We back dropouts, renegade students, and deep tech scientists at the earliest stages, before anybody else. Want to chat? Reach out:👇
Investing across North America
Joined July 2015
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1517 is more than just vibes & techno-retrocool! We back people who want to build the future. We are the first believers & the last doubters.
For startups:
📜 Thesis: Sci-Fi tech (passes the Kubrick test), dropouts & renegade scientists
🌱Stage: Angel/preseed — seed
🌎 Geo focus: NA w/ rare EU + SA investments.
💰 Check-size: $50K - $500K
For builders:
$1k. No strings attached. For makers, students, and/or dropouts. Strongly prefer HW over SW.
Want to build the impossible? We also offer $100K to do R&D for 6 months.
To get in touch, drop us a line, [email protected]
ALT The image depicts an engine being fired in an lab
after reviewing 10,000+ Thiel Fellowship applications, Michael and Danielle developed some pretty unusual ideas about what makes a great founder.
edge control. hyperfluency. the toilet plunger. Danielle's "Friday Night Dyson sphere."
none of these are a personality test.
we're just looking for tricky bastards who always find a way.
in 2019, @Atom_Computing trapped its first atom.
2021: 100 qubits.
2023: 1,180 qubits.
2026: selected for DARPA's final quantum benchmarking stage.
we found some photos of their early lab in our archives.
pretty cool watching a 1517 portfolio company go from one trapped atom to this.
The Medici Project: $1,000+ grants for young people working on things they can't stop thinking about. No equity.
1517fund.com/medici
1517 Fund retweeted
Exceptional talent is widely distributed. Permission to use it is not.
We started the Thiel Fellowship to find extraordinary young people and give them the freedom to pursue ambitious ideas.
Fifteen years later, see what they’ve built.
1517 Fund retweeted
That's our girl @DStrachman and our boy Michael Gibson (@William_Blake), now doing the same work but at @1517fund
1517 Fund retweeted
Thrilled to announce the general availability of
@positron_ai's Atlas Inference Appliance on
@OracleCloud, making Positron the first AI chip startup to be deployed at scale with a hyperscaler. Look out for more announcements this week at Oracle Cloud World! blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infra…
1517 Fund retweeted
Record setting 1517 founders, now building a fusion reactor in SF!
Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.
Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.
Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.
1517 Fund retweeted
Isaac Newton spent decades huffing mercury fumes in a Cambridge cellar, grinding lead into a worthless sludge while praying to the gods of alchemy. Now Marathon can use its reactor blanket to turn mercury-198 into stable gold by the ton. The alchemist will lose to the atom.
Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.
Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.
Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.
1517 Fund retweeted
Spent 3 days last week with @DStrachman, @William_Blake & the @1517fund fam, including a day at her place. 1517 was @invariantes first fund investment in 2015. Exceptional returns, but they also helped shape me as an investor. Rare investors build companies & fellow GPs. Love ya!
Sixteen years ago, when @William_Blake and I were on the founding team of the Thiel Fellowship, we called it an older young person’s homeschool program.
In a very Thiel-ian way, we built something that fostered independent thinking by giving young people permission to explore what interested them in an environment that trusted them to make decisions and execute on their work.
@firstround’s editorial team wrote a really thoughtful piece about those first years of the fellowship. It also covers my journey — going from school founder to handing out $100K grants to teenagers.
So wonderful to chronicle that very special time that has become the genesis of 1517 💗 (Link in comments)
We used a voting method borrowed from a fourth-grade classroom to help pick Thiel Fellows.
Some of those fellows went on to build Ethereum, Figma, and Anthropic. The early days were a lot weirder than people remember
review.firstround.com/inside…
