Apply to Keel 3.0

Keel is the NYC accelerator. We believe that young people consistently build extraordinary companies, are inadequately served by today’s accelerator market, and have no home east of San Francisco. Here’s the problem as we see it, Keel’s bet, and the world we’re building toward:

The Talent Pool

Young people consistently build extraordinary companies.

Each decade this century, many of the most valuable companies were built by founders in their teens and twenties — Facebook, Airbnb, Spotify, Dropbox, and Reddit in the 2000s, Stripe, Snap, Figma, Canva, Instacart, DoorDash, and Coinbase in the 2010s, and Cursor, Scale, Cognition, Mercor, and Etched in the 2020s so far, amongst many more.

And in the most competitive startup ecosystems, this pattern persists. A disproportionate share of top-performing companies in accelerators like YC are founded by individuals under the age of 25. The reason for this is structural: young founders are native to new technological paradigms, operate with fewer constraints, and are more willing to pursue the non-consensus visions they have for the world.

The Problem

But the accelerator market today is not serving the top 0.1% of this talent pool.

We know young founders want to build in communities of like-minded peers. These communities often come in the form of incubators and accelerators. Most of the companies stated above were in at least one. But top young founders today have to choose between programs that take a tenth of their company at pre-seed, are hybrid-at-best in format, and have bloated cohorts of hundreds of companies. While these machines may have made for great funds over the last decade, they’ve built a product that commoditizes the founder, indexing young technical talent instead of curating it.

And importantly, all the elite programs that do exist are siloed in SF. There are few elite programs east of San Francisco, and there are even fewer in NYC, where contemporary, high-filter founder spaces independent from VCs practically don’t exist. And this is important, because NYC is now unequivocally the second largest and second most valuable tech ecosystem in the world, and home to where over 25% of the top 0.1% of founders will choose to build over the next decade.

The Cohort

Keel is building the NYC accelerator. We back a small cohort of elite founders from campuses across the Northeast, and run a 12-week, 12-team, 24/7 in-person program at our NYC campus. Our terms look more like bringing on a founding advisor than raising a round, and our support feels like adding full-time operators, not just another sexy logo on your cap table.

At Keel, we help you 1) go to market faster, 2) add ARR every week, 3) hire great engineers, and 4) raise larger rounds at higher valuations. To accomplish this, Keel’s program consists of:

And we’re a growing community: Alums include F-ADA, DonorAtlas, Sotira, Altitude, Verustruct, Morph, and many others. Over the next year, we will have accelerated nearly 50 founding teams in NYC.

The Opportunity

We may be entering one of the fastest periods of technological growth in history, with the next 5 years poised to reshape the pace and scale of startups. AI is projected to contribute $15 trillion to the global economy by 2030. The race toward AGI, and the automation of knowledge work, will likely produce a historic number of unicorn-scale outcomes over the next decade — potentially exceeding the pace of the last two decades combined.

And the founders most likely to build these organizations are young, highly technical, world-class operators who are native to this new technology and have an unwavering opinion about the way the world will look. They are humanity’s World-Builders. Maybe they’ll be wrong, and in that case they’ll fail. But if they’re right, they’ll build brand new worlds by building brand new kinds of companies.

If you’re currently worldbuilding, worldbuild with us. Apply to Keel Cohort 3.0 by April 26th.