Maxence

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.