Founder Fellowship
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 partner with founders pre-revenue, pre-product, and even pre-idea, to make sure you find founder-market fit. Our approach is boutique and customized. We don't force strict timelines. We help you avoid local maxima and find your global maximum.
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
Comun
Banking built for those who’ve been left out.
Abiel and Andres grew up just 30 minutes apart in Mexico, but only met during the Fellowship, where they bonded over the frustration of navigating U.S. banking as immigrants. They started Comun, a neobank designed from the ground up for Latino immigrants.
Orb
They built conviction to change a $2T industry.
Alvaro and Kshitij joined the Founder Fellowship after years collaborating at Asana to tackle the hardest early-stage challenge: building conviction in an idea worth years of your life. They founded Orb, changing how internet companies run mission-critical billing.
Profound
Helping brands navigate the shift to AI.
James and Dylan met at SPC NYC and bonded over a question: what happens when AI becomes the default interface to the internet? They joined the Founder Fellowship to build Profound, where they're creating tools to help brands track and influence how they show up across AI systems.
Ascend
These second-time founders knew: go slow to go fast.
2nd-time co-founders Andrew and Praveen already knew about -1. Planning to start a new company but unsure what problem to tackle, they joined the first Founder Fellowship to find an idea worth a decade of their lives. The result was Ascend, the first modern insurance payments platform.
Column Tax
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.
Bevel
Control over personal health.
Grey and Ben joined the Founder Fellowship as prolific builders without a clear idea. They followed curiosity threads from writing tools to stablecoin payments before gravitating toward a problem closer to home: they started Bevel, a unified interface for personal health data.
Lica
Imagining the ChatGPT moment for video.
Priyaa and Purvanshi joined the Fellowship in early 2024 asking how a ChatGPT moment for design might look. Drawing on deep expertise in multi-modal models, they're building Lica to break down the barriers between formats and dramatically accelerate brand design teams.
Program Details
Important Dates
We run fellowship cohorts every Spring and Fall. Applications are open twice a year. The Spring 2026 cohort kicks off late March in San Francisco.
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, Figma, and many more.
You become part of SPC as soon as you accept the fellowship offer. 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.
Fellow 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.