Alex Mojtahedi and the founders outside the velvet rope

Twenty thousand dollars can sound like a beginning. For Alex Mojtahedi, it nearly meant an ending. In 2023, Peachscore had that much left in the bank and no revenue, he recalls. The company he had built to help other founders was having trouble keeping itself alive. Some investors suggested closing it. An acquisition offered another way out. He and the remaining team chose to keep going.

By December 2025, he reported monthly recurring revenue above $60,000. Cash remaining and recurring revenue measure different things, but together they mark the distance between two chapters of the same business. The former investor was getting another education in being a founder. Tuition, in this case, was payable in uncertainty.

The first inventory came with a passport attached

Long before Peachscore, there were mobile phone covers. Mojtahedi dates his first independent work to 1999, when he was a 17-year-old student in Dubai. He had lent his savings to a friend; two weeks later, neither the friend nor the money had reappeared. His tuition and dormitory were paid, but his available cash amounted to $500 tucked under a pillow.

He approached a phone shop. The owner agreed to give him stock to resell to smaller shops, on one memorable condition: Mojtahedi would leave his passport as security. Each day he took out inventory, sold what he could, returned to settle the bill, and kept the difference. An informal distribution business had arrived with an unusually personal collateral requirement.

That early episode puts a physical shape around his later interest in entrepreneurship. Before there were dashboards, there was merchandise to move and somebody waiting to be paid. The customer’s decision was immediate. A better story about the future would not settle that evening’s account.

A forecast still needs somebody willing to change

In 2013, Mojtahedi started Tilofy with fellow co-founder Ali Khoshgozaran. He served as its chief technology officer. The company worked on identifying emerging trends before they reached the mainstream, turning data into information businesses could use when deciding what to build and where to go. Plug and Play was among its investors.

His technical background includes a master’s degree in computer science. The appeal of forecasting is easy to see in his subsequent work: a young business makes consequential decisions while knowing relatively little. Better information promises to make those decisions less like throwing darts with the lights off.

He has also described the trouble that begins when people resist what the information suggests. In an account of a previous partnership, he recalled a disagreement over moving a product from consumer customers to businesses. The delay cost several months and substantial money before the original approach was abandoned. His lesson was to discuss the possibility of a pivot before entering a partnership. A shared enthusiasm for the first idea leaves quite a lot of the actual job undiscussed.

From choosing a cohort to questioning its boundaries

Mojtahedi joined Plug and Play in 2017. He led its media and advertising accelerator work, bringing startups into contact with established companies and investors. This placed him inside the machinery that entrepreneurs spend so much effort trying to reach: the introductions, the program, the room where somebody understands the business without needing the entire industry explained first.

He was already writing about that machinery in 2018. His argument was that the quality of a startup’s surrounding network mattered alongside the money it raised. Different funding routes came with different kinds of help. A cheque could extend a company’s life without supplying the customer introduction, experienced adviser, or commercial relationship needed to use that time well.

It is an argument with an operator’s preoccupations. Funding is easy to count. The usefulness of the people around a founder is harder to put into a neat announcement. Mojtahedi kept returning to that less photogenic part of the transaction.

The support business needed support

Peachscore was founded in 2021. Its premise was to extend education, business intelligence, mentorship, and connections to founders who could not get those resources through conventional accelerator places. Plug and Play’s founders became shareholders. Mojtahedi had carried relationships from his investing years into a company that would try to widen access to such relationships.

The difficult period that followed matters because it tested the premise in its founder’s own working life. An accelerator sells preparation for a business journey full of imperfect information. Running one provides ample opportunity to discover whether the preparation survives contact with events.

Mojtahedi’s later advice includes getting a product to customers earlier, listening closely, and controlling spending. Those are modest verbs for a field fond of enormous nouns. Build. Ask. Sell. Adjust. They give a founder something to do on a Tuesday, when the grand vision has not yet paid an invoice.

Twelve weeks, without a relocation

The partnership with Dealum, announced in November 2024, made the intended shape of the business clear. The accelerator was virtual and equity-free, with a structured twelve-week curriculum, mentorship, market intelligence, a global demo day, and continuing membership in the surrounding network.

For Mojtahedi, the combination mattered. Automation could process information and provide feedback; people could help a founder interpret it. In announcing the collaboration, he spoke of “combining technology with human expertise.” There is a useful restraint in that formulation. The software has work to do. So does the person on the other end of the conversation.

The virtual format also changes the geography of participation. A founder can use the program without making a temporary move to its home city. That is part of Mojtahedi’s answer to the access problem: move more of the support to where founders already are, then give them opportunities to meet people beyond their immediate circle.

The algorithm leaves room for a conversation

One of Mojtahedi’s practical networking stories starts in a queue at an event. He struck up a conversation with a woman who turned out to be a technology reporter. Months later, she covered his company’s product and introduced investors; one introduction helped lead to a seed investment. The business consequence arrived well after the conversation.

Peachscore’s Founder’s Connect sessions give that kind of encounter a regular appointment. The format described in November 2024 was a monthly two-hour gathering, with founders from different countries introducing themselves in one-minute pitches. Customer acquisition, operations, and other shared problems could become subjects for peers to work through together.

In October 2025, Mojtahedi was invited to judge and host a round of TCVN’s Investor Dating Game during LA Tech Week. Three founders would face ten minutes of questions; an investor would select one for a further one-to-one conversation. The name had a wink, but the format had a serious purpose: give an entrepreneur some attention before deciding whether to continue.

His own public invitations occasionally make the same point with less ceremony. Before a startup gathering, he joked about “awkward LinkedIn connections” waving at each other across the crowd. It is a small, recognizable absurdity: hundreds of people arrive to make connections, then discover how convenient it is to stand beside somebody they already know.

“Your business requires your attention and effort here and now.”

Alex Mojtahedi, on keeping a founder’s focus in the present

Making the early chapters visible

By 2026, Mojtahedi’s work had expanded into the question of how founders become visible before a funding announcement supplies them with a headline. Peachscore Media launched in February, giving enrolled startups a place to publish company stories, product news, partnerships, and milestones inside its network.

It fits his longstanding concern with the environment around a company. A founder may have progress to report without having a publicist to report it. Providing a place to explain that progress adds another form of participation to an accelerator built around education and evaluation.

In August, Peachscore announced a partnership with Keiretsu Forum Northwest & Rockies and its affiliated Ecosystem Venture Group. The collaboration set out to connect startup development with investor readiness and potential funding through joint programs, integrations, and events. At that point, Peachscore reported supporting more than 1,900 startups across over 105 countries.

Later that month came Evolution Intelligence, a report intended to reconstruct a company’s changes using historical versions of its website. Product additions, altered messaging, and pivots become part of a longer record. Tilofy’s interest in detecting patterns has an echo here. Mojtahedi is still working on the relationship between information and judgment, this time with the founder’s own history among the inputs.

The present tense of ambition

In a 2023 essay about entrepreneurial time, Mojtahedi urged founders to learn from the past while attending to immediate work and the near future. His examples were ordinary responsibilities: a customer problem, a product improvement, a marketing decision. The distant vision should help a founder act, rather than occupy all the space where action belongs.

The idea gives his career a useful rhythm. There is the teenager settling up with a shop owner, the technical founder trying to make data useful, the accelerator leader arranging introductions, and the chief executive building a wider program while keeping a company afloat. Each job brings its own version of the same question: what information, relationship, or decision would help someone move forward today?

Peachscore’s stated mission reaches toward a million founders by 2030. That is an aspiration, with a great deal of work between the number and its realization. The everyday mechanisms are smaller: a lesson watched, a business reviewed, a conversation started, a company introduced when it is ready.

Mojtahedi’s story is most interesting at that scale. He has spent years asking how more people can reach the support around entrepreneurship. The passport, the phone covers, and the nearly empty company account keep the question grounded. Access has consequences you can count at the end of a day. Sometimes it begins with somebody agreeing to let you try.