one of their programs in India.
The immersive program comes as a follow-up to the graduate program launched in India in March 2023. Successful teams from the graduate program were given the tools, advisory, and required funding to launch their startup focused on rapidly growing their idea into an early-stage company. The EF India team has been mentoring 30 exceptional individuals as a part of this cohort and preparing the India teams for creating value with a global customer base from their inception. The selected teams from India comprise of:
- CodeAnt AI | Amartya Jha, Chinmay Bharti | CodeAnt AI is a DevTool that helps companies find and auto-fix code issues and security vulnerabilities.
- Hanomi | Marco Mascolo, Drishti Bhasin | An engineering co-pilot to slash design cycles for hardware companies by 50x.
- Insight XR | Sudhanshu Heda, Akshat Khare | Building an Analytics and Insights Platform for XR Experiences to help teams build data-backed experiences.
- Iterate AI | Saksham Aggarwal, Shubhram Bhattacharya | Creating infinite engineering bandwidth for product teams.
- Repello AI | Aryaman Behera, Naman Mishra | Automated red-teaming tool to proactively find vulnerabilities in generative AI applications.
- Unproject | Rishabh Singh, Viba Mohan | Building the Figma for spatial computing.
Alice Bentinck, co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First, said, “It’s well known that Europe and India have some of the world’s most talented engineers. But their path to becoming globally important founders is still too fraught with obstacles. Launching the SF hub is not just about access to the world’s best investors, but it’s about the ‘wet-ware’ mental upgrade EF founders will get from being surrounded by a dense ecosystem of ambitious peers.”
Talking about the immersion program Rahul Samat, Partner and India Head of Entrepreneur First, said, “From Bengaluru to San Francisco, our immersive program is a testament to our commitment to Indian founders, enabling them to build global companies from inception. Witnessing their growth over the past year has been inspiring, and we eagerly anticipate their global impact. As they step onto the global stage, their diverse perspectives will not only contribute to the entrepreneurial fabric of their home countries but also enrich the global startup ecosystem.”
Once founders relocate to San Francisco post funding from EF’s Investment Committee, they will be matched with a Silicon Valley advisor, attend weekly conversations with experienced founders, operators, and investors, and pitch to world-leading investors at an in-person Demo Day hosted by Reid Hoffman.
Building across a wide range of sectors, EF India’s portfolio boasts 50+ successful startups such as gamified investment and personal finance platform Fello, which has a user base of over 1,000,000 people and raised US$4M in their latest funding round, and Beatoven, which harnesses artificial intelligence to empower video and podcast content creators in composing original soundtracks without any prior music expertise.