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EWOR

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A fellowship for outlier founders building transformative tech.
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Julian’s seed round was oversubscribed. Then it almost collapsed entirely. After the EWOR Grand Pitch in March, he was taking up to 15 investor calls a day. Then, as signing approached, his lead kept moving the goalposts. So, Julian kicked them out. He and Daniel then met at 4:35am every morning at the EWOR San Francisco Residency to find a new lead. Within a week, an investor who had first texted Daniel “I can’t do it” made their first exception and led the round. Today, Tumbleweed gives anyone a box, called a Pod, they can fill with whatever they want and send it to space. Each Pod comes pre-certified, which cuts the paperwork needed to ship to space by 10,000x. That makes it 10x cheaper and 5x faster, with 7x less effort. Their first mission sold out and launched in July 2026, built in 9 months for under €500K. Such a feat is practically unheard of in the space industry. Congrats to Julian, Leonhard, Guillaume and the Tumbleweed team on their $7.7M seed round - Austria’s largest SpaceTech seed round in history. Julian shares the full fundraising story with Daniel on the latest episode of Been There, Done That – EWOR’s podcast series dedicated to the raw, unfiltered founder stories that never make it to LinkedIn. Link in bio. by @ewor_official
Forbes just featured companies leading Europe’s AI race. 7(!) of them are EWOR Fellows. Ron Schmelzer’s latest piece argues that Europe’s biggest opportunity lies beyond the race to build the largest model, rather in the infrastructure and specialised technology that make AI useful. That’s exactly where our fellows are building: Melious AI gives companies open-weight AI on renewable-powered European infrastructure. Ecosia just moved its AI chat and search onto it and roughly halved its AI costs. Reactive AI is building a Large Awareness Model that holds all context inside the model, at 25x lower cost than LLMs. It’s already reached 77% of state-of-the-art performance on just $100K of compute. SE3 Labs turns sensor data into a live 3D picture so one operator can command an entire fleet of autonomous systems in plain language. It’s already flying real missions with NATO and allied forces. Tacent Labs is building the verification layer for AI-generated science. Just months since founding, the team’s already caught errors in CERN simulation code and peer-reviewed papers. Oblex gives auditors 100x more evidence coverage and cuts testing time by up to 70%. Parametric turns a stack of engineering drawings into priced bills of materials and purchase orders in days. That work normally takes senior engineers 4 to 6 weeks in Excel. Tattvam AI is building the first end-to-end system that designs chips autonomously, 20x faster and 1,000x cheaper. Seven teams, each one going after a problem the frontier labs aren’t solving. Thanks to Ron for a sharp read on where Europe can win. If you’re building in specialised AI or AI infrastructure, applications for the EWOR Fellowship close on 30 November: https://www.ewor.com/apply?sc=SM&ssc=Instagram Link to the full article in bio. by @ewor_official
15 open roles, 15 future millionaires. That’s EWOR Operators Day on 5 November. Apply to meet the 10 EWOR Fellows hiring founding-level roles, link in bio. A preview of who you’ll meet: 001 Alfons, a physicist and former professional handball player, fought off four university professors trying to claim his invention. He recently raised $23.6M to turn roads into power plants. 002 @edvin_andersson0 started his first business at 11 and scaled a remodelling marketplace to $2M by 17. Now he’s building an AI call centre turning home improvement leads into booked appointments. 003 @cmp.noah built Germany’s leading financial literacy non-profit before moving into AI research at Cambridge and MIT. He’s building the AI-native layer that organises shipments autonomously for freight forwarders. 004 Leo built his first computer at six and skipped university to build a voice AI platform that outperformed a competitor with $200M+ in funding. 005 Ömer, former product lead at Calm, took his last company from idea to revenue in 11 days before exiting. Today, he’s defining how humans and AI agents work together. 006 Yamen, a self-taught programmer since 13, co-founded the world’s first smartphone-based obstacle avoidance system for blind people. He’s now deploying swarms of robots for commercial security and industrial inspection. 007 Fuzhan, an award-winning AI PhD and pianist, is in stealth developing the world models powering autonomous physical systems. Previously, she built one of the world’s first physics-aware AI applications for BASF and led cross-continental research with Caltech, MIT, KIT and TUM. 008 Kotryna, a former RAND defence analyst who swapped nuclear strategy for fashion tech, is making emerging luxury fashion brands impossible to ignore. 009 Linh scaled a bubble tea company to three locations at 15 and had a seven-figure exit by 18. Together with Adrian, she’s building a retrofit kit that makes any existing street light smart in minutes and cuts its electricity use by up to 80%. Open roles range from AI and robotics engineers, to CTOs to marketing leads. Few spots remain. Share this with an operator who should be there. by @ewor_official
@nico.innit and @luc_mhx kept building products nobody wanted. Then they took a week to study design thinking and worked out what to build instead. Today, apps used by millions are tested by Mini, minitap’s AI quality assurance co-worker. During their seed raise, Nico sorted every rejection into two piles every night: bullshit and not bullshit. Every rejection that held up pointed to something wrong with the business, so his team fixed it. 100+ investor conversations later, they closed an oversubscribed $4.1M round. His advice to any founder about to tell an investor their round closes in two weeks: don’t. Investors see straight through a fake deadline, and it costs you their trust. In episode 17 of Been There, Done That, Nico tells EWOR CEO Daniel Dippold why founders chasing product-market fit should stop reinventing the wheel. Listen now, link in bio. by @ewor_official
For those who think in decades and build in days: EWOR Fellowship applications open today. On top of €500K funding and weekly mentorship from unicorn founders, you’ll build alongside founders like these: Alfons spent six years inventing a new way to harvest energy. He now uses it to turn roads into power plants at REPS GmbH. Hundreds of investors turned him down. He raised $23.6M six months after joining EWOR, as covered in Forbes. Ilaria spent eight years in biophysics at Harvard and ETH Zurich. Now she’s building Vale Biolabs to predict how a patient’s brain will respond to treatment. It’s already being piloted at a leading US hospital for children with a rare brain disease. Alzheimer’s is next. Lukas joined EWOR with no startup, only a PhD in 3D computer vision from the Technical University of Munich. He’s now building 3D vision models at SE3 Labs. He recently raised €5.5M, as reported by Sifted. Sundar was a top-3 tennis player in India before signing a record deal at 14. He joined EWOR building a delivery startup. Conversations with Daniel changed that, and he pivoted to building Mozart AI, an AI co-pilot for music production. Sundar’s since raised a $6M seed led by Balderton, as announced in Forbes. Founders, you’re going to build your generational company with or without us. Build it with people as obsessed with creating your legacy as we are. If you know a founder who belongs here, send them this post or nominate them directly by 30 November. Link in bio. by @ewor_official
The stakes were high for the founders pitching at today’s EWOR Grand Pitch, and they 𝗮𝗯𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗰𝗿𝘂𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝘁! All 11 left with packed calendars. We kept this Grand Pitch more exclusive than ever, and yet hundreds of investors showed up. Thank you to all partners and angels for coming! Not everyone gets a room like this. We went through 40,000 applications to find the ones who deserve to be there. Congratulations to the presenting fellows: 001 Simon Jakobs (Melious AI) 002 Wiktor Stanislawek (Reactive AI) 003 Liam McNamara (Matrix) 004 Benjamin Woollams (TrueRights) 005 Ilaria Incaviglia (Vale Biolabs) 006 Ronan Vaz (Parametric) 007 Nader Soliman (Oblex) 008 Adrian Rhaese (ENVIOTECH) 009 Georgii Vysotskii (Gracia AI) 010 Leonardo Benini (Helmit) 011 Oleg Ruchayskiy (Tacent Labs) Know a founder who belongs on this stage next? Send them our way. by @ewor_official
We read more than 40,000 applications a year to find true outliers. Tomorrow, 11 of them will present at the EWOR Grand Pitch. Here’s a preview of a few that made it: 001 The 20-year-old neuroscience researcher mentored by a Nobel laureate who’s now enabling multi-hormone testing at home. He signed $10M in LOIs in 30 days. 002 The repeat founders who exited a fintech with $12M ARR and 3.5M monthly users in 2 years, now turning 4-8 camera feeds into interactive, 4D scenes. They won Meta as a client against its own internal team and closed $1M ARR in half a year. 003 The founder who reached 180,000 users with his platform before turning 18, now building AI that remembers a conversation instead of rereading it, at 25x lower cost. He pitched the guy who invented AI reasoning at OpenAI, who personally invested right away. The Snowflake founder and a 5x unicorn founder followed shortly after. 004 The founder who built a business with 40,000 customers at 17 to support his family in Cairo while finishing his A-levels 2nd best in the entire Middle East. Now automating external audits, cutting testing time by up to 70% and increasing evidence coverage 100x. A Big Four pilot is secured. 005 The founder who built AI used by over 60% of German hospitals, now building the sovereign European infrastructure to run it. €2M ARR five months after launch. 006 The physicist who co-discovered one of the most debated dark-matter signals of the last decade, and a mathematician with a €25M-revenue exit. Together, they’re now verifying AI-generated science, and have already found errors in CERN simulation code. 17:30 Berlin/8:30 SF. Invite-only. Partners and superangels only. If you’re a fit but we haven’t met you yet, reach out in the comments. by @ewor_official
European VCs called @wiktorstanislawek’s pitch deck a red flag for naming OpenAI as a competitor. In San Francisco, investors called it ambition. In Episode 16 of Been There, Done That, the Co-founder and CEO of Reactive AI tells Daniel Dippold how his team of AI researchers and university dropouts from Poland, none of whom had worked at an AI lab before, set out to build one, from Europe. As Wiktor puts it, how can we reach superintelligence if models have Alzheimer’s. They forget everything and reread the entire conversation every time you prompt them. Reactive AI builds the first Large Awareness Model with internal memory, enabling self-improvement at 25× lower costs than traditional LLMs. YC passed on them twice. EWOR said yes after a one-minute demo: Reactive AI’s token count stayed flat as other LLMs kept climbing exponentially after a few messages. When Wiktor approached a founding OpenAI researcher to join the team, the researcher asked to invest instead, and wired the money 24 hours later. Today, the underdogs from Poland are taking on Silicon Valley’s Frontier Labs with Large Awareness Models. Full episode live now, link in bio. by @ewor_official
Noah and Florian could have built yet another AI agent for freight forwarding. They didn't, and it's why nemox is beating the competition today. A year ago, they were two engineers who had never worked a day in logistics. So they did something almost nobody building an AI startup bothers to do anymore: they showed up in person. For weeks, they sat at desks at Cargo Movers in Frankfurt, next to the people who write the quotes and check the invoices. They watched people fight with five programs at once, every one of them bought to make the job easier but failed miserably. That's when Noah and Florian killed their original plan to build an AI agent. The people at those desks didn't need another tool. They were already navigating five just to send one email. As Noah puts it: "They spent a few seconds making the decision, but then 30 minutes executing it." So, nemox sits between those tools and does the executing. When a customer emails asking what it costs to fly a shipment somewhere, nemox's AI assistant reads the email and works out the price, directly in Outlook. The person at the desk checks it and hits send. From there, the same shipment runs through nemox in operations and accounting, all the way to the final invoice. At Cargo Movers, 54% of quotes now go out without a single change. And yet not one person has lost their job over it! Less than a year in, freight forwarders in five countries already use nemox. A lot of agentic AI startups in logistics will end up where Noah and Florian started, sitting next to their customers and listening. These two EWOR Fellows just got there first. by @ewor_official
7 of Daniel W. Dippold's 50 angel investments became unicorns. He says the difference was never the idea. It was who the founders hired, and in what order. The pattern he sees fail: founders delegating their strengths and holding onto their weaknesses, when it should be exactly the reverse. His rule is blunt: Own what you are great at and delegate what you are bad at entirely. And never make a hire in your weakest area without someone world-class judging the candidate, because you cannot recognise excellence in a skill you do not have. But strength alone doesn't tell you what to hand over. Some of your best work drains you. Some of your worst work you love. So he plots every task on two axes – edge and energy – and the quadrant it lands in decides which roles to hire, when, and how. He calls it the Energy/Edge Matrix. Full framework in the comments. by @ewor_official
We went to San Francisco for the first time 1.5 years ago and saw our Fellows raise $2M on average. Today, they raise $10M. As a result, our US applications - purely driven by word of mouth - spiked 237%. When we first arrived in SF, we realised, without a doubt, that this city has the best ecosystem for raising capital. It still concentrates 25% of global VC today despite being a city of only 800K. Soon after, it became obvious that we needed a kickass US team on the ground, which @forbes announced today - link in bio! As EWOR CEO Daniel Dippold puts it: the US is one piece, a very important one, of the global network we’re building so EWOR Fellows can be as successful as they possibly can in fundraising, hiring and customer acquisition from wherever they’re located. There’s still so much more to come. by @ewor_official
Chris could have raised millions for Nimbus. He chased profitability instead, and scaled from $1.6M to $2.5M ARR in weeks. He refuses to start a company until he knows the one channel that will make it profitable. For Nimbus, that channel is referrals. Most founders get growth wrong by going an inch deep in ten channels at once. Chris turned off all marketing spend at his previous company to go deep on one channel. That decision alone allowed him to grow from Seed Stage to Series B. In this episode of Been There, Done That, he tells Daniel why the build-to-PMF window has collapsed from 18 months to 30 days, and why distribution, not technology, is the only real moat left in 2026. Listen now, link in bio. by @ewor_official

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