Enza Capital

Entrepreneur First is a London-based talent investor and company-building programme that operates differently from all other investors in this directory: rather than evaluating finished startup pitches, Entrepreneur First identifies and recruits exceptional individuals before they have a business idea, company, or co-founder, and runs an intensive cohort-based programme in which participants find co-founders, develop ideas, and build the earliest version of a company. The firm operates cohorts in London, Singapore, Paris, Berlin, and Bangalore, and has built more than 500 companies from scratch since its founding in 2011 by Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck. Entrepreneur First invests at the pre-seed stage with initial checks from $100,000 to $250,000, taking small equity positions in companies it helps create through the programme. The model is premised on the belief that the biggest constraint on company creation is not access to capital but access to the right co-founders and the confidence to take the leap into entrepreneurship. Portfolio companies include Magic Pony Technology, the deep learning research company acquired by Twitter; Tractable, the AI-powered vehicle damage assessment company; Omnipresent, the global employment platform; and Permutive, the audience intelligence platform for publishers. Beyond its original portfolio, the programme has created hundreds of additional companies.