EWOR fellows can access up to €500K in capital and now get a San Francisco leadership team to go with it, after the Berlin-based fellowship said US applications rose 237% in the past twelve months.
That surge is the tell.
EWOR on 22 September named Oscar-winning filmmaker and FrontPage founder Charles Ferguson, former Emhance chief executive and Adjust chief product officer Katie Madding, and three-time founder Gigi Brett to lead its US push. Ferguson sold FrontPage to Microsoft in 1996, holds a PhD in political science from MIT and won an Academy Award for Inside Job, and now invests early in Etched, Perplexity, CopilotKit and Paradigm. Madding was the third US hire at Adjust, acquired by AppLovin for $1B in 2021, then built Emhance, Google’s official partner for game playtesting, to recurring revenue with customers including Activision Blizzard King. Brett, who moves from Cape Town to San Francisco as chief investment officer, built Batelle with a team of 60, Upstream, which piloted with US Navy SEALs, and PreSeed, which now covers around 10% of registered sperm donors in the US.
EWOR pitches itself as a fellowship for outlier founders building transformative tech, a positioning that underlines its selective, stipend-plus-mentorship model rather than a classic accelerator batch, and it bills itself as harder to get into than Y Combinator. The contrast matters. Y Combinator runs cohorts in San Francisco and takes equity for a standard deal and three months of group programming, while EWOR offers 1:1 weekly mentorship from unicorn builders at Adjust, ProGlove and SumUp wherever founders live, plus larger checks at the idea stage. Against traditional fellowships, which are usually defined as a fixed-term post granting stipend and research facilities, EWOR is explicitly capital and company building first, not advanced study.
The fellowship says founders who join raise €8.5M on average and 25% of recent joiners raised at nine-figure valuations in the past six months, with Ferguson citing an average of $10 million after Demo Day. It hosts its first SF Demo Day on 9 October where 10 founders will pitch hundreds of investors. The near-term proof sits there, along with examples EWOR cited among this year’s admits that include 6x unicorn founder Martin Varsavsky building Certuma, Xing founder Lars Hinrichs building Simsalasim at €10 per month for unlimited data across 100 countries via eSIM, and researchers and serial founders behind EOMIND, Sprite and Nyxium.
