Entrepreneurs First

Entrepreneur First (EF, also styled "Entrepreneurs First") was founded in London in 2011 by Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck, who met while working together as management consultants at McKinsey & Company starting in 2009. The founding insight, reportedly inspired by a McKinsey engagement on building a technology cluster in East London, was that Europe lacked a credible, well-supported career path into deep-tech entrepreneurship comparable to what existed in Silicon Valley -- and that many of the most talented potential founders (engineers, PhDs, researchers) simply didn't have a co-founder or a company idea yet, even though they had the raw ability to build category-defining technology companies. EF's answer was to become what it and outside observers call a "talent investor": instead of investing in existing startups or teams, EF invests in individuals before they have a company, recruiting cohorts of ambitious technical people, helping them find compatible co-founders, and providing pre-seed capital and structured support (originally a program informally called "Focus", later restructured into sequential phases known as FORM and LAUNCH) to help them go from individual to incorporated, funded startup, typically culminating in a demo day pitch to investors.

EF grew from a single London cohort into an international operation. It expanded to Singapore in 2016, and by 2018 had added offices in Berlin, Hong Kong, Paris, and Bangalore, alongside a later Toronto office (from 2020). Not all of these survived: Hong Kong closed in 2019, and in spring 2023 EF closed its Berlin, Toronto, and Singapore offices as part of a strategic refocusing, redirecting resources toward a new San Francisco hub (opened October 2023, with EF's first SF demo day held in April 2024) to be closer to the center of the AI startup ecosystem, alongside continuing operations in London, Paris, Bangalore, and New York. In 2021 EF announced a partnership with the Tezos Foundation to spin up Web3-focused startups, reflecting its periodic thematic/vertical experiments (it has also run programs oriented around deep tech and, more recently, AI specifically).

On funding, EF has raised capital both to fund its own operations/pre-seed investments and via corporate sponsorships. Early backers/sponsors reportedly included McKinsey & Company, KPMG, Microsoft, and Sky. A Series A of roughly £8.5 million was raised in July 2015, backed by Encore Capital, Infocomm Investments, and angel investors including Robin Klein and Alex Chesterman. A Series B of approximately $12.4 million followed in 2017, notably bringing in LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman as an investor and board member -- press coverage (The Independent, The Times) around that round emphasized Hoffman's personal enthusiasm for EF's "invest in people" thesis, drawing parallels to his own LinkedIn/PayPal network philosophy, though it is not entirely clear from public sources whether his check was personal or via Greylock. EF's largest disclosed round was a $158 million Series C announced in late June 2022 at a $560 million valuation, which added Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison as new backers alongside a large group of existing individual investors: Reid Hoffman, Tom Blomfield (Monzo/GoCardless), Taavet Hinrikus (Wise), Matt Mullenweg (Automattic/WordPress), Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO), Elad Gil, Lachy Groom, Claire Hughes Johnson, Sarah Leary, Sara Clemens, and Matt Robinson, among others. Notably, this list is dominated by prominent individual operator-investors rather than traditional institutional VC firms -- EF has been explicit that portfolio companies (not EF itself) separately attract institutional capital from firms like Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SoftBank, and GV. Crunchbase records (with amounts/dates obfuscated behind its paywall) show EF has raised across roughly six rounds through at least a Series D, via entities including "Entrepreneurs First Capital," "Entrepreneur First (Global)," "EF Singapore," "Next Stage Fund," and "Entrepreneurs First (Core)"; Crunchbase's investor data confirms Greylock general partner Matt Cohler and Stripe's John Collison as participants in the Series D round, and separately lists Reid Hoffman and Greg Lawton as board members (joined September 2017 and March 2018 respectively) with Charlie Songhurst as an advisor. Total cumulative funding raised and the exact Series D date/amount could not be confirmed from freely accessible sources.

Business model

"Talent investor" / company builder model: EF recruits individuals (engineers, researchers, operators) rather than existing founding teams, runs an intensive multi-week cohort program to help them find co-founders and validate ideas, and provides initial pre-seed capital (historically in exchange for equity, e.g. roughly 8% for the initial investment under earlier program structures) in the companies that emerge from the cohort. EF then continues to support the resulting startups through follow-on capital, mentorship, and access to its investor network as they raise further institutional rounds.

Equity stakes taken in the startups formed through its program (initial investment plus follow-on rights), rather than program fees; also historically received corporate sponsorship/partnership funding (e.g. from McKinsey & Company, KPMG, Microsoft, Sky) and has raised institutional venture funds (e.g. Entrepreneurs First Capital, EF Singapore, Next Stage Fund) to invest across cohorts.