Today we are excited to announce the start of this year's Kleiner Perkins Fellows program — how we've expanded to more schools, more companies and introduced a seed funding component for Fellows.
Sixty eight students will be spending their summer working at some of the most interesting start-ups in the Kleiner Perkins portfolio pursuing their passion for design, engineering and product management. Democratizing access to unique opportunities in tech, these students come from a wide range of schools that includes not only Harvard, Stanford and Yale but the University of Maryland, Washington University in St. Louis, Cal Poly SLO, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Texas A&M University, Rice University and a student from the Minerva Schools. We are also happy to report a robust roster of participating companies including Airbnb, Betterworks, Coursera, Doordash, Farmers Business Network, Enjoy, Gusto, Handshake, Livongo, Nextdoor, Pinterest, Shape Security, Slack, Synack, Uber with Tally, Stripe, Robinhood, Figma, and Proxy joining for the first time.
To be selected participants must demonstrate entrepreneurial and leadership characteristics, technical ability and drive. Lisa von Rabenau (Product Fellow @Proxy) founded ReMaterials (building materials for disadvantaged communities) and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30. Daniel Kwak (Product Fellow @Uber) took time off Wharton to be the first product manager at Phil and had previously founded a watch company, Tailors and Madmen. Will Papper (Product Fellow @Proxy) founded an online gaming community of 5,000 at age 14 and took time off from Stanford to build Librarian AI with a $70,500 prototyping contract. Kanishk Vashisht (Engineering Fellow @Gusto) is founder of a fuel delivery/logistics startup which raised $70,000 from Rough Draft Ventures and did $100,000 in ARR in its first year.
To further encourage our Fellows to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams, we announced last year that Fellows who have graduated and go on to found their own companies will have the opportunity to receive $100,000 in Seed funding from Kleiner Perkins. Early investments in Fellows graduates include Figma, Audius, Doppler Technologies, Persona, Docbot, Sympto Health, Catch Financial, Chef Robotics, Atlas, Archerus, Re-Inc.
Since launching in 2012, the Fellows community is now 500 strong. We are proud of what the program has accomplished in building a diverse pipeline of future talent. In 2018 we achieved 50/50 gender diversity, and 70% of the cohort were minority students and 15% under-represented minorities. This year the class will include 50/50 gender diversity and 75% of the cohort are minority students. We are also proud to have the Fellows program recognized by Vault.com as one of the leading internship programs in the US.
But what we love most about the KP Fellows program is the opportunity to nurture this special ecosystem of alum, founders and mentors to help support future generations of tech leaders. One of the program's key values is that KP Fellows are more than just a community - they are a family that spans beyond companies, schools, disciplines, locations and traditional networks to grow and learn together.
Congratulations to the 2019 class of Fellows!
To learn more about this year's class or to apply for the program, visit the Kleiner Perkins Fellows website today.