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

13 companies from The Bridge just pitched at @join_ef Demo Day in San Francisco a few weeks ago, many were still looking for a cofounder look how far they’ve come since: Marv Labs: marvlabs.ai > teaching robots to repair cars by learning from real technicians > $3.1M in contracted ARR, 32 days after launch Ambra Compute: ambracompute.com > turning wasted energy into AI compute. > $82.5M in compute LOIs in 3 months. @BiancaGiovetti Promethee: promethee.io > turning work into a multiplayer game >20% week-over-week growth for 3 months in private beta @Nlacombe_ Artificial Humans: artificial-humans.com > combining AI and human tissue models to predict how drugs affect patients. > $20M secured in a single LOI for just one drug. @kyomangold Avior: useavior.com > a global neobank built on AI and stablecoins > $40M in annual transaction volume declared by its first onboarded users @mateoherbig @hagenkral Goldfish: goldfish.sh > a memory layer for every AI you use. > 5,000+ users with $0 spent on marketing @joeledholm @kar_re Seeft: seeft.co > finding and recovering the money businesses lose. > Recovering over $1M a year for one enterprise customer, from a single workflow @mehdiamara__ Gini Health: gini.health > health intelligence built for the female body > 3,000 women signed up after a single story Harlow: tryharlow.com > running hotel operations through a voice-enabled badge. > $11M+ in commercial pipeline in 20days @benbolsakovs Era Compute: era.dev >connecting companies to European AI compute > $500M+ in quote requests in a few months @tedbibr @RMladek FirstSight.Labs: firstsightlabs.com > using AI to read fetal MRIs. > an analysis that takes an expert 3 hours, completed in seconds Asage: asage.ai > Bringing human expertise to multimodal AI. > 500+ vetted experts contributing to the next generation of models Stead > Acquiring real estate agencies and running them with AI. > Acquisition targets representing $50M in revenue, 8 weeks in Proud to have these founders at The Bridge