Best Deal in the World
Soma Capital S24 Fellowship

Apply Now

Apply to Receive 100k Uncapped

There have been 11 $100b+ businesses started in the US since 1990. There will undoubtedly be more over the next decades ahead - our mission is to partner with all of them. We believe that the best generational builders bring the following core traits:

  • Ruthless efficiency
  • Maniacal sense of urgency
  • 10x product differentiation
  • Customer obsessed
  • Technically brilliant
  • Fearless, relentless, high pain threshold
  • Learning machine - voracious intellectual curiosity
  • See the future - predict huge wave of a platform shift

If this is you, we want to support the mission!

Program Overview & Logistics

Our Pitch:
  • Best deal in the world: $100k uncapped, no board seats, no ownership targets, minimized dilution
  • We can help you swiftly incorporate and get set up
  • We’ll get you all your first customers. We have +700 portfolio co’s to start introducing you to, and unmatched Fortune 500 company connections (see below)
  • We’ll help you hire with unmatched talent network access. We have “scouts” on all the top undergrad campuses to help you cherry pick top talent
  • We can help put future rounds together as needed - we’ll bring you optionality, as we’re backed by key partners from places like Sequoia, NEA, Insight, Iconiq, IVP, DST, Tiger, Greenoaks, B Cap etc
How to Apply:

Any interested teams should fill out this link here which includes questions on your company, progress, founding team, and a short video pitch! Finalists will be interviewed and selected based on holistic review of interactions and materials

Timeline:

Applications Open: Rolling Acceptances Until Start Date
Decisions: All teams will be notified by April 26th
Programming: Join Sessions from May 6th - June 15
Demo Day: TBC following programming completion

How Are Teams Chosen?

We’re looking for technical, brilliant “entrepreneurs”: you’ve been building stuff your whole life, you have a unique ability to “see the matrix” where the world is heading, and you have ideas on major pain points and you’re fired up to solve them by building software. You have an ability to sell and articulate a crystal clear vision and inspire others to “organize” around you and you’re not hungry, but “starving” to relentlessly create and make the biggest dent in the universe imaginable.You’re fearless, confident, know how to balance taking feedback with being unshakeable in unique “outlier” views, you have strong and inspiring technical skills, a competitive “will to win” and you dream massive - because dreams are future realities.

Funding & Programming

Funding

If accepted, teams have the opportunity to receive $100k in funding from Soma Capital at the most founder-friendly terms possible. Soma Cap has the firepower to keep supporting you across the full path to IPO and the early stages are just the beginning for us

Programming:

The program consists of sessions over the course of a few weeks to get started with the building journey and scale enduring companies. The Soma team will become your best allies to establish company foundations and make a huge dent in the universe with a product that touches billions leveraging our years of experience building and working with the top companies of our generation. The program also culminates in a demo day where founders get to showcase their products in front of potential customers, investors and the community. Programming activities are included but not limited to:

  • Fireside chats with top founders in the Soma network
  • Dedicated programming on key areas top of mind for high growth companies - including fundraising, TAM sizing, financial modeling, pitching, etc.
  • Office Hours with the Soma team 2x a week
  • Access to the Soma network and library of resources - intros, discounts, customers, etc.
  • In-person events across large cities in the US to connect with key LPs, founders, and the Soma team
  • Culmination in Demo Day

We want to help you be lean and efficient

What no “program” or VC will ever tell you

Many of the most influential companies in human history raised 0 VC:

Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Sam Walton, Henry Ford, Estee Lauder, Bernard Arnault, Emancio Ortega, James Dyson, etc.

Technologists like Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, all raised $0 VC (small friends and family early rounds). Google and Apple raised very little (~20m), Amazon raised less than $10m. These are multi hundred billion to trillion dollar companies! And even today Midjourney (one of the top grossing Gen AI startups) raised $0 VC.

The VC job is to sell money, and convince LPs (their limited partner investors) that startups need a lot of capital so they can keep raising huge funds and take fat fees. VCs’ job is to also convince founders to take as much capital as possible - LPs force them to have “ownership targets” or they won’t invest, and VCs need to show they’re able to take big chunks of companies, take board seats, and exert lots of unique influence over direction and execution.

The next generational founders in the next decades ahead will think from first principles, they will see through this, and they will arise from constrained circumstances which breeds discipline, resourcefulness, creativity, customer obsessions, and 10x differentiation. They will be insanely efficient, capital efficient, and dilution sensitive.

Our goal is to give you the best deal in the world, $100k uncapped, minimize your dilution, help you protect your cap table, while then bringing completely unmatched second to none 0 to IPO connections and insights pouring fuel on the fire the entire trajectory. We will be your most uniquely connected, hardest hustling ally on the cap table, your “24/7 outsourced chief of staff,” and build lifelong partnerships and friendships. We believe in work-life harmony, and every detail of your life is a key component in your process to defining a category and building something massive and meaningful, hence there is no detail too small or large to send our way - give us your “impossible asks” and we will relentlessly execute for you.

Soma Value Adds

Read more on our Value Adds here
  • Customers: Soma Cap has invested in +700 startups across all sectors and geographies, many of which can be your first customers.
  • Strong VC alliances: We work very closely with top investors who have led rounds of Soma portfolio companies (tens of billions!). Some are also investors in Soma, aka our alliances are strong!
  • Key Unicorn Mentors: Soma Cap has invested early in over 21 unicorn breakout companies across all sectors and geographies - get mentorship from founders of legendary startups like Ramp, Deel, Ironclad, Razorpay, Cruise, Rappi, Kalshi, Coda, and many more.
  • Strong Soma Cap Friendships at YC: We have 16 years of close friendships with YC founders and partners helping companies in the ecosystem, we can help give you the “playbook” to optimize your shot of getting accepted if of interest. We have a high track record hit rate helping our Soma Fellows get accepted to YC and we can also help you sign up YC alumni startups as customers both inside and outside our portfolio.
  • World Class Soma Fellows Supporters: The first two cohorts of Soma fellows went on to raise funds from Tier 1 institutional investors, others went on to join Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 and Winter 2023 batches

Our Unfair Advantages

Aneel Ranadive has been in the Silicon Valley his whole life and saw day 1 as his dad Vivek Ranadive, a come from nothing immigrant from India, built Tibco (4.3b exit to Vista) which “digitized wall street in the 90’s” and powered 80% of Fortune 500 companies competing against Oracle. Vivek seeded and mentored Google, Yahoo, Salesforce, eBay, to Steve Jobs personally. Tibco even powered gov and city services, giving us close friendships with presidents of nations. Vivek has also gotten in to sports buying multiple teams, from the Golden State Warriors to the Sacramento Kings.

Here are second to none connections we’ve made to portfolio co’s.

Aneel Ranadive spent a lifetime learning from all these experiences seeing trillions in value creation starting from ground zero, then spent over a decade building startups and creating relationships day 1 among peer “millennial” co founders of startups like FB, Dropbox, Box, Twitch, Uber, Reddit, among others. 8 years ago upon starting Soma, we set out to combine a lifetime of all these learnings to go build the #1 seed fund in the world which we would have wanted ourselves as founders.

Our goal is to be your most uniquely connected, hardest hustling ally on the cap table from 0 to IPO and pour fuel on the fire along the entire trajectory.Soma Cap has now invested early in +20 unicorns like Deel, Rippling, Ramp, Ironclad, Lattice, Human Interest, Cruise, among others, totaling over +$100 billion combined value of all our founders. We have a portfolio of close to 1,000 brilliant founders across multiple sectors and geographies. We’re usually one of the first checks, and we accelerate our value adds along the entire path.
Our all time “unicorn” breakout founders say things like “Soma changed our life” (Ramp) and “Soma helped us get our first 100 customers” (Deel) see testimonials here