Announcing FCAT’s 2026 Frontier Founder Fellowship

FCAT's Frontier Founder Fellowship is back. This time, we're building.

Key Takeaways: 

• The Frontier Founder Fellowship is a global program run by the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT®) that brings together early-stage founders to deliver innovation for financial services and beyond.
• The 2026 cohort will be delivered in collaboration with Unknown Group from their campus in The Hague, an accredited entrepreneurial university at the center of Europe’s startup ecosystem.
• Participants will gain access to FCAT subject matter expertise, a global founder network, and a plan for structured experimentation, and exposure at major global startup events like Slush.
  

Since its inaugural Fellowship cohort, the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT®) Innovation Ecosystem team has supported frontier founders worldwide. With programs previously held in Dublin, London, and North Carolina, the FCAT Fellowship program is now in its fifth edition, and the team is doing something different.

In a world where emerging technologies like AI evolve faster than roadmaps can capture, rapid experimentation is essential to staying ahead. This year, FCAT is working with Unknown Group to deliver our next Frontier Founder Fellowship, bringing together Europe’s most enterprising entrepreneurs, exploring what’s possible, and working to build and test that potential.

About Unknown group

Unknown Group sits at the heart of Europe’s founder community from their base in The Hague. They run one of Europe’s largest impact campuses—an accredited entrepreneurship university—and Get in the Ring: a global startup competition surfacing exceptional early-stage founders from around the world.

The Unknown team knows how to find builders early, and their vantage point helps ensure compelling ideas get the attention they need to take hold. With the teams’ collective reach and FCAT’s proven track record across research and emerging technology, this Fellowship gives founders the space and resources they need to thrive.

An aerial view of Unknown's Campus, Titaan

How the Fellowship works

The Fellowship unfolds across three phases:

• In July, founders will gather in The Hague with FCAT and Unknown to align on vision and define their proofs of concept. Over the summer, the work moves into execution: teams will build, iterate, and test ideas against real constraints and in collaboration with FCAT and Unknown subject matter experts.
• In September, the cohort will reconvene to review learnings, refine their designs, and decide what comes next.
• By November, participants will have the opportunity to put their work forward for SLUSH in Helsinki: one of the world’s leading startup events and a testament to what frontier collaboration can deliver.

What we're building together

FCAT is built to experiment—rapidly scanning the horizon for emerging technologies, testing new opportunities, and pushing the boundaries of possibility to deliver solutions at scale. This Fellowship extends that approach by bringing founders directly into the fold.

Founders offer a different lens. Closer to their users and operating at the edge, they can surface new ideas, use cases, and ways of building.

The Fellowship brings together three complementary strengths: participants’ entrepreneurial drive, Unknown’s network and programming, and FCAT’s ability to test and scale, working side by side to bring ideas from early signal to tested application

Meet the Fellowship's Founders

Each founder was selected for their work building next-generation solutions with emerging technologies primed to shape the future of financial services.

Sean Blanchfield, Jentic

Milan Predic, Trinigence

Want to see what we build together? Learn more about FCAT's Innovation Ecosystem and watch this spot for updates from The Hague starting later this month.