European start-ups have grown accustomed to reaching out to US investors for capital funding, expert mentoring and networking opportunities; US founders have traditionally felt less need to look to Europe for such support. However, Berlin-based EWOR is an exception: the self-styled “founder fellowship” has received so many applications from US start-ups in recent months that it is today announcing the launch of a new team that will work out of San Francisco.

What is a founder fellowship? “It grew out of us trying to fix something we believed was broken,” explains Daniel Dippold, one of EWOR’s co-founders and now its CEO. “We’ve had accelerators for 20 years and their value proposition – helping founders access talent, create revenues, and raise a big round – has proved really valuable; what we wanted to do was to provide that value proposition in a way that doesn’t distract founders – they don’t have to show up to a program.”

In other words, EWOR tries to offer the benefits associated with an accelerator, including mentorship, connections to a broader network of entrepreneurial expertise, and help with raising money. But it takes a less formal approach than an accelerator, where founders are typically signing up for a short time period and committing to working with the organisation in a very structured manner.

Dippold describes this model as a “concierge-style accelerator”, with founders enjoying extended stays in the program – perhaps 18 months or so – during which they can engage with the services that most interest them. Successful applicants get up to $575,000 (€500,000) of capital and one-on-one mentorship from EWOR’s fellows – most of whom have founded unicorn businesses – plus any other help they ask for.

The decision to put boots on the ground in the US reflects a 237% increase in the number of US founders applying to join EWOR over the past year. The flexibility of the program is part of the appeal, but Dippold also accepts US start-ups are conscious of EWOR’s reputation for helping founders to secure big raises. The average EWOR founder to date has raised around $9.75 million (€8.5 million) – Dippold says this is significantly more than at accelerators such as Y-Combinator, to which EWOR is often compared, though definitive data is hard to find.

“Our raises have definitely captured people’s attention, and as a European organisation we also bring a different culture and set of values to the table,” says Dippold. “We’ve always had global ambitions because we want to work with the best founders wherever they may be, but we hadn’t planned our US move until recently when we saw how many founders there were applying.”

The San Francisco team comprises three EWOR leaders – Charles Ferguson, Katie Madding and Gigi Brett – who all have strong track records as successful founders themselves, as well as unconventional backgrounds. Ferguson, for example, is an Oscar-winning filmmaker, while Brett started out as a lawyer. Dippold says EWOR is keen on “non-linear outliers” – interesting people with different perspectives – and that this is also the accelerator’s approach to selecting participants.

In fact, getting into EWOR is tricky – the acceptance rate is rumored to be something like one in 1,000 – and getting trickier. “Each year, it’s getting more selective and the companies are getting more exciting,” Dippold adds.

He points to alumni companies such as Peaq, the Web3 networking business, and Thaleron, an energy storage start-up. Peaq has been valued at $3.5 billion while Thaleron last year completed a €13 million fund raise, the largest ever pre-seed round for a first-time founder in Europe.

So far this year, around a half dozen start-ups have joined the EWOR fellowship, ranging from AI health company Certuma to Nyxium, an AI platform for deployable energy and industrial infrastructure decisions.

However, today’s San Francisco launch could see EWOR pick up the pace in the coming months, as more US companies discover what the European accelerator has to offer.