If you are building outside the US and keep seeing the same two names come up, SOSV / Orbit Startups and The 500 Fellowship, there is a reason. Both write a $150,000 cheque. Both are explicitly global in remit. Past that, they are built on opposite assumptions about how a founder outside the US should move through a cohort, and the wrong pick costs you a quarter you cannot get back.
Same cheque, different clock
The 500 Fellowship runs on a hard date: Batch 37 closes October 16, 2026. That deadline is the whole philosophy in one line. You apply against a cohort, you get judged against everyone else who applied for that slot, and the programme is built around a group that starts and ends together.
SOSV / Orbit Startups states no fixed deadline on its programme page. Its $150,000 comes structured as a SAFE, and entry is not pinned to a single intake window the way a batch programme is. For a founder still closing a product gap, or waiting on a local regulatory approval that has nothing to do with Silicon Valley's calendar, that absence of a deadline is the actual product.
Breadth versus a disclosed cap table
Neither SOSV / Orbit Startups nor The 500 Fellowship states an equity percentage in the figures published on their own pages, just the cheque size. Compare that to programmes further down the same catalogue that tell you exactly what you are giving up before you apply:
- gener8tor Investment Accelerator: $100,000 for 7.5% equity, rolling applications, no batch clock.
- Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator: $150K on a 6% Post-Money SAFE, with W'27 and S'27 cohorts both open.
- Alchemist Accelerator: a $25,000 stipend for roughly 5% equity, and that percentage is stated as negotiable.
- Conector Startup Accelerator: 4 to 7% equity for the programme plus services, with no cash cheque attached at all.
If you need to model your cap table before you fly anywhere, the equity-disclosed programmes let you do that math today. The 500 Fellowship and SOSV / Orbit Startups ask you to apply first and negotiate the number after.
Where the money actually requires you to sit
Y Combinator is the clearest case of a location mandate in this catalogue: $500,000 per company, tied to the Winter 2027 batch, running January to March, physically in San Francisco. If your customers are in Lagos, Jakarta or Warsaw, ten weeks of mandatory Bay Area presence is a cost, not a perk, unless you are deliberately building US distribution alongside the product.
EWOR Fellowship sits at the other end: its site describes the model as virtual-first, and the cheque itself is staged by where your company actually is, up to EUR 300k at Ideation stage and up to EUR 500k once you can show Traction. Neither of our two leads, The 500 Fellowship or SOSV / Orbit Startups, states a hard residency requirement in the figures on their pages, which is itself worth noting against Y Combinator's explicit one.
What happens after the cheque clears
EWOR's two tiers, EUR 300k then EUR 500k, are effectively a built-in follow-on: the second number is not a separate fund, it is what you unlock by proving Traction. Katapult Accelerator runs the same logic across a wider band, €150,000 to €500,000, scaled to where the company is when it applies. PearX goes further still, $500K to $2M, with cohorts running year round and two formal intakes a year, which tells you the cheque size is doing the work of a later-stage round, not a seed top-up.
The 500 Fellowship's $150,000 and SOSV / Orbit Startups' $150,000 SAFE do not come with a stated follow-on tranche in the figures published on their own pages. Treat any additional capital from either as a separate conversation you have to win again, not a guaranteed second cheque.
Which one actually fits a non-US market
Take the SOSV / Orbit Startups route if your biggest constraint is timing: no fixed deadline means you apply when the product is ready, not when a batch opens. Take The 500 Fellowship if you want the forcing function of a real date, Batch 37 closes October 16, 2026, and you want to be judged inside a defined global cohort rather than against an open-ended pool.
What you should not do is default to Y Combinator because the cheque is biggest, $500,000 per company, if your market has nothing to do with the United States. That cheque comes with three months in San Francisco attached, and three months of founder time spent on US-specific distribution is three months not spent on the market you actually sell into.
If your company is closer to seed-stage and India-adjacent, check GSF Accelerator directly, its listed terms are seed investment plus mentorship with no public cash figure and no confirmed current dates, which means the only reliable number is whatever they tell you when you apply. And if your plan was ever to use a US-only regional cheque like the Michigan Business Accelerator Fund's $7,000 to $15,000 as a stand-in for a global programme, don't. It is sized and scoped for companies already operating in Michigan, not as a bridge for a team based outside the US.