German accelerator EWOR, which aims to challenge Silicon Valley institution Y Combinator (YC), has raised €60m to find Europe’s next unicorn founders.
It backs up to 35 founders per year, says it has a 0.1% acceptance rate and is run by six European serial founders, including Daniel Dippold, cofounder of AI services company NewNow, and Petter Made, cofounder of payments company SumUp.
The €60m is split evenly between a Series A round for EWOR and an investment vehicle to back the startups. The money comes from founders including Daniel Krauss and Jochen Engert, who are behind German transportation and bus titan Flix; investor and entrepreneur Felix Haas, who founded German tech conference Bits & Pretzels, has also backed the accelerator.
How EWOR works
Founded in 2021, the accelerator invests up to €500k in each startup — with €110k as an initial cheque and €390k in uncapped investment which converts to equity in a later round. The second chunk of funding used to be capped, but the accelerator recently changed that: “The very honest answer is, we’ve been competing a little bit with things like YC,” Dippold tells Sifted.
EWOR takes about a 7% initial equity stake in companies. Unlike YC, it’s hybrid and virtual-first, and invests in far fewer companies per year.
Dippold says it’s also flexible on the location of its founders. “We believe that European founders can go to SF now for like two months, do the fundraising there, come back, employ their people here, run their ventures from Europe, find incredible talent, but still have a little bit of a bridge,” he says.
EWOR targets serial entrepreneurs through two tracks: its Ideation Fellowship, which helps founders get ideas off the ground, and its Traction Fellowship, which helps founders with established startups scale.
Each company that goes through the accelerator gets one-on-one mentorship, including up to five hours per week with a unicorn founder, customised learning modules and a network of more than 2,000 mentors, VCs and subject matter experts, EWOR says.
Ten founders have been accepted to the 2025 cohort so far, building things like recycling robotics solutions and 3D organ printing startups.
EWOR is also eager to back companies building bespoke foundational models in areas like robotics and genetic biotech. Dippold says he’s eyeing companies in the hardware layer of AI, including those designing chips to take on Nvidia.
He’s also interested in what he calls “research companies”.
“I believe there’s not enough DeepMinds out there, and there’s not enough DeepSeeks,” he says. He wants to find companies that can employ quant engineers to solve very difficult research problems and make them commercially available to the Googles and YouTubes of the world. “We think Europe is best positioned in the world to launch companies like this,” he says.
Using AI to find the outliers
EWOR wants to find 35 unicorn founders every year, and to do that it uses machine learning and AI — a topic Dippold studied in university while writing his masters thesis on outlier founder detection machine learning at the University of Cambridge.
EWOR looks at a variety of factors when picking which companies to accept — like someone’s GitHub to see how they write code and what that tells them about how the founder thinks or their personality traits. It has also designed tests in-house with Cambridge and Stanford, Dippold says.
“If you fund people who have a high likelihood to do useful pivots, they will also have a high likelihood to build a more successful venture,” he says.
EWOR runs applications through AI to determine who to accept, supplementing the tech with partner interviews and additional tests.
The accelerator also wants to work more on weeding out one common problem with using AI to screen applications: a lack of diversity. Dippold says EWOR’s leadership team is 40% female, and that the last cohort was around 24% female.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/ewor-60m-accelerator-invest/
