Supporting early stage entrepreneurs seems to be a sudden trend in Europe. In March, podcaster and venture investor Harry Stevings launched Project Europe on the Great Fanfare, aiming to support founders under the age of 25 to under-$10 million funds. Now, the new fund wants to be better, this time at $68 million.
EWOR (short for “risk-free entrepreneurship”) launched its own “founder fellowship” and committed €60 million. The fund provides selected founders with 500,000 euros of capital for 7% shares (by comparison, Project Europe offers 200,000 euros of 6.66% shares). EWOR claims, on average, that alumni continue to raise between 1 million and 11 million euros during their fellowships.
Every year, this money is sent to 35 entrepreneurs who fit the eWor mold of “visionary, technical genius, deep-driven operators, serial entrepreneurs.” Fellows receive virtual first support with 1:1 mentorship (including 1-5 hours a week with the “Unicorn Founder”), access to 2,000 mentors, VCS, and subject matter experts. The 500,000 Euro investment adds 110,000 Euros from EWOR GMBH and 390,000 Euros from the investment fund via capless convertible notes or similar equipment.
Founded in 2021, EWOR is run by six entrepreneurs: Daniel Dippold, Alexander Grotto, Florian Hoover, Petter Maid, Quinten Selhorst and Paul Muller. They previously worked for companies such as Sumup, Adach, Proglove and United Domains.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Dippold said that it contrasts with Ewor’s fellowship offering with Project Europe, the latter promoting entrepreneurs supporting “Just An Idea,” but that EWOR can easily match its products. “We do two fellowships: ideas and traction. We literally have no co-founders, like we were with Cambridge’s youngest machine learning researcher a year ago.
“We run eWor like a software company. The only thing that matters is what is the most convenient thing founders can do,” he added.
So far, 10 founders have been accepted into this year’s cohort. One of these is UK-based Mark Golab, a 3D printing expert who applies the technique to organ transplants with a Cambridge surgical model after survival of a life-threatening infection. The other is Vienna-based Viktoria Izdebezka, who is working on lead generation in sales.
Previous EWOR Fellows include Ricky Knox. Ricky Knox has won two nine-digit exits with Azimo and Tandem Bank. Tim Seite then bootstrapped and led Tillhub to an exit worth almost 100 million euros.