The fastest way to SF for people who want to build a generational company
Joined January 2025
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I'm an accelerator, a founder house, a program.
The name doesn't matter, here is what I am:
8 weeks in San Francisco to build the foundations of a generational company
- non-US based founders
- pre-idea, pre-team
- 40 spots
- $250k investment for the best teams
what I cover: flights / housing / food / visa support / co-founder matching / personalised support / network access
by Entrepreneurs First
backed by Patrick & John Collison, Demis Hassabis, Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt & others
alumni have built: Cleo, Aztec Network, Gensyn, PolyAI, Neptune Robotics, Magdrive
Comment your edge ! Our next cohort is open now
The Bridge retweeted
One of our new founders landed a multimillion-dollar contract in Japan by growing a beard, printing fake “Growth Director” business cards and throwing his own embassy reception.
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He’s just one of the outliers in The Bridge Fall 26 cohort, which has officially kicked off.
A few other crazy things they pulled off before landing in San Francisco:
> Won four international physics olympiad medals, then helped scale a foundation model at top HFT firm 200x in size as part of a team whose model generated nine-figure annualised revenue.
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> Turned down a €400K quant trading track to teach himself longevity biotech.
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> Built a voting platform at 15, grew it to 30,000 users, and sold it to the Council of Europe at 16.
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> Built an AI tool that turns prompts into working hardware designs and grew it from $0 to $23K MRR in six months. Had already sold an AI tutoring business with 10,000+ paying students.
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> Built a thrust-vector-controlled rocket in high school, then went on to build testbeds at NASA JPL and rocket-engine hardware at Japan’s space agency. Also raised CHF 2M for charities door-to-door alongside his studies.
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> Built an AI product solo to 350,000 users and $30K ARR in eight months, with $0 spent on marketing.
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> Won the highest-scoring gold medal at the International Philosophy Olympiad, then built a quant-finance platform that hit $30K ARR in its first month after launching exclusively to MIT’s Master of Finance cohort.
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At The Bridge, we take chances on crazy outliers who’ve shown an edge that’s impossible to ignore.
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Follow The Bridge to follow their journey.
The Bridge retweeted
love living these stories
unexpected things happen when you walk out of @jointhebridge house in the Mission
The Bridge retweeted
pretty nice first angel @sama
The Bridge retweeted
Day 1 we told our founders getting into rooms is an important skill
So they crashed the OpenAI party and got Sam Altman to sign the Sama Lisa
One of our new founders landed a multimillion-dollar contract in Japan by growing a beard, printing fake “Growth Director” business cards and throwing his own embassy reception.
⠀
He’s just one of the outliers in The Bridge Fall 26 cohort, which has officially kicked off.
A few other crazy things they pulled off before landing in San Francisco:
> Won four international physics olympiad medals, then helped scale a foundation model at top HFT firm 200x in size as part of a team whose model generated nine-figure annualised revenue.
⠀
> Turned down a €400K quant trading track to teach himself longevity biotech.
⠀
> Built a voting platform at 15, grew it to 30,000 users, and sold it to the Council of Europe at 16.
⠀
> Built an AI tool that turns prompts into working hardware designs and grew it from $0 to $23K MRR in six months. Had already sold an AI tutoring business with 10,000+ paying students.
⠀
> Built a thrust-vector-controlled rocket in high school, then went on to build testbeds at NASA JPL and rocket-engine hardware at Japan’s space agency. Also raised CHF 2M for charities door-to-door alongside his studies.
⠀
> Built an AI product solo to 350,000 users and $30K ARR in eight months, with $0 spent on marketing.
⠀
> Won the highest-scoring gold medal at the International Philosophy Olympiad, then built a quant-finance platform that hit $30K ARR in its first month after launching exclusively to MIT’s Master of Finance cohort.
⠀
At The Bridge, we take chances on crazy outliers who’ve shown an edge that’s impossible to ignore.
⠀
Follow The Bridge to follow their journey.
The Bridge retweeted
Non-US founder? This is your shortcut to Silicon Valley.
The Bridge is an 8-week residency in San Francisco.
• 50 non-US founders
• One house
• $250K for the best teams
• Free compute + a hardware lab
• Access to top Bay Area advisors and investors
• Three healthy meals a day
The best part: you can show up pre-idea and pre-team.
Most leave with a co-founder, a vision, first customers and a seed round.
It's part of Entrepreneur First, whose backers include the Collison brothers, Demis Hassabis, Reid Hoffman, Nat Friedman and Eric Schmidt.
You don't need to live in SF to build there.
You need 8 weeks.
Bookmark this + tag a founder outside the US.
The Bridge retweeted
Karol Hausman is the co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence.
His company is betting on a future where physical labor is as readily available as electricity. And the plan is to build a single AI model that can power any robot in the world.
PI’s models are already moving beyond robot arms. One partner uses them to power an autonomous wheel loader that loads a dump truck with no operator inside the machine.
The parallels between @physical_int and early OpenAI cannot be ignored: a research-first company, a general-purpose model, and some of the field’s best minds working on it.
@hausman_k managed to get not one but six well-known names in robotics and tech to bet on the company: @svlevine , @chelseabfinn , @lachygroom (an early Stripe employee and prolific investor), @QuanVng , @adnan_esm and @brian_ichter
For a team like this to work, everyone has to be willing to question their own ideas.
And as CEO, Karol sets the example. He’s intellectually honest enough to reconsider the path ahead, even when it means walking away from work he’s spent years building.
During his PhD, a visiting researcher told him to scrap two years of work and change methods. Karol thought the visitor was wrong. Then he attended his lecture, changed his mind, and rebuilt his PhD around deep learning.
The visitor was Sergey Levine. Today, they’re co-founders. They deliberately hire for that same intellectual honesty at Physical Intelligence to maintain the cultural DNA.
@Anastasia_ELW and I traced how Karol thinks, hires, and gets some of robotics’ best minds to build together.
Sidedoors Presents: Karol Hausman, The Founder Who Bets Everything on Chaos.
sidedoors.co/p/physical-inte…
probably better than anything we could write about The Bridge ourselves
if you’re thinking about joining, read @cryptobuilder_ honest account of her first two months: finding a cofounder, living with 60 founders, and figuring things out along the way
My Journey at @jointhebridge by @joinef
I wrote this at the SF airport, heading home after two months at The Bridge by Entrepreneurs First. It feels like the perfect moment to share a bit about my journey.
When I boarded the plane to SF, I didn’t really know what I was applying for or what I was heading into. I had never been to the US and was ready to build solo.
Two months later, I am leaving with an absolutely fantastic cofounder, a much higher bar for what is possible, and the muscle of knowing: “We’ll figure things out no matter what.”
I wrote about working with the EF team, living with 60 young founders in one house, and the ups and downs of our first two months building a company together.
For those considering joining and wanting a glimpse, those curious about what it feels like, and those who have been side by side with me all this time, here is my story: paragraph.com/@lisaakselrod/…
The Bridge retweeted
My Journey at @jointhebridge by @joinef
I wrote this at the SF airport, heading home after two months at The Bridge by Entrepreneurs First. It feels like the perfect moment to share a bit about my journey.
When I boarded the plane to SF, I didn’t really know what I was applying for or what I was heading into. I had never been to the US and was ready to build solo.
Two months later, I am leaving with an absolutely fantastic cofounder, a much higher bar for what is possible, and the muscle of knowing: “We’ll figure things out no matter what.”
I wrote about working with the EF team, living with 60 young founders in one house, and the ups and downs of our first two months building a company together.
For those considering joining and wanting a glimpse, those curious about what it feels like, and those who have been side by side with me all this time, here is my story: paragraph.com/@lisaakselrod/…
The Bridge retweeted
my advice: @jointhebridge
go to sf
meet you peers irl
get 250k$
The Bridge retweeted
They came to SF knowing they wanted to build in energy.
They just didn’t know what yet.
A few weeks of testing problems later, Bianca and Alessio found the intersection of energy and compute, and Ambra Compute started moving fast.
On the way to Demo Day, Mike Phillips jumped in a Waymo with Bianca to talk about finding the right problem, building in San Francisco, and why speed matters.
Full conversation in thread.
The Bridge retweeted
“Instead of paying for my flights, can you cover my fuel?”
@omar_marv drove from Yale to SF for @jointhebridge, stopping at 30+ car dealerships on the way. He grew up on his dad’s dealership floor in Morocco.
Now he’s building @marvlabsai .
Read about his story in the article below.
The Bridge retweeted
“Working on something that isn’t challenging is not worth my time.”
That’s Faidra, co-founder of Asage.
She met François through EF. Their first call was a disaster. Then they met in person, it clicked, and they’ve been building together ever since.
Since then: first benchmarks, growing client traction, their first hire, and investors including the co-founder of World Labs.
Asage is just getting started.
Watch their full Demo Day pitch on the Demo Day portal.
13 companies from The Bridge just pitched at @joinef Demo Day in San Francisco
a few weeks ago, many were still looking for a cofounder
look how far they’ve come since:
Marv Labs: marvlabs.ai
> teaching robots to repair cars by learning from real technicians
> $3.1M in contracted ARR, 32 days after launch
Ambra Compute: ambracompute.com
> turning wasted energy into AI compute.
> $82.5M in compute LOIs in 3 months.
@BiancaGiovetti
Promethee: promethee.io
> turning work into a multiplayer game
>20% week-over-week growth for 3 months in private beta
@Nlacombe_
Artificial Humans: artificial-humans.com
> combining AI and human tissue models to predict how drugs affect patients.
> $20M secured in a single LOI for just one drug.
@kyomangold
Avior: useavior.com
> a global neobank built on AI and stablecoins
> $40M in annual transaction volume declared by its first onboarded users
@mateoherbig @hagenkral
Goldfish: goldfish.sh
> a memory layer for every AI you use.
> 5,000+ users with $0 spent on marketing
@joeledholm @kar_re
Seeft: seeft.co
> finding and recovering the money businesses lose.
> Recovering over $1M a year for one enterprise customer, from a single workflow
@mehdiamara__
Gini Health: gini.health
> health intelligence built for the female body
> 3,000 women signed up after a single story
Harlow: tryharlow.com
> running hotel operations through a voice-enabled badge.
> $11M+ in commercial pipeline in 20days
@benbolsakovs
Era Compute: era.dev
>connecting companies to European AI compute
> $500M+ in quote requests in a few months
@tedbibr @RMladek
FirstSight.Labs: firstsightlabs.com
> using AI to read fetal MRIs.
> an analysis that takes an expert 3 hours, completed in seconds
Asage: asage.ai
> Bringing human expertise to multimodal AI.
> 500+ vetted experts contributing to the next generation of models
Stead
> Acquiring real estate agencies and running them with AI.
> Acquisition targets representing $50M in revenue, 8 weeks in
Proud to have these founders at The Bridge
The Bridge retweeted
we often talk about the overlap between gamers and founders. @Nlacombe_ (Spring26) story puts it in a different light
after a few tough years, he went back to the one place where he’d always been able to focus for hours: games
so he turned studying for the bar exam into one: points, progress bars, and a community watching him work
he passed, then the thing he’d built to help himself took on a life of its own
@juliadenoly tells the full story behind promethee here: juliadenoly.substack.com/p/h…
