EWOR (short for Extraordinary World) is a self-described “radically selective” fellowship that is harder to access than a place in Y-Combinator. And today it announces it has committed €60 million to supporting the world's most exceptional early-stage entrepreneurs.
Founded in 2021, EWOR is run full-time by six entrepreneurs who have built companies worth over €12 billion, including SumUp, Adjust, ProGlove, united-domains, and Sigma Squared Society: Daniel Dippold, Alexander Grots, Florian Huber, Petter Made, Quinten Selhorst, and Paul Müller.
I spoke to Daniel Dippold, founder and CEO of EWOR, to find out more.
An entrepreneur, investor, and mathematician, best known as the founder and CEO of EWOR, Dippold founded and successfully exited his first company in his early twenties, which focused on measuring emotional intelligence through sound wave analysis. He later co-founded New Now Group, a machine learning venture that provides post-deployment algorithm tuning. He also established the Sigma Squared Society, an NGO that supports entrepreneurs under the age of 26 across more than 30 countries.
Dippold admits that as a three-time CTO with a theoretical mathematician background, “I'm used to sitting in a basement coding away. That’s also why EWOR is quite techie in the way it's built.”
Why EWOR?
With Europe home to over 900 accelerator and incubator programs and counting, I wanted to learn why we need EWOR.
Dippold highlighted the need for global competitiveness, asserting that Europe needs an initiative that's globally competitive — “not just Europe-only or niche-focused. It should attract people even from places like Stanford and MIT to build something here instead of going to YC or US equivalents."
He also notes that professors or consultants often lead incubators, while actual great founders tend to have too much money and don’t bother with small Pre-Seed tickets.
“We wanted unicorn and decacorn founders to spend all their time with founders, co-hustling with them at the pre-seed level, not just investing and stepping back.”
For example, we build backend infrastructure alongside founders and help them create hardware solutions that avoid relying on the cloud, because the unit economics are often much more competitive that way.
For half the founders we've supported in fundraising, I’ve personally stayed up doing code reviews until 4 a.m. when needed. This is the kind of co-hustling we believe in."
EWOR offers two programs within its fellowship:
EWOR Ideation Fellowship
The EWOR Ideation Fellowship is designed for aspiring entrepreneurs who don’t yet have traction or even a concrete business idea.
It helps fellows identify a strong opportunity, shape it into a business model, and lay the foundations for early traction. It’s designed for people who are ready to commit to a high-growth entrepreneurial path, even if they’re just starting with an idea — or none at all.
EWOR Traction Fellowship/strong>
The EWOR Traction Fellowship is built for founders who have already launched a startup and gained initial traction. Participants work closely with EWOR Partners, seasoned entrepreneurs who provide hands-on coaching to help them scale their business and prepare for major funding rounds.
In terms of successful applications, Dippold shared that right now, it's about 60/40 in favour of traction. “We'd love it to be 50/50. We really enjoy ideation stage work — it's more about true co-building, and we think it fits our mission better in the long run.”
EWOR makes applying for Y-combinator look like signing up for an open mic night
Ok, I jest! But the reality is that out of more than 35,000 applicants each year, EWOR accepts just 35 entrepreneurs (0.1 per cent) or a 1 in 1000 acceptance rate, who EWOR refers to as ‘fellows’.
The selection process is based on a combination of ML-driven pattern recognition, intensive partner interviews and evidence-based testing.
Dippold however, contends that EWOR’s ideation fellowship lets people apply a bit earlier, which lowers the barrier slightly.
“Still, for the traction fellowship, we’re very exclusive, and it's about to get even more selective because we’re doubling applicants but taking 10 per cent fewer people.”
Why a fellowship?
Dippold contends that the “real magic at Pre-Seed isn’t money — it's having someone who's built things before, hustling alongside you. That's why we don't call it an accelerator. It's a fellowship.
What kind of people are selected? Visionaries, technical prodigies, deeply driven operators, and serial entrepreneurs who have the potential to found companies that solve significant challenges. Alumni include:
- Ricky Knox, who achieved two 9-figure exits with Azimo and Tandem Bank.
- Andrew Nutter, who built space exploration startup Gama after successfully leading Westwing to IPO.
- Tim Seithe, who led Tillhub to a bootstrapped exit at almost €100M
- Ariel Harmoko, Cambridge’s youngest ever machine learning researcher, who recently raised a $4M round led by a16z for his startup Artifact AI, after just ten months inside EWOR’s fellowship
- Jörgen Tveit, founder of energy storage startup Thaleron, which raised Europe's largest ever pre-seed round ($13M) by a first-time founder
Also, financially, the founders coming out of EWOR have raised around $5 million on average compared to YC’s $1.3–1.5 million these days.
The value of a fellowship that is decentralised, modular, and asynchronous
Ok, that’s a lot of jargon. But one of EWOR’s big strengths is that it has built a program that is flexible enough for remote cross-border teams — and wherever in the world team members reside.
According to Dippold the team realised the way ventures are built post-2025 is different. Silicon Valley used to be about proximity — everything within walking distance. Now, that's changed. Investors are fine meeting founders on Zoom. It's normal now to build an engineering team in Oxford, have sales in the US, and onboard customers in Dubai.
“We've built the entire system to be modular — founders can access what they need, when they need it, and how they need it.
I really believe this has been one of the game-changers that helped us attract such exceptional founders — and helped them go on to raise incredible rounds.”
According to Dippold, EWOR this means even serial entrepreneurs, who often don't have the time or willingness to go through a standard program, can still get all the benefits.
“We built a lot of tech to make this possible. For example, if a founder wants to hire someone, we have a vector database containing candidates' GitHubs and LinkedIns.
If you want someone who's written more than 10,000 lines of Rust, I can find them for you with a single query — it takes one second. This lets us enable top-tier hires exactly when founders need them.
Our "talent module" is fully on-demand: founders access it at the intensity and timing that suits them. They don't have to sit through a few talent sessions; all the content is online, and introductions happen ad hoc whenever needed.”
Further, Demo Days work the same way. Instead of being fixed at the end of the program, EWOR runs them twice a year. Founders can join when it makes sense for them — some after three months, some after 18 months.
“You don’t always need to fundraise exactly three months after starting, so we stay flexible.”
But what about community?
When I meet accelerator/incubator participants, they’ve usually created this community through collective skill, stress, socialising. They help each other pitch, they cheer each other on. How does this work at a set up like EWOR?
Dippold believes running a community “based on what people actually need right now is far more powerful than simply grouping people together by default."
"You can, of course, put 30 people in a room for three months — that's the traditional cohort model. But we think a community becomes much stronger when it's need-based.
For example, if you want to hire people, we place you in a module alongside 12 others who are also hiring.
You build connections by working on the same challenge at the same time. You spend three months together in that module, and the bonding is incredible.”
The same happens with fundraising modules. People connect because they are solving the same problem, not just because they happened to join at the same time."
Dippold contends that one of the biggest struggles traditional accelerator communities face — “and I’ve seen this firsthand with Sigma and others like Y Combinator” — is that eventually, the connection between older and newer cohorts weakens.
“Since our model is modular, people connect across cohorts. They're united by shared needs — like hiring or fundraising — rather than just timing.”
This is supplemented with a month long coworking experience and a two-month Silicon Valley residency where founders meet iconic entrepreneurs and investors.
“After that, we return to Europe to keep building — because today, you can do world-class work from here too.”
It follows that EWOR takes an equally rigorous approach to each syllabus, reinventing the program annually.
“We track founder feedback weekly, measure NPS, kill half the things that don't work, and rebuild,” explains Dippold.
“Companies do build-measure-learn, so why shouldn’t a fellowship do the same? Every year, it's a new version.”
Handling diversity in an ecosystem where women are still underrepresented
EWOR’s leadership team is 40 per cent female. Dippold shared that among fellows, it's at around 24 per cent female founders — “better than the global average but not where we want to be. We’re trying to improve that quarter by quarter, especially using the ideation fellowship where we have more influence at earlier stages.”
Ten founders have so far been accepted into this year’s cohort. They include:
- UK-based Mark Golab, a 3D printing pioneer applying the technology to organ transplants with Cambridge Surgical Models, after surviving a life-threatening infection himself
- US-based Matthew Pierre-Louis, founder of Möbius Industries, a full-stack recycling robotics solution with a team from MIT, Tesla, SpaceX and Boston Dynamics
- Vienna-based Viktoria Izdebezka, Austria’s youngest supervisory board member in a public corporation and 2-time founder, revolutionising AI-powered lead generation with Salesy
- UK-based Nick D’Aloisio, a 3-time founder with exits totalling €100M, building a neuro-inspired deep learning hardware and software product, currently in stealth mode
What should someone thinking of applying to EWOR know?
Dippold shared straight from the heart:
“If you’re willing to endure pain and commit to the biggest personal growth journey of your life, you can do this. It doesn’t matter where you come from.
If you’re bold, crazy, and ambitious enough to want to change the world, EWOR is the place for you.”
Lead image: EWOR. Photo: uncredited.
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