Incubator Week
5 days. All expenses paid. $100k in funding if we back your pitch.
Cohort
v5
Runs
August 17–21
Funding
Up to $100k in grants
Covered
All expenses paid
Track record
Past cohorts: 38 participants, $2.5M+ in external funding raised.
Alumni include:
- Exona Lab: quantifying AI risk for the Lloyd's insurance market; Lloyd's Lab Cohort 16, paper with Bengio, Reuters feature
- 0Labs: AI purple teaming — adversarial agents that expose detection gaps before attackers do
- Telluvian: mechanistic interpretability for high-stakes AI; FR8 incubator
- Jacob Arbeid: quit AISI; raised from ACX/Manifund to build an automated cyber evals lab (stealth)
- Shay Yahal: enterprise AI safety (stealth); paying customers, Redwood Research partnership
- Cecilia Tilli: raised $480k from Coefficient Giving after pitching on the Friday of Incubator Week; building an organisation working on desirable propensities and character traits for safe deployment in multi-agent settings
- Alex Csaky: offered an Entrepreneur in Residence role at Forethought after Incubator Week; now growing the field around AI for epistemics and coordination technology
- safely.bio: runs know-your-customer checks on researchers placing synthetic DNA orders, records the evidence, and returns a clear recommendation so labs can distinguish legitimate researchers from bad actors before shipping
Plus career transition grants and placements at Andon Labs, ASET, and BlueDot.
The week
- Monday
Threat models
Develop threat models and identify the top experts in your problem space.
- Tue – Wed
Build interventions
Build and test interventions, call experts, and pressure-test your assumptions with the cohort.
- Thursday
Pitch prep
Sharpen the story and create your pitch.
- Friday
Pitch for funding
Pitch to us. If we back your pitch, we will fund your immediate needs on the spot and—if you make good progress—give you up to $100k in grant funding within two weeks.
About you
- Technically serious
- Working in or adjacent to AI safety, biosecurity, cyber, or other catastrophic-risk fields
- Ready to leave whatever you're doing now to build
- You don't need a polished idea - we will help you find one here
Know someone who should be there? Refer them here, and we'll send you $2,000 for each person accepted after your referral.
About BlueDot
BlueDot Impact is a nonprofit building the workforce and organisations needed to safely navigate AGI. We've raised over $35M and trained over 8,000 people since 2022.
For questions, reach out to joshua@bluedot.org.