Entrepreneur First Opens San Francisco Hub to Strengthen India-US Corridor and Provide Founders Access to US Investors
7 min read5 Indian firms; 11 Indian Founders to be a part of 28 different chosen world firms for the immersion program
The world immersive program is aimed to present distinctive Indian founder expertise entry to US traders, market, and clients
Newly launched San Francisco workplace to host the primary batch of founders made up of 33 firms inbuilt Bengaluru, London, Paris, and New York
Entrepreneur First (EF), the world’s first “Talent Investor”, has launched a brand new workplace in South Park, San Francisco to join the world’s finest founder expertise with the world’s finest funding ecosystem. Five Indian firms constructed from scratch in EFs Bangalore program shall be invited to relocate to San Francisco following EF’s pre-Seed Investment Committee.
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Rahul Samat, Partner & India Head Entrepreneur First
These Indian startups may have the chance to proceed their journey in San Francisco, rising what they’ve constructed into an early-stage firm whereas gaining entry to US traders, clients, and markets. This immersive program additional reinforces EF’s dedication to strengthening the India-US hall, serving to distinctive Indian founders construct global-first firms from their very inception.
The inaugural San Francisco batch shall be made up of 33 world groups who shall be engaged on all the things from non-invasive brain-computer interfaces to decode language-related thought within the mind to Figma for spatial computing. EF has additionally upgraded its funding phrases for founders becoming a member of their applications throughout the globe. Teams that go their pre-Seed Investment Committee shall be supplied a $125,000 funding for an 8% convertible instrument. In addition to the $125,000 funding quantity per firm, each founder will obtain a pre-seed advance of up to $5,000 funding quantity upon acceptance into one in every of their applications in India.
The immersive program comes as a follow-up to the graduate program launched in India in March 2023. Successful groups from the graduate program got the instruments, advisory, and required funding to launch their startup centered on quickly rising their concept into an early-stage firm. The EF India group has been mentoring 30 distinctive people as part of this cohort and making ready the India groups for creating worth with a world buyer base from their inception. The chosen groups from India comprise of:
CodeAnt AI | Amartya Jha, Chinmay Bharti | CodeAnt AI is a DevTool that helps firms discover and auto-fix code points and safety vulnerabilities.
Hanomi | Marco Mascolo, Drishti Bhasin | An engineering co-pilot to slash design cycles for {hardware} firms by 50x.
Insight XR | Sudhanshu Heda, Akshat Khare | Building an Analytics and Insights Platform for XR Experiences to assist groups construct data-backed experiences.
Iterate AI | Saksham Aggarwal, Shubhram Bhattacharya | Creating infinite engineering bandwidth for product groups.
Repello AI | Aryaman Behera, Naman Mishra | Automated red-teaming software to proactively discover vulnerabilities in generative AI functions.
Unproject | Rishabh Singh, Viba Mohan | Building the Figma for spatial computing.
Alice Bentinck, co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First, mentioned, “It’s well-known that Europe and India have a number of the world’s most gifted engineers. But their path to turning into globally essential founders remains to be too fraught with obstacles. Launching the SF hub isn’t just about entry to the world’s finest traders, but it surely’s in regards to the ‘wet-ware’ psychological improve EF founders will get from being surrounded by a dense ecosystem of bold friends.“
Talking in regards to the immersion program Rahul Samat, Partner and India Head of Entrepreneur First, mentioned, “From Bengaluru to San Francisco, our immersive program is a testomony to our dedication to Indian founders, enabling them to construct world firms from inception. Witnessing their development over the previous 12 months has been inspiring, and we eagerly anticipate their world influence. As they step onto the worldwide stage, their various views is not going to solely contribute to the entrepreneurial material of their house international locations but additionally enrich the worldwide startup ecosystem.”
Once founders relocate to San Francisco put up funding from EF’s Investment Committee, they are going to be matched with a Silicon Valley advisor, attend weekly conversations with skilled founders, operators, and traders, and pitch to world-leading traders at an in-person Demo Day hosted by Reid Hoffman.
Building throughout a variety of sectors, EF India’s portfolio boasts 50+ profitable startups equivalent to gamified funding and private finance platform Fello, which has a consumer base of over 1,000,000 folks and raised US$4M of their newest funding spherical, and Beatoven, which harnesses synthetic intelligence to empower video and podcast content material creators in composing authentic soundtracks with none prior music experience.
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About Entrepreneur First
Founded in 2011 by Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck, Entrepreneur First is a category-defining investor in entrepreneurial expertise. EF’s portfolio firms have been backed by world-leading traders, together with Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Softbank and GV (previously Google Ventures). The startups cofounded on their applications at the moment are price over $10B, and embody Tractable, Magic Pony Technology, Cleo, La Vie, Aztec, Sonantic, and many extra. They have workplaces in London, Paris, Bangalore and San Francisco. Sharing their experience, Matt and Alice have co-authored the guide “How to be a Founder” (Bloomsbury Publishing), which was launched in August 2022.
Entrepreneur First, the world’s first “Talent Investor” finds and funds the world’s finest early-career, technical founder expertise pre-team and pre-idea. Since 2014, they’ve constructed a portfolio price >$10bn with this distinctive method to firm creation and are backed by founders together with Patrick and John Collison, Reid Hoffman, Taavet Hinrikus and Matt Mullenweg.
EF’s spectacular world roster of backers contains John and Patrick Collison (co-founders of Stripe), Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of Wise), Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn), Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress), Tom Blomfield (co-founder of Monzo and GoCardless), Nat Friedman (former CEO of Github), Sara Clemens (former COO of Twitch and Pandora), Matt Robinson (co-founder of Nested and GoCardless), Patrick O’Shaughnessy (Positive Sum), Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman (co-founders of Deepmind), Claire Hughes Johnson, Sten Tamkivi, Elad Gil and Lachy Groom.
Appendix: Details of firms from India within the inaugural batch
CodeAnt AI | Amartya Jha, Chinmay Bharti | CodeAnt AI is a DevTool that helps firms discover and auto-fix code points and safety vulnerabilities. Amartya led the DevOps and Infrastructure groups at unicorns like Zeta and ShareChat, scaling their infrastructures and functions to deal with a whole lot of thousands and thousands of requests. Chinmay was the founding engineer at Zevi AI and constructed search infrastructure for the largest D2C manufacturers to deal with thousands and thousands of requests.
Hanomi | Marco Mascolo, Drishti Bhasin | An engineering co-pilot to slash design cycles for {hardware} firms by 50x. Marco was awarded Best Student in Imperial Colleges Engineering Department, with an MSc in Fluid Dynamics, and hands-on expertise from NASA to Formula 1, constructing 3D printers and robotic arms since age 12. Drishti has a mechanical engineering background, from prime IIT, mixed with 5 years of AI experience, and key roles at Microsoft, NannyML, Quansight, and a number of publications in prime conferences.
Insight XR | Sudhanshu Heda, Akshat Khare | Building an Analytics and Insights Platform for XR Experiences to assist groups construct data-backed experiences. Sudhanshu was a Founding Member in a Series A funded XR Startup the place he developed a platform to deploy AR/VR/MR Experiences for greater than a dozen Fortune-500 Enterprises. These experiences garnered greater than 50M customers. Akshat graduated from IIT Delhi with a Computer Science Degree. He was a Senior AI Researcher creating cutting-edge AI options leveraging LLMs and LVMs for US State Governments and Pharmaceutical firms.
Iterate AI | Saksham Aggarwal, Shubhram Bhattacharya | Creating infinite engineering bandwidth for product groups. Shubhram was a product supervisor and constructed Indias first book-keeping app for truck house owners and scaled it to 1.2 million customers. Saksham is a CS senior from BITS Pilani. He labored as a full-stack developer at pyor.xyz, constructing the interpretation layer for digital belongings which led to scaling the waitlist to 120k+ customers.
Repello AI |Aryaman Behera, Naman Mishra | Automated red-teaming software to proactively discover vulnerabilities in generative AI functions. Aryaman, along with his 5 years of safety analysis background, graduated from IIT Roorkee, was part of Azure Red group at Microsoft. Naman is a software program developer and ML Engineer who has constructed merchandise utilized by greater than half one million customers and has labored with huge firms like American Express. With analysis publications in ML Security, he brings deep-tech experience to the group.
Unproject | Rishabh Singh, Viba Mohan | Building the Figma for spatial computing. Unproject is at present working intently with design companions from Unity, Microsoft and Gravity Sketch to construct the right software for spatial designers. Viba was beforehand listed by Adobe as one of many 10 most promising designers of 2019. Rishabh beforehand labored on the Intel 3D analysis lab at Santa Clara with a concentrate on XR.
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