Following soaring US applications over the past 12 months, Berlin-based founder fellowship EWOR announced a new San Francisco team comprising Oscar winner and Microsoft-exited founder Charles Ferguson, former Emhance CEO and Adjust CPO Katie Madding, and 3x founder (Batelle, PreSeed Fertility, Upstream) Gigi Brett.

EWOR, a founder fellowship harder to get into than Y Combinator, has named a senior leadership team in San Francisco after 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 and invested early in Etched, Perplexity, CopilotKit, and Paradigm; 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, so fellows receive up to €500K in capital and weekly 1:1 mentorship from unicorn builders (Adjust, ProGlove, SumUp) wherever they are, rather than being asked to relocate.

Top IntentTech News: Yamaha Music Innovations Partners with Four Startups

The fact that a rising share of its applicants are US-based – people who already sit inside the world’s densest startup market – is the clearest sign that the model offers something US founders can’t easily get at home: well-above-average funding rounds and a full-time team of unicorn founders, who have already built companies worth between €100M and €10B, working beside them every week from as early as the idea stage.

Founders who join raise €8.5M on average. 25% of recent joiners have raised at nine-figure valuations in the past 6 months. This news comes just weeks before EWOR hosts its first-ever SF Demo Day on 9 October, where 10 founders will pitch to hundreds of investors.

“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, holds a PhD in political science from MIT, has published five books, and 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, having already invested in Etched, Perplexity, CopilotKit, and Paradigm. His career runs across the Atlantic, including 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 $10 million after Demo Day. So I’m honored to help lead EWOR’s US growth and its integration within San Francisco’s world-leading ecosystem.”

Top IntentTech News: TRIUMPH Becomes Private Firm, Welcomes New CEO Valladares

From leading startups to standing beside the founders who build them

Katie Madding was Chief Product Officer and the third US hire at Adjust, which Palo Alto-based AppLovin bought for $1B in 2021. She then led Emhance, Google’s official partner for game playtesting, as CEO, taking 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, then launched Upstream, the first preconception product designed for men, which ran a pilot with US Navy SEALs. Her most recent company, PreSeed, has built a database of exceptional sperm donors that 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

A handful of founders have been accepted into the EWOR Fellowship so far this year, among them:

• Martin Varsavsky, a 6x 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 €10/month for 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 thought rather than a keyboard.
• 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 €20M on a €277M post-money valuation to turn roads into power plants with REPS GmbH.
• Jörgen Tveit, founder of energy storage startup Thaleron, which raised €13M in what was, at the time, Europe’s largest-ever pre-seed round by a first-time founder.
• Leonard T. Dorlöchter, who achieved a $3.5B valuation for peaq within two years of joining EWOR.

Top IntentTech News: Samsara Praised by Drivers for Safety and Ease of Use

To participate in our interviews, please write to our IntentTech Media Room at info@intentamplify.com