Are EWOR fellowships the real project Europe is looking for?

Supporting super-early stage entrepreneurs in Europe seems to be suddenly in vogue. Back in March, “Project Europe” was launched to great fanfare by podcaster and VC Harry Stebbings with a small $10 million fund to back founders aged only 25 and under, riffing on the ‘Peter Thiel Fellowship’ model of old. Now a new fund hopes to go one better — but this time with $68 million.

EWOR (shorthand for “entrepreneurship without risk”) has launched its own ‘founder fellowship’, committing €60 million, which will offer selected founders €500,000 in capital for a 7% stake (in comparison, Project Europe offers on €200,000 for a 6.66% stake). It claims that, on average, alumni have gone on to raise €1million to €11M during the fellowship.

The money will be going to 35 entrepreneurs a year who fit the mould of “visionaries, technical prodigies, deeply driven operators, and serial entrepreneurs.”

Fellows will get virtual-first support, with 1:1 mentorship (including 1 to 5 hours per week with a ‘unicorn founder’), access to 2,000 mentors, VCs, and subject matter experts. By contrast, Project Europe offers its founder-investor network of 128 backers.

Founded in 2021, EWOR is run full-time by six entrepreneurs who were previously inside companies such as SumUp, Adjust, ProGlove and united-domains: Daniel Dippold, Alexander Grots, Florian Huber, Petter Made, Quinten Selhorst, and Paul Müller.

In a call with TechCrunch, Dippold contrasted EWR’s fellowship offering with Project Europe. While the latter trumpeted taking entrepreneurs with ‘just an idea’ he said EWOR will easily match that offering: “We do two fellowships, ideation and traction. You can literally — like we had a year ago with the youngest machine learning researcher from Cambridge— have no co-founder, no idea. You can start at inception, no problem.”

As part of the €500,000 investment, this includes €110,000 from EWOR GmbH and an additional €390,000 from the investment fund via an uncapped convertible note or similar instrument.

One example of a previously backed startup includes Aspect Health, a startup that was built in Moldova, raised funding in Silicon Valley and New York, and ended up with a $50M.

Dippold said: “We have 50,000 applicants in a vector database that understands every intricate detail of a person’s GitHub. So if you need to hire a person with 10,000 lines of code and Rust skills, I can find that person with one query.”

“We run evil like a software company, build measure, Learn, Build measure, Learn, Build measure, learn… The only thing that matters is it needs to be the most useful thing any founder can possibly do,” he added.

Ten founders have so far been accepted into this year’s cohort.

They include UK-based Mark Golab, a 3D printing pioneer applying the technology to organ transplants with Cambridge Surgical Models, after surviving a life-threatening infection himself. And Vienna-based Viktoria Izdebezka, who is working on lead generation with Salesy.

Previous EWOR fellows include Ricky Knox, who achieved two 9-figure exits with Azimo and Tandem Bank; and Tim Seithe, who led Tillhub to a bootstrapped exit at almost €100M.

EWOR fellow Jörgen Tveit, founder of Thaleron, added in a statement: “The founders of EWOR are deeply technical and understand the challenges of building a world-changing tech company.”