In turn, HelloToken has created an engine for real-time contextual
research across millions of people.
Pamela Valdes Esteva (Mexico City, Mexico)
Beek
Social
Networking
Pamela is co-founder and CEO of Beek, a social
network for millennial book lovers.
“This has been proven true–by the successes of our past fellows, by the
new applications we get every year, and by the growing numbers of young
people who are creating their own career paths outside of college, with
or without a fellowship from us.”
Brian Truong (Boston, MA)
HelloToken
Enterprise
Software
Brian is CEO and co-founder of HelloToken, a company
that enables digital publishers to earn up to 10x more for their content
by posing simple market research questions to readers instead of serving
ads. He is now working on Quizr, a sports betting
application that launches in Europe in late 2016.
Alex Rodrigues (Calgary, Alberta / Mountain View, CA)
Varden
Labs
Autonomous Vehicles
Alex is CEO of Varden
Labs, a startup developing self-driving shuttles for private campuses. By
connecting the fragmented world of scientific research, Kynplex aims to
accelerate the pace of discovery.
Jesse Leimgruber (San Francisco)
NeoReach
Marketing
Technology
Jesse founded and runs NeoReach, a startup
developing influencer marketing technology for Fortune 1000 brands and
their agencies. Augur is built on the Ethereum blockchain
and allows users to forecast events and be rewarded for predicting them
correctly.
Samuel F. He is also the
co-founder of Visionary VR, a venture-backed startup building software
for creating stories using virtual reality.
Nick Mares (San Francisco)
Kettle & Fire
Food
Nick
co-founded Kettle & Fire with his brother to bring to market the world’s
first shelf-stable bone broth made from grass-fed, pasture-raised
cattle. To date, Equidate
has helped thousands of employees at private companies sell portions of
their stock to accredited investors in the absence of an IPO or
corporate sale.
Grace Xiao & Raul Jordan (Cambridge, MA)
Kynplex
Communication
Software
Grace and Raul are co-founders of Kynplex, a startup
that provides communication tools for scientific laboratories. Kisan
enables farmers to sell their produce directly to institutional buyers
using a smartphone, rather than going through the physical marketplace
dominated by middlemen.
. The fellowship provides young people with $100,000 to
learn by doing rather than by following conventional paths like college. Beam lets viewers of live-streamed
video game sessions get involved in the game, influencing gameplay in
real time.
Sohail Prasad (Plano, TX / San Francisco)
Equidate
Financial
Technology
Sohail is the founder and co-CEO of Equidate, a
secondary marketplace for shares in private companies. For more information, see thielfoundation.org.
Luke Sophios (San Diego)
CourseKey
Education
Technology
Luke is founder and CEO of CourseKey, a software
company that allows teachers to leverage the devices that their students
are already bringing to class – laptops, tablets, and smartphones – to
instantly create a more interactive, engaging “smart classroom”.
ABOUT THE THIEL FOUNDATION
Joey Krug (Knoxville, IL)
Augur
Prediction
Markets
Joey is building the world’s first decentralized
prediction market platform. Local governments are
increasingly interested in innovation; the Lace platform helps municipal
staff to build smarter cities.
Aditya Agarwalla (New Delhi, India)
Kisan Network
Agriculture
Marketplace
Aditya is co-founder of Kisan Network, an online
marketplace for the $200 billion Indian agricultural ecosystem. The system evaluates athlete movement to identify injury risk
factors and inform smarter training.
Lexi Smith (Boston)
Carewell
Health IT
Lexi
is co-founder of Carewell, an intelligent caregiving platform that helps
caregivers take care of loved ones with dementia by using wearable
devices to learn the smartest ways to provide personalized care.
Eva Shang (Cambridge, MA)
Legalist
Legal
Analytics
Eva is co-founder of Legalist, a legal analytics and
alert platform that helps lawyers keep track of new developments in case
law so that they can represent their clients more effectively.
Cosmo Scharf (Los Angeles, CA)
The Virtual Reality
Foundation and Visionary VR
Virtual Reality
Cosmo
co-founded The Virtual Reality Foundation, a non-profit organization
that produces the world’s largest event showcasing virtual reality
technology, VRLA Expo, as well as The Proto Awards, the premier
celebration for recognizing virtual reality content. Beek casts aside sterile 5-star
rating systems and lets users discuss and react to books while they are
actually reading them.
Introducing the 2016 Thiel Fellows
Boyan Slat (Delft, The Netherlands)
The Ocean Cleanup
Environmental
Technology
Boyan founded and runs The Ocean Cleanup, a
non-profit organization that develops technologies to rid the world’s
oceans of plastic. Poirier (Montreal)
Retinad
Virtual
Reality; Gaming
Samuel is co-founder and CEO of Retinad, the
preeminent analytics platform for virtual reality apps. Our message may have seemed
odd four or five years ago–some found it blasphemous to question how
well American higher education was working, and to suggest
entrepreneurship as an alternative path–but today even the colleges are
waking up; top schools are creating their own incubators, crafting more
flexible stop-out policies, and even raising venture capital funds.
This year’s cohort was selected from more than 6,000 applications
received from around the world.
Ivonna Dumanyan (Kherson, Ukraine / Durham, NC)
BioMetrix
Wearable
Performance Technology; Artificial Intelligence
Ivonna is
co-founder and CEO of BioMetrix, a wearable platform for injury
prediction and prevention. Three years later, Yellowberry has pioneered a new approach
to this market, and has expanded beyond bras to underwear, loungewear,
and activewear.
Panashe Mahachi (Kitchener, Ontario, Canada / Mountain View, CA)
Lace
Labs
Government Technology
Panashe is
co-founder of Lace, a marketplace for cities and other municipalities to
find and purchase cutting-edge software. AppHub’s mission is to empower engineers by eliminating
tedious and redundant, time-consuming work.
The Thiel Foundation supports science, technology, and long-term
thinking about the future. Their wholesome, slow-simmered bone broth is available at select
Whole Foods, Sprouts Farmers Market locations, and several online
retailers.
Joey Levy (New York)
Quizr
Sports
Gaming
Joey founded Draftpot, a daily fantasy sports platform,
from his dorm room in 2014. Through a
workforce of students who live on campus, EnvoyNow makes delivery
direct-to-dorm room, direct-to-lecture hall, and direct-to-study nook
faster and more accurate than mapping software-based delivery services
can achieve.
To date, companies created by Thiel Fellows are together worth more than
$1.4 billion.
Matthew Salsamendi & James Boehm (Seattle, WA)
Beam
Social
Gaming
Matt and James co-founded Beam, an interactive
live-streaming platform for gamers. NeoReach is currently used by industry giants such as
Wal-Mart, Amazon, and NBC.
James Sun (Toronto, Canada)
Revlo
Social
Gaming
James is co-founder and CEO of Revlo, a fan engagement
platform for the game broadcaster Twitch. Lunar Labs aims to bring online the 64 million
Americans–and then billions more worldwide–that don’t yet own a
smartphone.
Matt Arbesfeld (Cambridge, MA)
AppHub
Developer
Tools
Matt co-founded AppHub, a company that builds tools that
let app developers deploy and update software applications easily and
instantly. By leveraging the power of ocean currents to
concentrate and extract plastic waste, The Ocean Cleanup is orders of
magnitude more efficient than traditional approaches that rely on boats
and nets.
Thiel Fellows receive mentorship and guidance from current and former
fellows, as well as from the Thiel Foundation’s network of technology
entrepreneurs, investors, and scientists.
Anthony Zhang (Calgary, Alberta, Canada / Mountain View, CA)
EnvoyNow
Local
Delivery
Anthony is CEO and co-founder of EnvoyNow, a last-mile
food delivery service focusing on colleges and universities.
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The Thiel Foundation today accepted 29 new members into the 2016 class
of Thiel Fellows. Revlo makes it easy for
broadcasters to interact with all their fans and monetize them.
Christian Owens (London)
Paddle.com
Software
Christian
is the founder and CEO of Paddle.com, which builds infrastructure for
software companies to help companies deal with complex issues such as
payments, taxes, localization, and analytics.
Hunter Rosenblume & Rohith Varanasi (Detroit, MI)
Lunar
Labs
Telecommunications
Hunter and Rohith
co-founded Lunar Labs, a startup that sells smartphones with no monthly
contracts and pay-as-you-go data on a per-app basis starting at just
pennies per day. BioMetrix is pushing the limits of connected
technology and insight-driven intelligence with a simple, skin-adhered
sensor. Retinad helps
developers create better VR content with tools such as heat maps and
user emotional tracking so that consumers can enjoy a more immersive,
personalized virtual reality experience.
Megan Grassell (Jackson Hole, WY)
Yellowberry
Apparel
Megan
founded Yellowberry in high school when she realized that tween girls
like her younger sister lacked age-appropriate options when buying their
first bras.
Young people now have more options than ever.”
“We launched the fellowship in 2011 to test a simple thesis: college
isn’t right for everyone–especially for young people who want to create
new things,” said Blake Masters, President of the Thiel Foundation.
Varden’s technology has been used to transport thousands of people, more
than any other autonomous vehicle company in the US.
Henry Hu (Hong Kong / San Francisco)
Cafe X
Food
Technology, Automation
A native of Beijing, Henry Hu is CEO and
co-founder of Cafe X, which designs, manufactures, and operates
automated robotic cafés that serve locally roasted coffee in 10 seconds.
“In the past few years we’ve seen a dramatic change in the way young
people approach their potential,” said Jack Abraham, Executive Director
of the Thiel Fellowship. “Many are applying to the program with one or
two companies already under their belts–they’ve become successful
founders before they can even buy a beer