Foundry
Foundry is a granted ($1k) preaccelerator and competition ($5k cash prize) for frontier-tech startups.
It exists to empower Australian and Kiwi PhD students and EMCRs to start or join interesting companies. We don’t believe in “research commercialisation”. We believe in research talent.
We’ve run one Foundry cohort each year since 2022. We have an NPS > 70. The companies that have come out of Foundry have raised from top-tier VCs (including Blackbird), been headhunted by YC, and gone on to specialist accelerators like Mass Robotics’.
Foundry alumni that are active include Aquila, Andromeda, Synbiote, Messenger, Unsloth, Kite Magnetics, GreenDynamics, Cell Bauhaus, Preview Health, Graft AI, Iceberg, and Twisted.
We wrote a Manifesto that did its job (ruffled some feathers, brought out some supporters, changed some minds). Someone put the PDF on Scribd and it’s also on Substack.
Michael Tolo and Saron Berhane now run Foundry. You can get in contact with them via the Blackbird Foundry site or their LinkedIns, or I can pop you in touch.