entrepreneur-first
(8)
Srinivas Sarkar
Srinivas Sarkar is the co-founder and CEO of Coupl, a Y Combinator-backed neobank built for couples in India. After a stint as a management consultant at EY and a Founder in Residence run at Entrepreneur First, he set out to fix a gap he kept noticing: banking products for couples had not kept pace with how couples actually live. Coupl offers a zero-balance digital joint account that opens in under a minute and serves married, unmarried, and LGBTQ+ partners alike. The company has grown to 80,000+ couples and 300+ crore in transactions without paid advertising. Sarkar is a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honoree, an Entrepreneur 35 Under 35 listee, a BITS Pilani alumnus, and a three-time TEDx speaker.
Mriganka Pattnaik
Mriganka Pattnaik is the co-founder and CEO of Merkle Science, a blockchain transaction monitoring and forensics company he started in 2018 after seeing, from inside crypto exchange Luno, how badly banks and regulators wanted a way to track illicit crypto flows. Under his lead, Merkle Science has raised over $24 million in Series A funding from investors including Kraken Ventures, Digital Currency Group, BECO Capital, and Susquehanna's Darrow Holdings, and now sells its 'Know Your Transaction' tools to VASPs, financial institutions, and law enforcement.
Maria Szandrach
Maria Szandrach is the co-founder and CEO of Mentalyc, a San Francisco clinical-intelligence platform that turns recorded therapy sessions into insurance-ready notes, treatment plans, and progress insights for psychotherapists. A McKinsey strategy alum with an MSc from London Business School, she has co-founded three startups across the mental health and insurance worlds. She built Mentalyc with engineer Georgi Urumov during the COVID pandemic after the two met through Entrepreneur First, later going through Berkeley SkyDeck. Maria has become a recognizable voice on what AI should and should not do inside the therapy room, arguing for slow, careful building in a field where over-promising is dangerous.
Matthew Wilson
Matthew Wilson is the co-founder and CEO of Jack & Jill, a London-based startup building two conversational AI recruiters - Jack for job seekers and Jill for employers - to replace the resume-and-keyword model of hiring. An Oxford-trained theoretical physicist turned serial founder, he previously co-founded Veratrak and scaled the global-employment company Omnipresent to a roughly $600M valuation in three years before its acquisition by Deel. In October 2025, six months after starting Jack & Jill, he raised a $20M seed round led by Creandum with backing from over 75 angels including Nico Rosberg.
Neel Popat
Neel Popat is the CEO and co-founder of Popcorn, a software-first 'next-gen telco' that sells one global eSIM phone plan with unlimited talk, text, and data across 180+ countries and no roaming fees. A British-Indian former finance professional turned serial founder, he coded a viral message board at 13, studied mathematics at LSE, spent a decade inside investment funds, then built the crypto-investing app Donut through Entrepreneur First. When Donut's custody partner Genesis went bankrupt, Popat fought through the wind-down and returned 100% of user funds before channeling the lessons into Popcorn.
Nelson Jones
Nelson Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Kular, a London-based AI lead generation platform that only charges customers when it delivers actual sales leads. An Oxford law graduate who started building businesses before he finished his degree, Nelson moved from legal-sector sales at Luminance into Entrepreneur First, where he met co-founder Saaras Mehan in the LD16 cohort. The pair launched in 2021, went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, and pivoted from an AI business-development tool for law firms into Kular, which today generates leads for over 1,000 companies via email, LinkedIn, and AI voice notes. Kular's signature bet is radical alignment: pay only for results.
Telescope
Telescope is an AI-driven lead generation and outreach platform that lets B2B sales teams describe their ideal customer in plain English and instantly surface matching companies and people from a database of 900M+ verified profiles and 50M+ companies. It then automates personalized outreach across email and LinkedIn, warms up mailboxes for deliverability, and consolidates replies into a single inbox - replacing a stack of separate prospecting tools. Founded in 2021 by Dr. Reza Javan and backed by Sequoia Capital and Entrepreneur First, the London-based company says it is used by 20,000+ companies.
Reza Javan
Reza Javan is the CEO and co-founder of Telescope, a London-based AI prospecting platform that automates B2B outbound across email and LinkedIn. Before he sold software to salespeople, he was Dr. Reza Rezaei Javan, an Oxford DPhil microbiologist who sequenced thousands of pneumococcal genomes and discovered new families of antimicrobial peptides. He swapped the lab bench for a startup at Entrepreneur First's LD17 cohort, where Telescope was born in 2021. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Soma Capital and Entrepreneur First.