Entrepreneur First's Alice Bentinck on finding pre-idea founders and running demo day for 20 AI companies
Oct 16, 2025 with Alice Bentinck
Key Points
- Entrepreneur First's October 2025 demo day showcased 20 AI companies targeting legacy industries, with half already crossing $100,000 in revenue despite incorporation less than three months prior.
- Faction automates purchase-order workflows for industrial distributors, while Cherto targets a $400 billion compliance bottleneck in fragrance and cosmetics, exemplifying EF's pattern of early-career founders solving entrenched operational problems.
- EF recruits pre-idea individuals and pairs them through a 48-hour hackathon rather than applications, operating as a talent agency across Europe, the US, and India to build companies from scratch.
Summary
Alice Bentinck, CEO and cofounder of Entrepreneur First (EF), held a demo day for 20 companies at the EF office, drawing 200 attendees including partners from Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Zetta, Susa, True Ventures, and Paceset. The keynote was delivered by Jack Clark, cofounder of Anthropic, whose opening remarks centred on existential risk in AI.
The defining theme of this October 2025 cohort is young, early-career founders applying AI to entrenched legacy industries. Two companies illustrate the pattern clearly.
- Faction is automating the purchase-order workflow for industrial distributors. Its CEO, Kanal, developed the idea after spending a summer manually processing orders for large distributors, and is building the company to eliminate that problem at scale.
- Cherto is positioning itself as Vanta for FMCG, automating regulatory compliance for fragrance and cosmetics companies. The compliance bottleneck it targets is estimated to hold back $400 billion worth of new product launches annually.
Half the demo day batch had crossed $100,000 in revenue, a notable threshold given that most companies were incorporated less than three months before pitching. Bentinck flags revenue stickiness as the metric investors are prioritising right now, pointing to the multi-year contracts EF companies are securing with large industrial clients as a differentiator from consumer-style growth curves.
EF's model is structurally distinct from accelerators like YC. It recruits individuals before they have a team, a co-founder, or an idea, then runs them through a proprietary formation process. Bentinck compares the firm's talent-sourcing role to CAA, the Hollywood talent agency, operating across Europe, the US, and India. Selection relies on a 48-hour hackathon rather than applications, with evaluators focused on pace, build speed, and interpersonal dynamics under pressure. Bentinck is explicit that strong candidates are identified proactively rather than discovered through inbound applications.