Review (August 2025)
Since 2009, the world’s fastest-growing startups have used the founder institute to raise funding, get into seed-accelerators, generate traction, and more.
4.42M
Estimated Revenue
566.78k
Website Visitors
3.2/5
Trustpilot Score
What do we know about Founder Institute?
Estimated Revenue (2020)
$4.42M
Total Employees
1700
Founded
2009
Industry
Professional Training Coaching
Location
Palo Alto, United States
About
Founder Institute: Since 2009, the world’s fastest-growing startups have used the Founder Institute to raise funding, get into seed-accelerators, generate traction, and more.
What is Founder Institute's Revenue?
Founder Institute's estimated revenue for 2024 is $4.42M.
What does Founder Institute do?
The Founder Institute is the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. We help you get to traction and funding with a support network of startup experts that are invested in your success, and through a structured business-building process that has helped our alumni raise over $800M. Leaders of the world's fastest-growing companies have used the Founder Institute to raise funding, get into seed-accelerators, generate traction, recruit a team, build a product, transition from employee to entrepreneur, and more. Based in Silicon Valley and with chapters across 180+ cities and 60+ countries, the Founder Institute's mission is to empower talented and motivated people to build impactful technology-enabled companies worldwide.
What are the monthly traffic metrics for Fi?
6/mo Traffic Growth
-10.00%
All Time Traffic Growth
Create Free Account
Monthly Hits
567k
Time on Site
3.3Mins
Pages per Visit
2.0
Bounce Rate
61%
How fast is Fi growing?
Fi has grown by 91.4% in the last 6 months according to SimilarWeb.
How do people interact with Fi?
Last month, Fi received 567k visitors who spent an average of 3.3 minutes on the website and visited 2.0 different pages per session. Overall, 61% of people bounce on the first visit.
How do people find Fi?
323.6k people (57%) visit Fi directly. 184.6k (33%) people search for them in Google. Whereas, 28.6k (5%) discover Fi through Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube. 19.8k (3%) visitors come from Fi's email newsletters. Finally, 209.3 (0.0%) people come from affiliates and or paid referrals.
Who uses Fi?
Fi's top market is the United States and they receive 100.3k (17.7%) people.Then the 2nd is Finland with 36.1k (6.4%).The 3rd is is Sri Lanka with 32.3k (5.7%).
Traffic Growth (last 6 months)
What are Fi's ads on Google?
Google Ads
Founder Institute - Best Startup Incubator
https://fi.co/
Pre-Seed Startup Accelerator Program. Start Your Own Business! Entrepreneur Programs. Amenities: Programs In Many Citites, Entrepreneur Ideas & Help, Growing Startups, Employee to Entrepreneur.
Keyword: pre revenue funding
Best Startup Incubator - Trusted By Entrepreneurs
https://fi.co/
Pre-Seed Startup Accelerator Program. Start Your Own Business! Entrepreneur Programs. Amenities: Programs In Many Citites, Entrepreneur Ideas & Help, Growing Startups, Employee to Entrepreneur.
Build A Startup | Trusted By Entrepreneurs
https://fi.co/
Build your business alongside top local startup experts invested in your success. Start Your Own Business. Entrepreneur Programs. Amenities: Programs In Many Citites, Entrepreneur Ideas & Help, Growing Startups, Employee to Entrepreneur.
Best Startup Incubator | Trusted By Entrepreneurs
https://fi.co/
Pre-Seed Startup Accelerator Program. Start Your Own Business! Entrepreneur Programs. Amenities: Programs In Many Citites, Entrepreneur Ideas & Help, Growing Startups, Employee to Entrepreneur.
Keyword: fund your idea
Build A Startup | Trusted By Entrepreneurs | fi.co
https://fi.co/
Build your business alongside top local startup experts invested in your success
What do Fi's customers say about them?
Review Score
3.2/5
Total Reviews
1
Info
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1 Star
100.0%
Read reviews that mention
Mentee
Do not get involved with the Founder Institute
Reviewed on 2020-01-24T02:58:15
A FI mentor, who is NOT an employee of the Founder Institute, has
access to ALL email addresses andpersonal details that the Founder Institute collects from people all over the world.
This means: not only access to names, company names and email addresses from co-mentors and FI participants all over the world, but also from people who only just once registered for an FI event or were declined to participate as founder or mentor.
This a huge data privacy violation. Not only in Europe, where data privacy rules are the most humane, but everywhere. Imagine you are not interested in FI, and just want to visit one of their events, or you didn’t pass its IQ/EQ test as candidate, or you were found too light-weight for a mentorship, then the hundreds of FI mentors can identify that happened, with a few clicks. Not only that: they can steal your email and use it for their own good/business and include it in their own mailing lists or sell it to third parties.
Why do you think I was able to send you an email today? Because until now, I have access to a mentor account. And becoming a mentor at FI is not that hard, believe me. Once logged in you only need to enter three random letters and the database of FI returns all the emails that contain these letters. In a couple of hours I was able to harvest 400.000 (!!) email addresses.
Do not get involved with the Founder Institute
The fact this database is already for a long time available to mentors, shows how careless and cold-hearted Founder Institute is as an organization is. It’s remarkable how hard it is to find information about their controversial 4% shareholder arrangement. And that is, as I can quote them, to ‘not make the competition aware of the gold’ they have in their hands with their business model. They deliberately do not want to be transparent about an essential part of their rules, despite most candidates having tons of questions about it.
What IS published about it, is only available in very legally written lines, that even are not understandable for local FI leaders. FI teaches you what every startup accelerator will teach you, that you have to listen to your (future) customers, but they themselves can not care less about it.
If you have been to one of their public events, you will most probably have seen that the FI presentation contains a picture of Elon Musk, who has been a student room mate of FI founder Adeo Ressi. Whereas Musk never tells his customers about having been a room mate of Ressi, Ressi on the other hand tells this each and every time. But fact is that Musk is not available as mentor for the Founder Institute, and looking to the way he wants to be treated in terms of data privacy, never wants to be either.
By the way, the online FI system that participants and mentors have to use is from incredible poor user interface quality. It is the exact opposite of the quality that Musk wants to provide with his products.
As a mentor
I asked myself as a mentor if I have ever given consent for being included in the database of FI, that people can find my email, and I know I haven’t. I have spoken to other mentors who also complained about being approachable via their email without their consent. FI doesn’t care. Does it even have something like system administration?
Additionally, FI expects from mentors to sign a mentor agreement if they want to be part of the mentor bonus pool, but does not give any explanation about its preconditions and content. In practice, it does not insist you to sign it before you have given a lecture, meaning that you as a mentor could have provided a lecture, without any legal base. Again, FI only cares about its own interest and maximizing its profit as much as possible.
What now?
Take action and demand that FI stops storing or at least sharing your information. And look around for other accelerators, there are tons of alternatives in the world that DO REALLY CARE about their customers. This is at least what I can advise you. I’m glad to at least be able to warn you. All the best!
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