Pioneer has now funded 130+ companies from 50+ countries. Those companies have gone on to raise over $100M from a16z, Sequoia, Khosla, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, and many others.

Some of the more recent announcements include:

If you haven’t heard of Pioneer, here’s the quick gist: we are a startup accelerator born online. Instead of endless Zoom and gloom, Pioneer is kind of like a stock market for pre-seed companies. Anyone can sign up with their product. Then they get a weekly score that fluctuates based on progress. Talk to more users, the score goes up. Write more code, score goes up. Read Reddit, the score goes down. You get the idea. We have all the trimmings of a traditional accelerator too: selected founders become Pioneers who join our network, get mentorship, advice, etc. But that’s all icing on the cake; our desire is to build a web-native startup scene.

Starting today, we’re giving every new Pioneer a choice: 1% of your company to become a Pioneer (our prior terms), or 2% to become a Pioneer and receive an additional $20k in funding.

Importantly, we’re doing this without changing our selection criteria. We’re still selecting Pioneers who are just months into their projects, often before they’ve even launched or acquired their first users, and almost always before they’ve raised a single dollar. Our goal is to help enable founders all around the world take their companies, and themselves, a bit more seriously. We hope more variety and choice will help make Pioneer attractive for all types of startups.

Once admitted, companies join our hybrid program built for the 2021 reality: 2 months virtually, and 1 month in Silicon Valley. In addition, founders also join our community (for life), including peers building companies all over the world, AMAs with successful founders, fundraising support, and much more.

To learn more about what it’s like, check out our website or read about the announcement in Forbes.

And, as an aside, you might also enjoy our library of startup content: https://pioneer.app/codex.

P.S. If Silicon Valley is inaccessible due to Covid, we will re-create the IRL period in another startup hub, such as London. We will try our damnedest to make Silicon Valley work.