Canopy

Canopy is Founders, Inc.'s flagship cohort program, running five weeks at the firm's Fort Mason campus in San Francisco and, starting with its inaugural Spring 2026 cohort, online.¹ The program accepts teams across three tracks — software, hardware, and media — and provides weekly sessions with billion-dollar-plus founders, up to $50,000 in partner credits for all participants, and funding of up to $250,000 for top teams at 4–7% equity.⁶⁴ The Spring 2026 cohort drew over 6,500 applications and ultimately admitted 1,000 teams (200 in-person, 800 online), running from April 15 to May 22 and ending with a showcase at Fort Mason to which top online participants are flown.¹⁶²¹

Predecessor programs

Canopy did not appear out of nowhere. It is the fourth iteration of Founders, Inc.'s cohort programming, each version refining what the prior one taught the team about running structured sprints at scale.

Ship It (February–March 2025)

The first formal program was Ship It, a four-week sprint from February 24 to March 21, 2025, at Fort Mason.⁹ Founders, Inc. selected roughly 60 teams — builders who flew in from around the world — to work on their startups on-site for a month.⁸ The program offered access to the Fort Mason lab (where over 100 founders and builders already worked), mentorship from the f.inc leadership team, weekly progress checkpoints, and a Demo Day with $1 million earmarked for investment in standout companies.⁹ Among the participating companies were RESA AI (AI receptionist for sales calls), Vaidya Surgical (autonomous surgical robots for tumor resection), Kairos (proactive AI agents), Cheforge (AI-powered cooking robots), Nexstera Tech (disaster prevention infrastructure), and Bluvo (unified API for crypto exchanges).⁸

Off Season (Summer 2025)

The next program, Off Season, ran for six weeks during the summer of 2025 and targeted a different demographic: college students, recent graduates, and dropouts.¹¹¹⁰ Founders, Inc. selected 48 teams to work on-site at Fort Mason.¹² Ideas ranged from autonomous vineyard-inspection robots (Budbreak) to a flying home robot (Nila) to a multiplayer music-production platform (SyncTown) to an AI orthodontist (Orthomind).¹² The program ended with a demo day; outcomes included teams receiving funding, finding co-founders, closing angel checks, and getting into accelerators like Y Combinator and Speedrun.¹¹ Off Season II is scheduled for the summer of 2026, with top teams eligible for up to $250,000 in funding and $500,000 in credits.¹¹

Artifact (January–February 2026)

Artifact ran from January 12 to February 13, 2026 — five weeks, in person at Fort Mason, with 100 spots available.¹³¹⁴ Artifact moved f.inc's programming from the four-week format to five weeks and required applicants to have a direction they could build on immediately, though a polished idea was not required.¹³ Applications closed December 31, 2025, with early decisions starting December 20 and final decisions going out January 6.¹³ Historically, Founders, Inc. invested in roughly the top 10% of program teams at $100,000–$250,000 per check.¹³ The program was described as "intense" — participants were expected to make real space in their schedules for the full five weeks.¹³

Connection to buildspace

The program lineage runs further back than Ship It. Between 2023 and 2024, buildspace — the builder community founded by Farza Majeed — ran two longer-form in-person residencies called SF1 and SF2 from the same Fort Mason building that Founders, Inc. now occupies.¹⁹ Each residency brought roughly 35 builders on-site for 77-day cohorts.¹⁹ When buildspace shut down on August 24, 2024, four of its team members — Stavan Patel, Adrianna Lakatos, Aiden Blumenstein, and Dante Lentini — joined Founders, Inc. directly.¹⁹ Patel, who became f.inc's Creative Director, was the one who publicly announced Canopy on March 27, 2026.⁶ The physical campus expanded into the space buildspace had vacated, and the cohort format — in-person builders working side by side on individual projects with structured weekly checkpoints and a culminating showcase — is a direct descendant of the SF1/SF2 model and buildspace's broader Nights & Weekends six-week cadence.¹⁹¹

The Canopy format

Who applies

Canopy is open to founders building in three domains: software (agents, apps, tools, platforms), hardware (robots, drones, wearables, machines), and media (channels, streams, studios, creator-led brands).¹ Founders, Inc. does not require a pitch deck or a formal pitch at any stage; instead, applicants fill out a short application (five to six questions) and are evaluated on traits the firm has listed publicly: prolific building history, technical curiosity, founder-market fit, a unique point of view, ambition, and a generous attitude.⁴ The firm states that ideal applicants have "previously built some cool projects & got some traction," have "a clear plan for what you'll do with the capital," and have "made moves to build motion (e.g. gone viral, have a crazy waitlist, have paying customers, etc.)."⁴

For the Spring 2026 cohort, applications closed April 4, with late applications accepted until April 10.³¹ Accepted in-person participants confirmed their spots by April 13; online participants by April 14.²⁰ The program received over 6,500 applications; at kickoff on April 15, Founders, Inc. founder Furqan Rydhan announced 1,000 teams had been admitted — 200 in San Francisco and 800 online — giving the inaugural cohort an acceptance rate near 15%.¹⁶²

Structure

Canopy runs for five weeks.¹ In-person participants work from the Fort Mason campus — a facility listed at 42,000 square feet by Fort Mason Center and described as 45,000 square feet after a 2x expansion by Thieblot — that includes a hardware lab with CNC machines, 3D printers, soldering stations, and Raspberry Pis; a media studio with cameras, microphones, and lighting; open workspaces for 80 founders; a gym; and a gaming room.⁵¹⁰²¹ Online participants join from anywhere in the world — the Spring 2026 cohort was the first time Founders, Inc. opened a program beyond in-person attendance.¹⁶

The weekly rhythm includes sessions from founders who have built companies valued at $1 billion or more, office hours with the f.inc team, and Ship-it sessions every Friday, where participants demo what they built that week.⁶⁵ In-person founders receive daily lunches and access to the full campus amenities.⁵

The program ends with a showcase.¹ For the Spring 2026 cohort, top online teams were to be flown out to the Fort Mason campus for the closing event.¹⁶ Top teams across both tracks are eligible for up to $250,000 in funding and $500,000 in partner credits.¹

Investment terms

Founders, Inc. writes first checks of $100,000 to $250,000 for 4–7% equity.⁴¹⁵ The firm positions itself as "the first believers in bold ideas" and describes its equity ask as minimal relative to the resources provided.⁴ For the Spring 2026 Canopy cohort, Founders, Inc. stated it was looking to invest $3,000,000 in the 60 days surrounding the program.⁷ All participants receive $50,000 in credits; top teams receive up to $500,000 in credits on top of investment.⁶¹

Teams that receive a check get permanent access to the Fort Mason lab; founders who do not receive immediate investment but show progress often get extended campus access.⁴¹³ Many f.inc founders later join other accelerators like Y Combinator and return to Fort Mason afterward — the firm explicitly describes itself as a long-term home rather than a time-bound program.⁴

The annual program calendar

As of early 2026, Hubert Thieblot outlined four cohort programs per year plus a rolling residency track.¹⁰ The named programs are:

• Artifact — runs at the beginning of the year (January), five weeks in person.¹³
• Canopy — spring (April–May), five weeks in person and online.¹
• Off Season — summer, six weeks, aimed at students, recent graduates, and dropouts.¹⁰¹¹
• Blueprint — fall, six weeks, exclusively for hardware and physical-AI teams, with 100 founders in one shared lab.¹⁰

Outside the scheduled cohorts, Founders, Inc. runs Wild Card — a rolling sprint residency where founders are invited to campus every two weeks.¹⁰ Applicants who are not ready for a check are encouraged to join one of the named programs, which Founders, Inc. describes as designed to get builders "from -1 to 0."⁴

Media coverage

In August 2025 the New York Times featured Founders, Inc. in "The 20-Somethings Are Swarming San Francisco's A.I. Boom," describing f.inc's 42,000-square-foot Fort Mason space and profiling portfolio founders including Hunter Nguyen of Stratus AI.¹⁸ In September 2025 the Wall Street Journal published "AI Startup Founders Tout a Winning Formula — No Booze, No Sleep," featuring f.inc resident Haseab Ullah and describing the campus's daily routine.¹⁷ By March 2026, Thieblot reported 55 startups funded, the portfolio's first unicorn, a 2x campus expansion, a 4x increase in deployed capital, and over 1,000 founders brought to San Francisco through f.inc's programs.¹⁰