This year’s cohort of Founders includes professionals from global organisations such as Google, Stripe and NASA.
Dogpatch Labs has today (31 January) revealed the second cohort of participants in its Founders programme.
A group of 40 new entrepreneurs – half technical engineers and half commercial professionals – will participate in the start-up accelerator’s second run.
The new cohort of founders includes industry professionals from major organisations such as Stripe, Google, Meta and NASA, as well as academic talent from institutions such as MIT, Stanford and Cambridge with expertise in areas such as machine learning and neuroscience.
Participants will go through a full-time programme over 12 weeks where they will be sorted into co-founder pairs, consisting of one technical engineer and one commercial professional, and be tasked with building a start-up from scratch with mentorship from seasoned entrepreneurs.
The programme will culminate in a demo day held at Dogpatch Labs later this year, where each competing start-up pair will pitch their idea to a group of investors, ecosystem leaders and stakeholders for the chance of obtaining €100,000 in early-stage investment.
“This is a new kind of start-up factory for Ireland – a model that taps into one of our greatest untapped resources: transitioning talent from multinationals into impactful start-ups,” said Amy Neale, partner at Delta VC and a mentor in the programme. “The quality of this cohort is really something special.”
Founders was first launched in 2023, and has yielded some considerable results in the time since.
This time last year, Dogpatch revealed eight start-ups that were borne out of the accelerator, which included adtech start-up – and former Start-up of the Week – GlitchAds.
Also included was Inspeq AI, which raised $1.1m for its generative AI platform last May.
The Founders programme is currently funded as a two-year pilot programme through returns from successful investments in Irish start-ups through the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC).
In November, it was announced that the NDRC was to close operations in November of this year, after the Irish Government concluded that the enterprise ecosystem had “evolved significantly since NDRC’s inception” and decided not to procure a new service contract for the start-up accelerator.
Shortly after the announcement of NDRC’s closure, several start-up founders called on the Irish Government to reconsider its decision to stop funding. An open letter, which was signed by 200 entrepreneurs, wrote that the closure “comes at the worst possible time”.
With the NDRC slated to close operations, the Founders programme is in search of new funding in order to sustain beyond 2025.
Speaking about the importance of ensuring the continuation of the Founders programme, CEO and founder of Manna Drone Delivery Bobby Healy said: “This model has proven its value, creating start-ups that wouldn’t exist otherwise with exceptional founding teams.
“Ensuring its future is critical to building a world-class innovation ecosystem for Ireland.”
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