Founders at the University of Cambridge

No, we do not charge a programme fee.  

Final-year students, PhDs, postdocs and alumni within five years of graduation. We welcome technical builders, researchers and exceptional commercial candidates. Register your interest here if you fall outside of these criteria, as we may find ways of connecting you with Cambridge talent.

We are looking for people who want to be full-time founders by Summer 2027. If that’s not for you, this programme is not for you.

No. Many participants join without a pre-formed idea. The programme is designed to help you explore, test-fit with co-founders and form a direction together. That said, if you already have an idea, or even a half-formed one you’re encouraged to apply. SYNC is an ideal place to test your way through the idea maze, refine your thinking and build momentum with a co-founder.

Through short ideation sprints. You’ll explore working with new potential co-founders, work on different problems and see where the strongest fit emerges. We will also hold mixer events throughout the programme to increase your exposure to aspiring founders.

No. We create the environment, intensity and support system for you to choose the right person yourself.

It doesn’t matter. Some teams will take longer to form and people will continually break up and rematch. The goal is to find a long-term co-founder that you are aligned with, not to match as quickly as possible.

We are sector agnostic. We cover AI applied to traditional industries all the way to novel deep tech ventures. The common thread is ambitious founders solving hard problems.

Through Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, we invest out of the Discovery Fund, which was generously donated by University of Cambridge alumni. We invest in promising teams on founder-friendly terms, focusing on the earliest and riskiest stages of company formation, with all returns reinvested into the fund to support the next generation of founders. Investments start at £20,000 on a SAFE so that founders can experiment and build momentum at an early stage. We help founders move faster through introductions to our Community of investors.

We will look at the following criteria when making investment decisions:

• A company must be formed
• Strength of the founding team
• Progress made during the programme
• A clear plan to spend the money and raise follow-on funding
• A viable business model

• Weekly check-ins and monthly team reviews
• Mentorship from University of Cambridge alumni and industry leaders
• Specialist masterclasses that cover a wide range of topics from product to fundraising
• End-to-end support from testing co-founding relationships, prototyping, customer discovery, go-to-market, to investment readiness

We require full participation across the programme. This is to give each aspiring founder a fair and equal opportunity to find a co-founder.

• Kick-off weekend
• Three evenings a week throughout Michaelmas, with the final session on 11 December 2026.
• Post-programme we move to a check-in schedule plus optional co-working meetups

Unfortunately, we can’t help with visas at this time. However, you may want to apply to the UK’s Global Talent visa which enables exceptionally talented individuals potentially like yourself to come to the UK to work for five years. More on other visa routes can be found here.

Teams with traction will be fast-tracked to the interview stage for our pre-seed accelerator programme, START. Whatever you choose next, you are part of the Founders at the University of Cambridge Community.

If you have a question that is not answered above, please reach us at connect@founders.cam.ac.uk