Founder Fellowship

You don’t go from -1 to 0 to build something marginally better. You do it to build something generational. You do it to build AGI (and understand it), to build new clouds (for engineers and ML), to rethink language learning, to create the next generation of engineers, to fight global fraud, to build foundations for upward mobility, to usher in new business models.

In our experience, most companies don’t fail because they run out of cash or can't find traction. They fail because they never picked the right idea in the first place. We help you pick the right idea.

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Founder Fellowships

OUR APPROACH

How is SPC different?

Slope instead of intercept

Pre-idea investing is founder-centric investing. We are more interested in potential than we are in traction.

Founder-market fit

The low-hanging fruit has been picked. We set founders up for category-creation, not digital co-option.

Long-term partnership

Great ideas take time. We embrace the messiness of ideation, don’t rush founders, and partner with founders longer than any other investor.

It takes a community

-1 to 0 takes you unexpected places. We take a whole-team approach to supporting the journey—and embed founders in a community dedicated to it.

Founder Fellowship Stories

Abiel & Andres
Alvaro & Kshitij
James & Dylan
Andrew & Praveen
Harsh
Samantha & Jason
Gavin & Michael
Grey & Ben
Priyaa & Purvanshi
Abiel Gutierrez & Andres Santos
Abiel & Andres

Banking built for those who’ve been left out—starting with Latino immigrants.

Abiel and Andres grew up just 30 minutes apart in Monterrey, Mexico, but they only crossed paths during the Fall 2021 Fellowship, when they discovered a shared frustration for navigating the U.S. banking system as immigrants. That experience led them to start Comun, a neobank designed from the ground up for Latino immigrants: Spanish-first, simple to use, and offering everything from remittances to peer-to-peer transfers. It's now one of the fastest-growing companies at SPC.

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Comun
Alvaro Morales & Kshitij Grover
Alvaro & Kshitij

They built conviction they can change a $2 trillion industry.

After years of collaboration at Asana, these engineers decided to make the jump and found a company together. They joined the Founder Fellowship to navigate the hardest part of the early company-building process: building conviction in an idea you plan to spend years of your life on. Alvaro and Kshitij succeeded and founded Orb, a company changing how the building blocks of the internet run the can’t-fail billing process.

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Orb
James Cadwallader & Dylan Babbs
James & Dylan

Helping brands navigate the shift to AI, one search at a time.

James and Dylan met around the lunch table at SPC NYC and quickly bonded over a shared curiosity: what happens when AI becomes the default interface to the internet? That exploration led them to join the Spring 2024 Fellowship and go all in on Profound, where they're building the tools behind AIO—the next generation of SEO—to help brands track, improve, and influence how they're represented across AI systems.

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Profound
Andrew Wynn & Praveen Chekuri
Andrew & Praveen

These second-time founders knew: go slow to go fast.

Second-time co-founders Andrew and Praveen knew how hard the idea phase is after their previous company was acquired. Planning to start a new company but unsure what problem to tackle, they joined the Spring 2021 Founder Fellowship cohort to be deliberate in their process. The result was Ascend, the first modern insurance payments platform that has raised $40M+ to date.

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Ascend
Harsh Sikka
Harsh

Harsh came to SPC to research the question: what comes after ChatGPT?

Harsh joined SPC in early 2024 after a career in AI research and academia at Georgia Tech, driven by a desire to push model capabilities even further. At Metarch, he’s pioneering Frontier AI systems that can navigate open-ended, multimodal environments and interact with software, APIs, and tools to get real-world work done. Metarch is laying the foundation for the next generation of AI systems.

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Metarch
Samantha Whitmore & Jason Yuan
Samantha & Jason

Building AI that feels less like a tool—and more like a companion.

Sam first joined the SPC community in 2021 to explore how emerging technologies were reshaping the world. She dove into the technical depths of everything from crypto to language models alongside other members. Out of that exploration came a core insight: why do new technologies feel like tools, not counterparts? That question sparked the idea behind New Computer. As her conviction grew, she joined the Spring 2022 Fellowship and later teamed up with Jason, an ex-Apple designer also exploring new interfaces to AI. Together, they launched Dot, New Computer’s first product, an AI that deeply understands and connects with people.

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New Computer
Gavin Nachbar & Michael Bock
Gavin & Michael

Taking on a monopoly by making tax-prep less awful.

When they left Waymo to start a company together, Gavin and Michael had a core guiding principle: find a problem where consumers were being utterly failed and fix it. After joining the Spring 2021 Founder Fellowship, they followed this principle right to tax prep. Column Tax was their solution.

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Column Tax
Grey Nguyen & Ben Yang
Grey & Ben

From open exploration to giving everyone control over their personal health.

Part of the Fall 2021 Founder Fellowship, Grey and Ben came in as prolific product builders without a clear idea. They embraced SPC’s exploratory spirit, following threads of curiosity from personal writing tools to stablecoin-based payments. Ultimately, they gravitated toward the problems closest to home and started building Bevel—a unified interface for personal health data that empowers users to make informed decisions about their health.

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Bevel
Priyaa Kalyanaraman & Purvanshi Mehta
Priyaa & Purvanshi

Imagining the ChatGPT moment for video.

Priyaa and Purvanshi joined the Founder Fellowship in early 2024 with a bold thread of curiosity: what would a ChatGPT moment for video look like. Drawing on deep expertise in multi-modal models, they're building Lica to break down the barriers between formats, so anyone can consume or create content however they want. The first product allows creators and marketers to turn static assets into engaging and on-brand videos.

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Lica
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PROGRAM DETAILS

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Important Dates

We run fellowship cohorts every spring and fall. Our fall dates and the early application will be announced soon.

Pre-Fellowship

Founder Fellows get immediate funding and immediate access. We fund teams immediately—you don’t have to wait for the official fellowship kickoff. Our terms are $400k upfront for 7%, plus an additional $600k guaranteed in your next external funding round. We also offer up to $1M in credits and perks from companies including Baseten, OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, GCP, AWS, Render, RunwayML, Figma, and many more.

You become part of SPC as soon as you are accept the fellowship. You gain immediate access to all SPC offices, programming, resources, and partners.

Bootcamp

During the bootcamp, teams work closely in-person in San Francisco or New York City to build, demo, and share feedback alongside each other. This first intensive period is designed to get you started, but is not the end of the program

Our cohorts are purposefully small and each company works directly with SPC partners several times per week. We help you with bespoke customer discovery, product development, technical scoping, branding, product launches, pitch practice, and more.

You will also take part in regular demos, skills workshops, and unofficial board meetings with our full partner team in order to strengthen your narrative and resolve your most pressing issues. At the end of the bootcamp phase, you will have the option to present at the SPC Demo Faire in front of a curated set of top investors and potential founding engineers.

Residency

After the initial bootcamp, teams enter residency, which lasts as long as you need to reach conviction and get ready to raise your next round. Companies are built over years, not weeks. You will continue to partner closely with SPC investors and have full access to all SPC community programming and members.When you have conviction and are ready to raise your seed round, SPC partners will help you prepare your pitch and make white-glove introductions to investors. The majority of fellowship companies raise follow-on funding from tier 1 funds.

South Park Commons
380 Brannan St, San Francisco, CA
© 2025 All rights reserved.
South Park Commons
380 Brannan St, San Francisco, CA
© 2022 All rights reserved.