Entrepreneur First (EF), a UK-based global talent investor, launched operations in India and has allocated $25 million to promoting talent across multiple locations in the country over the next three years.

EF has pioneered a programme model that invests in outstanding individual talent even before they have an idea and helps them find co-founders and raise seed funding. The company has created 250 companies worth $1.5 billion combined, has had four exits worth $300 million, helped raise a total of $350 million from investors for its portfolio start-ups and has an alumni base of 2,000 people in five locations around the world — London, Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong and Singapore.

On Thursday, EF announced its first cohort of 50 individuals (founders) with talent in deep tech in Bengaluru, who were cherry picked from 900 applications and will be part of its bi-annual programme. Each of the cohort members, one-third of whom are PhDs, will receive a monthly stipend of $2,000 from EF for the first three months during which they will develop start-up ideas.

“We run cohorts in Europe and Asia every six months with 50-100 people on each. After the first three months of our programme, we make the first pre-seed investment of $55,000 in each start-up plus the stipends already paid, for 10 per cent of the company, before we help them raise seed funding from external investors. Additionally, we also invest 15 per cent of the seed round,” Matt Clifford, co-founder and CEO, Entrepreneur First, told BusinessLine .

EF is backed by over a 100 investors including the founders of LinkedIn, DeepMind and PayPal. Its major exits to date include Magic Pony, which sold to Twitter for a reported $150 million just 18 months after the founders met on EF, Avocarrot, Represent and Bloomsbury.ai. The company has hired Esha Tiwary as General Manager, India who was previously Director for Emerging Categories at Myntra, a Flipkart company.

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