A First Look at the 2025 NextGen AI Fellowship Cohort

We’re in the earliest days of a new era, one where AI isn’t just a research breakthrough, but a fundamental shift in how companies are built. And as with every platform shift before it, the real impact won’t come from the incumbents. It will come from the next generation of founders.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce the 2025 NextGen AI Fellows. The NextGen AI Fellowship is designed to find talented undergraduate and graduate students from across North America and help prepare them to build the next generation of tech companies, using AI. 

This June, 29 exceptional technical undergraduate and graduate students will congregate in Silicon Valley and New York city, two major AI hubs, to join our fifth NextGen cohort. These students have been handpicked from a broad range of schools across North America, and will spend the summer getting a crash course in what it takes to turn their ideas into scalable companies, with AI at the center of everything they do.

The NextGen AI Fellowship focuses on three areas: 

1. Embedded internships at AI-first companies. Fellows will participate in internships at companies including Databricks, fal.ai*, HashiCorp*, Meta, Notion, OpenAI, Parafin*, Vercel*, and more, to gain real-world experience in shipping, scaling, and solving complex problems in fast-paced teams.
2. Weekly sessions with leaders at the top AI companies and the VCs who funded them. Fellows will have the opportunity to meet with experts who have built generational companies and are shaping the future of AI for hands-on mentorship and lessons in company building from product intuition to team building to storytelling to go-to-market.
3. Prototyping and pitching at Demo Day. Fellows will spend the summer developing and iterating on an original company idea. The program will end with a live Demo Day, with the opportunity to pitch to a panel of early-stage investors and the chance to be funded. 

This year’s Fellowship Class includes students from a range of universities across North America including Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, University of Toronto, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, University of Virginia, and more. Each Fellow was selected based on academic excellence, initiative, and their potential to shape the future of technology through innovation and leadership.

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Presenting the 2025 NextGen AI Fellowship Class: 

This year marks the fifth cohort of the NextGen Fellowship. Since 2021, we’ve reviewed more than 7,000 applications from students across 750+ universities. Our program alumni have gone on to participate in Y Combinator, raise money from leading venture capitalists, and been featured in Forbes' 30 Under 30.  

The NextGen Fellowship isn’t just about teaching entrepreneurship. It’s about building a network of students who are already shaping what comes next—and giving them the people, perspective, and space to do it faster. Our goal has always been to foster a community of ambitious students and this year we’re proud to see that community grow. We invite you to learn more about the program here and follow along this summer as we highlight these future founders.

*Represents a Notable Capital portfolio company.

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