The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones that do.

For many years, New York City has attracted startups and creative thinkers from around the world. Among these exciting companies is a bold new initiative launched by the NYC Economic Development Corporation, which aims to address the shortcomings of the city’s technology ecosystem, specifically the lack of inclusiveness. This mission centers around the Founder Fellowship, which addresses the issue of the Venture Access NYC initiative, which is focused on Closing the Opportunity Gap for marginalized communities in tech founders. If you are a founder of a tech-enabled startup looking for ways to scale, the Founder Fellowship provides an excellent opportunity to gain traction build networks in a competitive space, and attract capital, all in a secure environment.

A Program with Purpose: The Vision of the Founder Fellowship

The founders of the Founder Fellowship set out with a specific mission in mind: using their networks and gathering resources, to remove the hurdles that often stand in the way of preventing skilled, underrepresented founders from the resources, networks, and capital needed. Every year, NYCEDC selects several promising startup founder teams from economically impoverished and underrepresented groups in technology from the city of New York. Some resources and opportunities are otherwise unreachable by most, that these founders stand to gain upon joining this fellowship. These include the provision of individual work plans designed to meet gaps and needs of individual founders’ ventures, interactions within a peer cohort aimed at the sharing of ideas, problem-solving, and receiving feedback regarding their projects, business administration services, and networks to capital and other business partners. Access to this type of network and support has been invaluable in enabling founders to gain a strong foothold in the very competitive environment of tech startups.
 

The core program for the 2025 Founder Fellowship will be supported by five partners. 

Chloe Capital – Works with gender and diversity across climate, health and workforce innovation. 

Company Ventures – Offers a zero-equity mentorship program to strengthen fundraising capability. 

Gold House Ventures – Offers key funding and support to entrepreneurs who are minorities. 

Newlab – Backing tech startups that have the potential for fast and sustainable commercialization. 
Visible Hands – Focuses on high growth of early stage ventures, mainly the underrepresented founders.

A Network of Collaborative Partners

In order to meet the varied demands of its founders’ the Founder Fellowship will adopt five program partners for the 2025 cohort who are considered as the ‘powerhouse’ in their respective fields together with the others supporting this program:

Chloe Capital: A venture capital firm investing through a gender and diversity lens in climate tech, health, and workforce innovations among other sectors.

Company Ventures: A seed-stage venture firm based in NYC running a zero equity supervised program aimed at improving their founders’ fundraising capabilities.

Gold House Ventures: An ecosystem that aims to provide the capital, tools and networks through its venture fund and acceleration programs to diverse entrepreneurs.

Newlab: A global venture platform for sustainable critical technology focused startups that allows a faster route to commercialization for the start ups.

Visible Hands: The company invests in high growth early stage ventures with a special focus on those founded by underrepresented groups.

Through these strategic collaborations, the Fellow Founders can leverage on access to monetization, proportional and non-proportional, of up to $1 million dollars, enhancing their growth capacity and allowing them to expand their businesses. And the partnerships are hardly lacking impressive resources: OpenAI will extend $5,000 worth of API credits to each of the Fellow teams to enable them incorporate advanced AI technlogies while Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation provides legal assistance to some founders to resolve their regulatory and transactional obstacles.

Building a Mixed Bag of Founders’ Community

The impact of the Founder Fellowship on NYC’s technology ecosystem is tangible. Since it was launched in 2022, the program has enrolled over 250 founders who have successfully led 168 tech startups. Collectively, these fellows raised more than $22 million, employed more than 100 new personnel, and collectively increased their net worth to $161 million. Such figures illustrate not only the effectiveness of the program, but the burst of innovation and persistence among founders in the City of New York.

The engagement numbers within the Founder Fellowship accentuates the initiative’s diversity and willingness to partner with the different pillars of NYC’s thriving technology scene. Three out of every nine fellows to this point have had a woman with one-third of all the teams having at least one Black, Latinx, or Asian founder, and 15% declaring they are LGBTQ. By pulling the less privileged founders, NYCEDC is not only benefitting unique individuals and unique entrepreneurs but adds to building a unique and diversified tech ecosystem based in New York City.

Moving Forward: Founder Fellowship in 2025

The 2025 cohort of Founder Fellowship is going to be more or less a powerful network of under-represented founders. NYCEDC will probably be augmenting the number of founders in the fellowship maintaining its focus on the creation of a technology landscape inclusive of BIPOC, women, LGBTQ+, and other historically hardly represented founders. With a stronger focus on access to capital, mentoring, and professional networks, the fellowship will no longer allow the barriers to success for gifted and creative businesses to endure.

The fellowship application process takes an ‘all-comers’ approach in terms of who gets a fellowship; volunteers for the fellowship would be accepted irrespective of their gender, race, age or any other protected characteristic. The companies that will be approved for the fellowship shall only be eligible for one cohort of the Fellowship to avoid asset allocation issues and for each founder to gain from the program at maximum.

Transforming Tech, One Founder at a Time

The participants who are selected do not only get funding from the Founder Fellowship but also a place to connect to one of the busiest cities in the world and the resources needed to succeed in it. The program’s impact has been profound and participants such as, “So, this was me, I joined you know and one other fellow who had the pitch like me who had a similar idea and it was really good. Certainly, several people would consider that to be probably the best thing that I had and I have a lot of much better planning than what I had going into the final round,” have attributed their companies’ expansion and escalation in valuations to the expansive perks that the fellowship students enjoyed: An abundance of mentors, resources, and connections.

As Michael Odokara-Okigbo, CEO and Co-Founder of NKENNE and a former fellow, notes, “We have so benefited from the fellowship, and participating in the Founder Fellowship has been a transformative experience. It has accelerated us to compete effectively with the help of the program’s business focus, strategic alliances, and mentorship program,” he cites, for instance.

On November 12th, NYCEDC held the 2025 Founder Fellowship Info Session in which they invited applicants and informed them about this great opportunity. An aspiring founder who wants to break through in the tech spheres should best go through this session as it is the first step towards working in Tank.
 

Apply for the 2025 Founder Fellowship Program Today

If technology is your passion and you want to change the world around you, apply for the 2025 Founder Fellowship. The 2025 Founder Fellowship is a program that allows people from different backgrounds to participate. To apply or find out more information about Venture Access NYC. A fellowship does not refer or belong to just a program—it is a step toward making New York City technology future-oriented, inclusive, and representative as a whole.