Perspectives
The Era of the AI Researcher-Founder
AI Researchers Get a Blueprint for Building the Next Billion-Dollar Company
Michelle Delcambre
Bridging the gap
between learning and founding
Student Program
AI Fellows 2026
A fully immersive week-long deep dive into the world of startups.
Student Program
AI Fellows 2026
A fully immersive week-long deep dive into the world of startups.
Our university programs and partnerships strive to bring together academic and private-sector innovation to make a meaningful impact on the world.
Student Programs
AI Fellows
The next generation of founders
Next program:
Summer 2026 (admissions closed)
Each year, we invite a cohort of ambitious ML and computer engineering undergraduate students from around the country to a week-long program in San Francisco, aimed at helping them identify, hone, and refine a solution to an AI problem they’re excited about.
Students get full access to our team and investors during the program week, which culminates in a hackathon and non-dilutive cash prizes to kickstart their next phase of building.
VC Fellows
Learn venture by doing venture
Next Program: 2027
Registration Opening Soon.
Learn about the entrepreneurial process while cultivating a thriving network of builders on your campus through our VC Fellows program. Our team supports the community-building efforts of this select group of students at top technical universities, including events, sponsorships, and hackathons.
This program culminates in a weekend in San Francisco learning from our team about the VC model, investment theme development, and the founder identification process.
Scholars
Where frontier science meets venture scale
Next program:
Summer 2026 (admissions closed)
In partnership with Daniela Rus and MIT’s CSAIL lab, we select five promising artificial intelligence researchers each year to receive $200,000 for two years to pursue deep research on frontier topics.
The second year of research includes direct support from our team to explore models for translating the research into products that change the world.
"Programs like the Felicis Scholars initiative play an important role in fueling the AI research that drives both scientific discovery and practical innovation. We're grateful for the collaboration and the opportunities it's creating for our researchers." - Daniela Rus
Opportunities
Lab Sponsorships
We directly support the research of professors exploring our future relationship with machine intelligence.
Stanford Mayfield Fellows House
In partnership with the Stanford Mayfield Fellows program, we are sponsoring the 2026 cohort’s summer house.
SEAMS at Stanford University’s Center for Human Centered Intelligence
We’ve funded a group of Stanford labs researching a core thesis: self-improving systems can deliver orders-of-magnitude gains to expand human potential.
Stanford Scaling Intelligence Lab
We sponsor Stanford’s Scaling Intelligence Lab, which advances scalable and self-improving AI systems, and connect with researchers building at the frontier of foundation models and AGI.
Friends & Family (Stanford)
We back Friends & Family, a nonprofit student builder community for emerging Stanford founders.
Stanford Senior Project Sponsorship
We sponsored and judged Stanford’s 2026 Senior Project Showcase.
Get Involved
We work directly with select schools, professors, and founders when designing the Fellows program. If you want to contact us about the program, please reach out to Felicis Executive Partner Michelle Delcambre.
Michelle Delcambre
Perspectives
