A selective six-week AI program where students are matched with real companies, to solve meaningful business problems using AI. Receive hands-on guidance from mentors at leading AI companies and top universities.
Applications are reviewed in rounds
Round 1: October 1, 2026 (recommended application deadline) | Round 2: November 1, 2026
Scholarships are available.
Many students have already taken a coding class, experimented with ChatGPT, or built something on their own. The AI Startup Fellowship gives you something different: the experience of building a real company project with AI.
You will work on a challenge selected by a company or nonprofit, interact with the people who care about the outcome, and use AI tools to research, prototype, test, and build a solution.
Unlike many early internships, you are not expected to figure everything out on your own. Our mentors work alongside your team throughout the 6 weeks, teaching you what you need when you need it, challenging your thinking, reviewing your work, and helping you turn an ambiguous problem into something you can actually solve.
We keep the program intentionally small because quality matters more to us than scale. We keep quality high in a few ways:
From kickoff to final presentation.
Expected live + async student commitment across 6 weeks (approximately 6–7 hours per week).
Matched based on interests, skills, and experience.
Hands-on guidance throughout the project.
Get feedback from company leaders as you build. You are never in the dark.
Mentor experience
Meet your team and partner organization. Learn why the challenge matters, who it affects, and what a useful outcome could look like.
Learn AI fundamentals, prototyping skills, and how startup teams communicate and make decisions.
Work in a team of 3-5 students, meet your mentor every week, test ideas, and improve your work after company feedback.
Explain your process, demonstrate what you built, share what you learned, and recommend what the organization should do next.
Project 1
Talk to staff about how they currently make matches, identify important matching criteria, build an AI matching tool, test recommendations against past examples, and refine the ranking logic.
Recommendation systems, structured data, user needs, ranking, and evaluation.
Project 2
Analyze app-store reviews, group them into themes, identify the most common pain points, build a dashboard that summarizes feedback, and validate findings with the company team.
Clustering, sentiment analysis, qualitative research, prioritization, and data storytelling.
Project 3
Review common support questions, organize the company’s existing information, build an AI support assistant grounded in those materials, test whether answers are accurate, and identify when the AI should hand off to a human.
RAG, semantic search, hallucination testing, workflow design, and human-in-the-loop AI.
Project 4
Interview staff to understand the most common documents and pain points. Build a tool that uses OCR to extract text from uploaded photos, then uses AI to identify key information such as deadlines, required actions, names, and benefit types. Test it on a dataset of sample documents, measure extraction accuracy, identify failure cases like blurry images or unusual layouts, and improve the experience.
OCR, structured data extraction, AI evaluation, customer interviews, edge-case testing, and product iteration.
This is not a classroom assignment. Learn how companies really work through company touchpoints including kickoff, midpoint feedback, and the final presentation.
Work on one substantial problem from research through prototype. There is no administrative busywork.
Get weekly guidance from experienced engineers, product leaders, designers, founders, and operators who work and build in AI.
Leave able to explain the problem, your contribution, your decisions, and what you built. We will guide you on how to add this project to your resume.
Exceptional students may request a mentor recommendation. Everyone who successfully completes the program receives a Certificate of Completion and written documentation of their project experience.
In some cases, partner organizations may invite exceptional students to explore additional opportunities after the program.
You are genuinely curious about AI and want to learn how to use it to solve real-world problems.
You want to meet people who work in AI and build with AI every day.
You are willing to think, experiment, build, get feedback, and put real effort into your project.
Yes, this helps your resume, but we also expect real contribution to the project and approximately 6–7 hours of work per week during the program.
Our projects are more business-oriented, with a focus on solving practical problems for companies.
AI is central to the program. You will spend significant time learning how to identify where AI is useful, build with modern AI tools, and evaluate whether your solutions actually work.
AI is not coding, though it is good at coding. We will not spend significant time on code reviews or learning a coding language.
Tell us what interests you and what you hope to learn.
Discuss your curiosity, experience, and goals.
See available partner projects and share your preferences.
We match 3-5 students by fit, age, experience, and time zone.
No. Projects are matched based on your past experience, and we teach the tools needed to complete the project. Curiosity, initiative, and a willingness to learn matter more than already knowing everything.
Expect approximately 6–7 hours per week, including mentor meetings, team collaboration, AI learning, and independent project work. Most project work can be completed flexibly around school schedules.
The Fellowship is fully remote. Mentor sessions, team meetings, and company checkpoints take place online.
Most AI programs begin with a curriculum and give every student similar assignments. We begin with a real problem. Your team is matched with a company or nonprofit facing a genuine challenge, and you learn the AI tools and skills necessary to solve it. The goal is not simply to learn about AI. The goal is to use AI to produce something useful for someone real.
In this program, we treat every fellow as an intern. High school interns are often expected to work independently or complete whatever tasks happen to be available, including meaningless administrative work. The Fellowship is deliberately structured around learning. You still get the experience of working with a real organization, but we teach the relevant skills, provide weekly mentorship, and support your team throughout the process. You are given meaningful responsibility without being left on your own.
Yes. Scholarships are available.
Applications are reviewed in two rounds. The recommended deadline is October 1, 2026, and the final deadline is November 1, 2026. Scholarships are available.
Apply to the AI Startup Fellowship