Entrepreneurs First invests in exceptional individuals to build startups from scratch. We bring together talented outliers to develop their most ambitious ideas and raise money from the world’s best investors. Since pioneering Talent Investing in 2015, we’ve learned to recognize individuals with extraordinary futures before anyone else, embedding them in a community of ambitious peers and giving them the tools they need to succeed, fast. We back them before they have a company, a team, even before they have an idea, based purely on talent. EF’s portfolio is now collectively valued at over $16B, and includes companies such as Aztec, Cleo, Magdrive, Neptune, Omnea, Opply, PolyAI, Tractable, and many more. EF is backed by some of the world's leading founders and investors, including Founders Fund, Greylock, John Collison (founder – Stripe), Patrick Collison (founder – Stripe), Reid Hoffman (founder – LinkedIn), Eric Schmidt (former CEO - Google), Demis Hassabis (founder – Google DeepMind ), Taavet Hinrikus (founder – Wise), Matt Mullenweg (founder – WordPress), Charlie Songhurst (Board member – Meta), Christa Davies (Board member – Stripe), Lachy Groom (founder – Physical Intelligence), Aidan Gomez (founder – Cohere), Mati Staniszewski (founder – ElevenLabs), Danny Rimer (Partner - Index Ventures), Matt Cohler (former General Partner - Benchmark). We exist to make great companies happen that otherwise wouldn’t. For more information about Entrepreneurs First, visit www.joinef.com We're hiring! Join our global team and experience firsthand the workings of a globally unique talent investor working with cutting edge entrepreneurs on world changing technologies: https://www.joinef.com/about/careers
Lien externe pour Entrepreneurs First
Senna Building, WeWork, Gorsuch Pl
E2 8JF London, GB
11th Main Road
4th Floor, Urban Vault 65
560102 Bengaluru, Karnataka, IN
Station F, 5 Parvis Alan Turing
75013 Paris, FR
501 Folsom St
Floors 1&2
94105 San Francisco, California, US
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New York we're on our way! 🗽 Join us next Wednesday June 3rd for a fun unconference-style presentation night with the theme: What are you obsessed with? 🧐 We've had everything from flirting in the Victorian Age to zero-knowledge proofs. This is NOT a pitch or demo night. Come for the learnings and unique obsessions! https://lnkd.in/g8iwFmgB
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you don't need to have the idea yet you don't need to have the team yet you do need to be ready to spend the summer in San Francisco with me Maxwell Filip-Turner and Mike Phillips, fully focused on building something from scratch The Bridge, final deadline on Monday. Link below.
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Deadline for the upcoming The Bridge cohort is in 3 days - applications close midnight, June 1st! We’re heading to our SF residency in AUG 🛸 > 8 weeks to build the foundations of a generational company. Who is this for? - You can’t not build & you’re ready to go all-in - Non-US Founders - As early as pre-idea / pre-team - 40 spots - $250K investment for the best - Bonus: I especially back AI-native Founders rethinking how humans & intelligence operate together We cover: - Visa support / flights / housing / food / access to the world’s best network - Our team supports you 24/7 and builds alongside you By Entrepreneurs First. Backed by: - Demis Hassabis, Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, Reid Hoffman, Patrick Collison & John Collison, Eric Schmidt & others Our alumni have built: Tractable, Cleo, Aztec, Gensyn, PolyAI, Neptune Robotics, & many more As always - ping & send names! glhf
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tbc(afé) is coming to SF. After 7 cities across Europe, Violette, Aurelien and I are hosting the first US edition from our hacker house in the Mission District. 3pm to 6pm, no agenda. Bring your laptop, work on your stuff, meet people. We're looking for future founders, creators, and operators. The Bridge and Entrepreneurs First team will be there if you want to talk about what's next. We're also recruiting a content creator. If that's you or someone you know, come say hi. → Application link(s) in comments
First-time founders are often quick to conviction and slow to validation. Second-time founders are usually the opposite. They’ve seen what it takes to build, they know how hard it is and they can validate fast. But choosing what to spend the next decade on can take longer. That’s what this evening is about. We’re hosting a private event in London for repeat founders who are thinking about what comes next. With Matthew Wilson and Ed Steele from Jack & Jill we’ll discuss how the playbook has changed: how AI compresses timelines, what defensibility looks like now and how to build conviction faster, and what it takes to make your last company a footnote of your next chapter. A room for founders who have done it once, and are thinking seriously about doing it again. Link in the comments.
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Saturday Club is coming to Berlin on June 6th! A place for people with a full-time job who are serious about founding a company soon. To be clear: we think the best way to start a company is to go full-time from day one. But we know that's not the right first step for everyone. Some people need to find a co-founder first, or make some progress before they leap. Saturday Club is for exactly those people, the ones in between. We're especially keen to meet technical builders, engineers and scientists, though strong commercial people with real conviction are welcome too. It's a structured morning built to help you meet potential co-founders, pressure-test ideas, and build toward going full-time. This is not a networking event. We screen for commitment and only invite people who show sincerity and progress. We're hosting this with Cherry Ventures at their Berlin office on Saturday 6th June. Victor from the Cherry team will be joining us. Apply here: https://lnkd.in/eHKUvDUw
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I'm hosting an evening with Jack & Jill, bringing together exceptional repeat founders to trade notes on what it takes to build a breakout startup today. • How do you pick a problem worth a decade? • How have team structures shifted, and what does the best early hires look like in an AI-native company? • How do you think about defensibility now? • How high has the bar for "breakout" actually moved? The playbook has changed. AI has compressed timelines, capital markets have reset, and the bar for a breakout business is higher than it was five years ago. For founders going again, some of the old answers no longer hold, and there are new questions entirely. Joining our panel: Matthew Wilson (CEO, Jack & Jill) — previously founded Omnipresent, scaling it to a $600M valuation in 3 years before exiting to Deel. At Jack & Jill, he's built a 16-person, founder-heavy team (10 ex-founders) across London and SF, and raised $20M led by Creandum (Lovable, Spotify, Black Forest Labs, Bolt). Ed Steele (Founding Operator, Jack & Jill) — previously founded Hoxton Farms, raising $35M from Founders Fund, Collab Fund and Fidelity. Before that, an ML engineer at Thought Machine and a mathematician working across biotech, finance and sport. Maths at Oxford, ML at Imperial. Join us if you're a repeat founder exploring what's next! Link in comments Entrepreneurs First Tom Bryan Vincenzo Francia Sophia Arora
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2.5 years building this and learning more than I've ever done in my life, come check it out!
Introducing AUDIOGEN, a new way of making music. Can you hear it? We all collectively think that one has to be "special" to make music, one has to be courageous, be a "creative". But in the very simplest versions of ourselves, we all constantly create and express, just across different mediums, our jokes, our pictures, our stories. Music we believe however, is the purest medium of creative expression. It's the only language that can always unite two people from the most distant corners of our earth. The bar though has always been too high, or as of recently, too low … We postulate a balance, where the act of creating is just hands on enough for one to take pride in one's creation and feel the catharsis of expression, and at the same time approachable enough for anyone to get started in under 10 minutes without requiring months of focused investment in highly dexterous instruments or musical software. We worship this equilibrium. As a tiny team of fully self taught researchers and seasoned engineers and designers we spent the last 2.5 years researching, pretraining, and posttraining our own full stack audio models and designing a brand new alien musical product experience in hopes manifesting this perfect balance. All through countless sleepless nights in our London office and late night discussions. Enjoy the film.
Certo has raised a $4M Seed round led by Daphni to build the AI-powered compliance platform for beauty and consumer goods brands. Founded by Bastien and Jean, Certo helps regulatory teams review products across ingredients, formulas, claims, labelling and market entry, turning a process that can take days into minutes. The platform is already used by leading beauty and CPG companies across Europe and the US to navigate growing regulatory complexity across 40+ markets. Proud to back this team from day zero at EF.
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Thrilled to share that Certo has raised $4M to build the AI-powered compliance operating system for the consumer packaged goods industry, led by daphni, with support from Entrepreneurs First, Motier Ventures, and Transpose Platform. Every consumer product on a shelf has passed through a regulatory review. And those reviews are getting harder every year, transversal frameworks, local country and state-specific rules, internal brand standards, certification schemes, retailer forbidden lists, all moving at once across 100+ countries. Yet most of those reviews still happen in spreadsheets and scattered PDFs. We're rebuilding that layer. Our mission is to become the data and trust layer that connects raw materials suppliers, manufacturers, brands, and regulators, so every product launched is faster, safer, and fully traceable. We're hiring across engineering, regulatory, and commercial. If this vision resonates, come build it with us. Thanks to the early Certo team Jean Duquenne Guillaume Lancrenon Louis Ducurtil, our investors and business angels Jonas Simonin Briac Lescure Julia Denoly Guillaume Houzé Clément Lamolinerie Laurine Moureaux Nikos Liodakis Fiyin Olayisade Alexandre Godvin Christophe de Villeplée Vincent Delacourt Sam Smith-Eppsteiner
Certo has raised $4M to build the AI-powered compliance operating system for the consumer goods packaged goods industry. The seed round is led by daphni, with participation from Entrepreneurs First, Motier Ventures, and Transpose Platform. Product compliance in consumer goods is becoming exponentially more complex (transversal regulations, local country and state-specific rules, internal brand standards, third-party certification frameworks, and retailer-specific forbidden lists, each updated constantly). Yet regulatory teams, who sit on the critical path of every product launch, still work with spreadsheets, scattered PDFs, and siloed document systems. Certo replaces that with a single platform covering the full compliance lifecycle: raw materials homologation, formula compliance, claims verification, artwork and labelling checks, and market access, across 70+ geographies. Reviews that used to take days now take minutes, with full auditability. Leading global beauty and CPG brands are already using Certo across Europe and the United States. This funding will go toward growing our engineering and in-house regulatory teams, deepening multi-market coverage through our proprietary databases, and scaling commercial operations in the EU and US. We are building the data and trust layer that connects raw materials suppliers, manufacturers, brands, and regulators. We're hiring, across engineering, regulatory, and commercial, in Europe and the US. If this vision resonates with you, come build it with us. Bastien Deliège-Coste Jean Duquenne Guillaume Lancrenon Louis Ducurtil Jonas Simonin Briac Lescure Julia Denoly Clément Lamolinerie Laurine Moureaux Nikos Liodakis Fiyin Olayisade