EWOR names a San Francisco team as US applications surge 237%

EWOR, a founder fellowship harder to get into than Y Combinator, has named a senior leadership team in San Francisco. The appointments follow a record year of US applications, up 237% in twelve months.

The team comprises Charles Ferguson, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who sold FrontPage to Microsoft. He invested early in Etched, Perplexity, CopilotKit, and Paradigm. Alongside him are former Emhance CEO and Adjust CPO Katie Madding, and 3x founder (Batelle, PreSeed Fertility, Upstream) Gigi Brett.

EWOR’s premise is that talent is spread evenly across the world but opportunity is not. Fellows receive up to $600K in capital and 1:1 weekly mentorship from unicorn builders (Adjust, ProGlove, SumUp). They get it wherever they are, rather than relocating.

Founders who joined EWOR this year raised $10M on average. 25% of recent joiners have raised at nine-figure valuations in the past 6 months. In addition, fellows hire early team members and secure first customers through EWOR’s talent and customer network.

Why US founders are applying

Its applicants increasingly come from the US, people who already sit inside the world’s densest startup market. That is the clearest sign that the model offers something US founders can’t easily get at home. It means well above-average funding rounds. It also means a full-time team of unicorn founders who have already built companies worth between $100M and $12B. They work beside fellows every week, from as early as the idea stage.

“Talent is spread evenly across the world. Opportunity is not,” said Daniel Dippold, EWOR’s founder and CEO. “Our job is to close that gap for the world’s best founders wherever they are. For a growing number of them, that now means San Francisco, so that’s where we are.”

From FrontPage to the frontier of AI

Charles Ferguson sold FrontPage to Microsoft in 1996. He holds a PhD in political science from MIT and published five books. He won an Academy Award for his documentary Inside Job, an account of the 2008 financial crisis. Today he’s one of the most sought-after early investors in AI. He has already invested in Etched, Perplexity, CopilotKit and Paradigm. His career runs across the Atlantic. It includes a Brookings fellowship, a board seat at the French-American Foundation and a life membership of the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Great founders need the same things: support from best-in-class mentors, access to the San Francisco startup ecosystem, and a superb global network,” said Ferguson. “EWOR is already the world’s most selective founder fellowship, now expanding with US applications up 237% this year, and with EWOR Fellows raising an average of $10M after Demo Day. So I’m honored to help lead EWOR’s US growth and its integration within San Francisco’s world-leading ecosystem.”

From leading startups to standing beside the founders who build them

Katie Madding was Chief Product Officer and the third US hire at Adjust. Palo Alto-based AppLovin bought the company for $1B in 2021. She then led Emhance as CEO, Google’s official partner for game playtesting. She took it from an idea to recurring revenue, with customers including Microsoft-owned Activision Blizzard King.

“What led me to EWOR were my lonely nights as a pre-seed CEO, when I sat alone with decisions, turning to AI for answers when what I really needed was a founder who’d been where I was,” said Madding. “That’s what we’re building: the world’s best product for founders, so they can pour their energy into the work only they can do, basically the support I had dreamt of when I was CEO.”

From optimising the conditions for life to those for billion-dollar companies

Gigi Brett joins EWOR as Chief Investment Officer, relocating from Cape Town to San Francisco. A three-time founder in health and education, she built Batelle with a unicorn founder and a team of 60. She then launched Upstream, the first preconception product designed for men. It ran a pilot with US Navy SEALs. Her most recent company, PreSeed Fertility, has built a database of exceptional sperm donors. It now covers around 10% of all registered donors in the US.

“My whole career has been about beginnings, from conception to early childhood health, and the lesson never changes: the further upstream you go, the higher the impact,” said Brett. “Joining EWOR, I get to work at the most upstream point there is, supporting founders from as early as the idea stage, when the right help changes everything that follows.”

A snapshot of this year’s accepted founders

EWOR has accepted a handful of founders into the Fellowship recently, among them:

• Martin Varsavsky, a 5x unicorn founder now building Certuma, the first AI doctor seeking FDA approval.
• Lars Hinrichs, Xing founder now building Simsalasim, the first truly global, AI-native mobile carrier, offering unlimited data across 100 countries via eSIM.
• Maya Polackal, a Harvard Medical School and Boston University researcher now building EOMIND, a frontier AI lab.
• Carter Laren, a serial founder ($300M in previous exits) and angel investor now building Sprite, AI agents directed by their own thoughts rather than a human’s.
• Thiri Shwesin Aung, a Harvard-trained environmental scientist turned founder now building Nyxium, an AI platform for deployable energy and industrial infrastructure decisions.

Previous fellows include

• Ricky Knox, an ex-unicorn founder with two 9-figure exits with Azimo and Tandem Bank
• Alfons Huber, a physicist who raised $23.6M on a $322M post-money valuation to turn roads into power plants with REPS GmbH
• Jörgen Tveit, founder of energy storage startup Thaleron, which raised Europe’s largest ever pre-seed ($15M) by a first-time founder at the time
• Leonard T. Dorlöchter, who achieved a $3.5B valuation for peaq within 2 years of joining EWOR

About EWOR

EWOR is a fellowship for outlier founders building transformative tech. They are convinced that entrepreneurs shape the future, yet only a few create generational impact. Therefore, EWOR supports the top 0.1% with up to $600,000 in funding. It adds weekly 1:1 mentorship from unicorn founders (Adjust, ProGlove, SumUp) who now work full-time for EWOR. No standardised playbooks or rigid programming. EWOR tailors its virtual-first approach to each founder’s non-linear journey.

Building alongside proven peers, EWOR Fellows break records. One raised a $15M pre-seed round as a first-time founder. Another achieved a $3.5B valuation within 2 years of joining the fellowship.