The Bridge

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

Had some great company at the house this week.

Camillo Lugaresi (MediaPipe at Google, then GPT 4o and o1 at OpenAI) and @andreaesposito (robotic hand lead at Foundation, previously Optimus at Tesla) came by for a chat with our Fall26 founders.

We talked AI, robotics, and where it's all going.

Thanks both for coming over.
And thanks @gmonteleone8 for making it happen.

Building in San Francisco comes with unexpected side quests @sama

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.

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