Entrepreneurs First invests in exceptional individuals to build startups from scratch.
Joined August 2011
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Entrepreneurs First retweeted
Lovart x OpenAI: Founder Vibe-Design Workshop
Thursday, Oct 22 · 6–8pm · San Francisco
Hands-on session for founders building with small teams. Bring a project to demo.
Top 3 projects win a year of Lovart Pro and a feature on our socials.
Spots are limited. RSVP ↓
Entrepreneurs First retweeted
One of our new founders landed a multimillion dollar contract in Japan by growing a beard, printing fake “Growth Director” business cards and throwing his own embassy reception.
He’s just one of the outliers in The Bridge Fall 26 cohort, which has officially kicked off. A few other crazy things they pulled off before landing in SF:
> Won four international physics olympiad medals, then helped scale a foundation model at Citadel Securities 200x in size as part of a team whose model generated nine-figure annualised revenue.
> Turned down a €400K quant trading track to teach himself longevity biotech.
> Built a voting platform at 15, grew it to 30,000 users, and sold it to the Council of Europe at 16.
> Built an AI tool that turns prompts into working hardware designs and grew it from $0 to $23K MRR in six months. Had already sold an AI tutoring business with 10,000+ paying students.
> Built a thrust-vector-controlled rocket in high school, then went on to build testbeds at NASA JPL and rocket-engine hardware at Japan’s space agency. Also raised CHF 2M for charities door-to-door alongside his studies.
> Built an AI product solo to 350,000 users and $30K ARR in eight months, with $0 spent on marketing.
>Won the highest-scoring gold medal at the International Philosophy Olympiad, then built a quant-finance platform that hit $30K ARR in its first month after launching exclusively to MIT’s Master of Finance cohort.
At The Bridge, we take chances on crazy outliers who’ve shown an edge that’s impossible to ignore.
Follow their journey on X @jointhebridge
From underwater robots to solving one of the biggest bottlenecks in infrastructure: energy.
Grace and Vayu came to SF building underwater robots.
1 week later, they killed the idea.
Then they spoke to hundreds of people in 2.5 weeks and found a much bigger problem: getting enough power, fast enough.
That led to LOIs and a $500K contract.
Last week, they pitched Lattice Energy at Demo Day. Watch their full pitch on the Demo Day portal.
Entrepreneurs First retweeted
I am a picture person
mostly the one standing a step behind:
a founder pitching 60 potential cofounders an hour after landing
a hardware lab built overnight in a residency
a cofounding team cooking side by side with a chef
a boiler room in the mission
a last garden lunch with founders who arrived solo and left with companies
most of these stayed in my camera rolls
They came to SF knowing they wanted to build in energy.
They just didn’t know what yet.
A few weeks of testing problems later, Bianca and Alessio found the intersection of energy and compute, and Ambra Compute started moving fast.
On the way to Demo Day, Mike Phillips jumped in a Waymo with Bianca to talk about finding the right problem, building in San Francisco, and why speed matters.
Full conversation in thread.
Entrepreneurs First retweeted
“Instead of paying for my flights, can you cover my fuel?”
@omar_marv drove from Yale to SF for @jointhebridge, stopping at 30+ car dealerships on the way. He grew up on his dad’s dealership floor in Morocco.
Now he’s building @marvlabsai .
Read about his story in the article below.
Axionic Labs is trying to put frontier AI in your pocket.
In 3 months, Archie and the team built a 1B-parameter model from scratch that is 500x smaller than other frontier models, fits in under 3GB, and has a 1M-token context window.
It already outperforms state-of-the-art open-source models on key long-context benchmarks.
Last week, Archie pitched Axionic Labs at Demo Day. Watch the full pitch on the Demo Day portal.
“Your AI has a 3-second memory. You shouldn't have to.”
That's the idea behind Goldfish.
@joeledholm and his cofounder met just 5 months ago.
Since then, they've built an AI memory layer that understands your work context and helps you write in your own voice, from WhatsApp to LinkedIn.
Already 5,000+ users.
Last week, Joel explained the idea live on @etnshow before pitching Goldfish at EF Demo Day.
And they were ready to try it on the spot.
At 2am, Vaibhav kept noticing the same person was still working: Amish.
They weren’t cofounders yet. They were building completely different things. But after enough late nights watching each other operate, Vaibhav knew Amish was the person he wanted to build with.
A few months later, they’re building Saturn Labs.
On the way to Demo Day, Isabel jumped in a Waymo with Vaibhav to talk about finding his cofounder, moving from India to SF, and why being here became essential to building the company.
Full conversation in thread.
The West still builds some of the most important parts of robots by hand.
Caldera wants robots to build them instead.
Raghav spent four years at Tesla building electric motors. His cofounder Yeok spent three years in Shenzhen deploying robotics in real warehouses.
Now they’re combining both sides of that experience to rethink how actuators and motors get made.
Robots building robots.
Watch Caldera’s full Demo Day pitch on the Demo Day portal.
“Working on something that isn’t challenging is not worth my time.”
That’s Faidra, co-founder of Asage.
She met François through EF. Their first call was a disaster. Then they met in person, it clicked, and they’ve been building together ever since.
Since then: first benchmarks, growing client traction, their first hire, and investors including the co-founder of World Labs.
Asage is just getting started.
Watch their full Demo Day pitch on the Demo Day portal.
Scarlet has raised a $50M Series B led by Headline to accelerate certification for AI and software medical devices.
Founded by James and Jamie, Scarlet is building a certification body designed for the way modern medical software is actually developed, helping companies get safe AI products to patients faster without compromising regulatory rigor.
The new funding will support expansion across the US and Asia-Pacific, grow its expert reviewer and engineering teams, and broaden its certification offering.
Proud to back Scarlet from day zero at EF.
Entrepreneurs First retweeted
Check out @join_EF's latest startups - here's the full playlist of pitches from our Demo Day in SF last week
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL…
Entrepreneurs First retweeted
Fundraising in the US is different to fundraising in Europe - probably more than you realise. VCs will ask different questions and expect different answers.
Here are my top tips:
1) Speed is ambition made visible.
Ambition isn’t just about what you could achieve, it’s about what you’re achieving right now. When I ask seed VCs what they look for in founders, the most common answer is speed/velocity/productivity/pace/intensity. Ambition shows up in how fast you move.