Entrepreneur First

Entrepreneur First

Entrepreneur First was founded in London in 2011 by Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford, who observed that many of the world's most ambitious individuals outside Silicon Valley lacked a structured path to company creation. The firm's original thesis treats talent as the primary asset class, constructing formal cohorts drawn from academic institutions and technology communities across Europe, Asia, and North America. Its model takes individuals with deep technical or domain expertise — often before they have committed to a startup — and runs them through an intensive ideation, co-founder matching, and company formation process that culminates in a Demo Day where they raise institutional venture capital. The firm's deployment is structured around a programmatic conveyer belt: a small, equity-free grant during an initial exploration phase, followed by an investment of up to $250,000 at company formation, with the capacity to write follow-on checks of up to $5 million through subsequent funding rounds. Asset-class exposure spans B2B enterprise software, financial technology, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and space technology. Entrepreneur First's geographic scope now covers London, Paris, Bangalore, and San Francisco. The portfolio includes over 50 named companies, with notable positions in Tractable (computer vision for insurance), Cleo (AI-powered consumer finance), PolyAI (enterprise conversational agents), Aztec (privacy infrastructure for Ethereum), Spore.Bio (microbial detection), and Magdrive (next-generation satellite propulsion). Entrepreneur First's portfolio has attracted co-investment from Silicon Valley's elite venture firms, including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, and Index Ventures, while its own cap table includes limited partners who are prominent founders and investors — John and Patrick Collison of Stripe, Reid Hoffman, Demis Hassabis, and Eric Schmidt among them. The firm runs its programs in hub cities across Asia, Europe, and North America and connects every cohort to the U.S. market through a dedicated San Francisco office that provides co-working space, immigration support, and direct introductions to 200-plus VCs at its Demo Days. In April 2025, the firm hosted a San Francisco Demo Day fireside chat with Vinod Khosla, continuing its pattern of convening influential operating figures for its founders. Entrepreneur First's architecture is structurally distinct from both conventional accelerators and early-stage venture managers because it assumes origination risk before any product or market exists. In place of selecting companies for investment, the firm selects individuals, constructs the teams, and then capitalizes the resulting entities. This sequencing inverts the typical diligence funnel and means that Entrepreneur First functions as both a talent aggregator and a capital allocator, with the latter fully dependent on the quality of the former's output.