If you have no co-founder and no product, most accelerators will not talk to you. They want a team, a deck, a working wedge. Two names get mentioned constantly for the opposite case: programmes that invest in a single person before any of that exists and build the team for you inside the cohort. Antler is the one everyone brings up first. We have not been able to confirm its current figures against the organiser's own page, so we are not going to quote numbers for it here. Entrepreneur First is in our catalogue with checked figures, and it runs on the same premise, so that is what the rest of this article is about.
How Entrepreneur First actually works
Entrepreneur First takes individuals into a cohort before a company exists. You apply as yourself, not as a founding team, and the first weeks are spent meeting other applicants and testing working relationships until pairs or small teams form around an idea worth pursuing. The ideation stage comes with an equity-free grant, so you are paid to be in the room and to find a co-founder. If a team forms and you incorporate, Entrepreneur First can invest up to $250K into the new company. The money only arrives once there is a company to put it into. That ordering is the whole design: the programme is betting on you first, the company second.
What happens if no team forms
This is the part most founders underweight before applying. Not every participant in a cohort ends up in a company. If you go through the ideation stage and nobody pairs with you, or the pairing you make falls apart before incorporation, there is no company for the $250K to go into, because that investment is conditional on formation. What you keep is the equity-free grant you were paid during ideation and whatever relationships and validated (or invalidated) ideas you built along the way. That is a real outcome, not a consolation prize, but it is a different outcome from walking out with a funded company, and you should go in knowing the split exists.
What it takes, and what you leave with
- The ideation grant from Entrepreneur First is equity-free. Nobody takes a stake in you personally.
- The up to $250K that follows applies once a company is formed, not before. Read that as the price of admission to the next stage, not a guaranteed cheque.
- If you leave without a co-founder, you leave with the grant you were paid and no equity given up, because there was never a company to give equity in.
Once you have a team, the choices look different
The moment you have a co-founder and something resembling a product, you stop being a candidate for pre-team programmes and start being a candidate for everything else in the accelerator market, and the terms there are not equity-free. Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator offers $150K on a 6% Post-Money SAFE, with its W'27 and S'27 cohorts both open. gener8tor puts in $100,000 for 7.5% equity on a rolling basis. Conector takes 4-7% equity in exchange for its programme and services. Compare that to what Entrepreneur First asked of you before you had a company: nothing.
Not everything on the other side of team formation costs equity, though. Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First Latin America is equity-free and gives eligible startups Google product credits, with the option to apply for additional Cloud credits. PepsiCo Greenhouse Accelerator gives a $20,000 equity-free grant, rising to up to $100,000 for winners. CTNext Entrepreneur Innovation Awards offers up to $10,000 through its EIA track and up to $25,000 through Growth Company Grants. Together AI Startup Accelerator gives up to $15K in platform credits at its Build tier, up to $30K at Scale, and up to $50K at its top tier, which only matters once you actually have a product running on compute.
At the larger end, Katapult Accelerator invests €150,000 to €500,000, and the EIC Accelerator combines a grant below EUR 2.5 million for 24 months at TRL 6-8 with a separate investment component, both aimed at companies well past the idea stage. GSF Accelerator offers seed investment plus mentorship once a team and product exist. Gold House Ventures Accelerator does not publish an investment figure but runs a 14-week accelerator with 1:1 advising, which is worth it for the network rather than the cheque.
Here is the actual decision: if you have no co-founder and no product, Entrepreneur First is the only programme in this list built for that exact state, and it pays you to find a team before it asks anything of you. Every other name here assumes the team problem is already solved and starts charging equity, or offering credits, from day one. Solve the team problem first. Pick the cheque second.