Founded in 2011 by Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck, the company has offices in Toronto, London, Berlin, Paris, Singapore, Bangalore and San Francisco.
[6] Bentinck founded Code First: Girls in late 2012 to address the decline of women working in the tech and digital workforce, which has led to a lack of diversity in the sector.
[10] In 2017, it was announced that Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Partner at Greylock, was leading a $12.4 million investment into Entrepreneur First.
[16] In July 2022, Entrepreneur First announced the raise of a $158 million Series C.[17][18] Investors in the round included John Collison; Patrick Collison; Taavet Hinrikus; Reid Hoffman; Matt Mullenweg; Tom Blomfield; Nat Friedman; Demis Hassabis; Mustafa Suleyman; Elad Gil and Lachy Groom.
[20] Entrepreneur First runs a 3-month long program, called 'Form', which recruits talented individuals to meet co-founders and build technology companies from scratch.
[28] Among its successful startups are Tractable (valued at $1 billion as of July 2021[29]), Cleo, Omnipresent, Aztec, Hertzwell, Transcelestial, Airbank, and Magic Pony Technology - who sold to Twitter for a reported $150m only 18 months after the founders met on the program.
[28] Entrepreneur First conducts its own talent searches to find and interest graduates in the program, encouraging them to apply "rather than joining Google or Facebook or doing a PhD or Postdoc".