Thiel Fellowship
The Thiel Foundation
$250,000 over two years
$250,000 over two years, no equity, for people aged 22 or younger without a degree. Applications are accepted year round.
The Thiel Fellowship gives fellows $250,000 over two years, with no equity taken in your company. It is for anyone aged 22 or younger without a university degree, and fellows must drop out of school to accept. It is open worldwide and reviews applicants as individuals; incorporating a company is not required. The foundation accepts applications year round with no deadline. The application is an online form anyone can open without signing in: basic details, links, an optional deck, and eight written answers with no length limit, starting with "What are you working on now?" Selection is by a selective review process.
- Funding type
- Grant
- Level
- Foundation
- Amount range
- $250,000
- Realistic amount
- $250,000 over two years to each selected fellow.
- Deadline
- Rolling; no deadline (applications accepted year round)
- Status
- active
- States
- Nationwide
Who qualifies
- Anyone aged 22 or younger (and without a university degree)
- Must drop out of school to accept
- Worldwide; reviewed as individuals
- You don't need to have incorporated a company
Is the Thiel Fellowship legit?
Yes. The Thiel Foundation has run it since 2011. It is free to apply, but it is a fellowship for people 22 or younger, not a small-business grant.
- Who runs it: The Thiel Foundation; Peter Thiel founded the fellowship in 2011
- What winners get: $250,000 over two years, with no equity taken
- Who can apply: People aged 22 or younger; no university degree needed
- Deadline: Applications are accepted year round
Sources: thielfellowship.org · page 2. Last checked at the funder on October 18, 2026.
Past Thiel Fellowship winners
The 2026 fellows the foundation announced included:
- Victor Boyd, Cavalla, Birmingham, AL · 2026 class (announced Apr 21, 2026)
- Samuel Carvalho, Praso, Recife, Brazil · 2026 class (announced Apr 21, 2026)
- Nick Dobroshinsky, EveryTicker, Sammamish, WA · 2026 class (announced Apr 21, 2026)
- Ishan Gupta, Juicebox, Kanpur, India · 2026 class (announced Apr 21, 2026)
- Aubrey Niederhoffer, Swoop, New York, NY · 2026 class (announced Apr 21, 2026)
- Claire Wang, Los Angeles, CA · 2026 class (announced Apr 21, 2026)
Names as published by the Thiel Foundation (via its April 2026 press release) (source). GrantCompass is not affiliated with the Thiel Foundation (via its April 2026 press release).
New grants like this every week: see this week's list or get it by email on Mondays.
What the Thiel Fellowship application asks
The Thiel Fellowship application asks eight written questions, alongside your contact details, links and education. There is no entry fee. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis, and you submit on the funder’s own form at thielfellowship.my.site.com. These are the questions as they appear on the form:
-
1
What are you working on now?
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2
What cool stuff have you worked on in the past?
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3
What is the most important problem facing your field?
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4
What is the most important problem facing another field of work?
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5
What are you currently obsessed with that is totally unrelated to your project?
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6
How do you feel about money?
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7
What are you scared of?
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8
Tell us something tangible you want.
What the answers need to show
- What you're building now, concretely
- Things you've built before
- Original views on important problems
- Honest, personal answers
GrantCompass drafts the Thiel Fellowship application from your own answers. You answer four short questions about what you're building and we write all eight answers around what the form asks, to fit the form. We use only what you tell us: nothing is invented, and anything a stronger answer needs is left as a marked blank for you to fill. The preview is free with no card. The full draft is $9, refunded in full within 7 days if it doesn’t make your application stronger. You review it and submit it yourself; GrantCompass is independent and not affiliated with the Thiel Foundation. Start a free draft on this page (grantcompass.co/grants/thiel-fellowship), or read how the drafting works.
How to answer the Thiel Fellowship application questions (with examples)
The Thiel Fellowship application is one page. It opens with your details, then “What are you working on now?”, then an industry question, an optional link and deck, and a yes-or-no on co-founders; the other seven boxes follow. All eight text boxes are required. None has a word or character limit. The foundation’s FAQ says you don’t need a company or a finished product, “but at a minimum you’ll need to demonstrate meaningful progress toward a concrete vision.”
Only the first two boxes are about your work. The other six are about how you think. Every example below comes from one made-up applicant, so you can see how the eight answers fit together. They run about 100 to 170 words for the first four questions and 50 to 75 for the personal ones, close to the length of a strong answer.
Question 1: “What are you working on now?”
- 1
Says what it is in the first sentence. The thing itself and who it is for, before any mission statement.
- 2
Shows what exists today. Prototypes, users, code, results, with numbers you can back up.
- 3
Names the next hard step. What you would do with two full-time years that you can’t do now.
“I’m building Rillbox, a sensor that costs about $40 in parts. It sits in a private well, tests the water for nitrates every six hours and texts the owner if the level crosses the EPA limit. A lab test takes two weeks by mail, and most families with wells test rarely or never.
Twelve Rillboxes have been running on farms in two Iowa counties since spring. They have logged about 9,000 readings, and two families found nitrate spikes after heavy rain and switched to bottled water until they fixed their wells. One of them told me, ‘We’d been drinking that for years and never knew.’ The first four units died within a month because condensation shorted the boards. I redesigned the casing around a sealed circuit, and none of the next eight has failed.
I left college after my first year to work on this. The next step is a sensor that holds its calibration for a full year without a visit, which is the problem I would spend the Fellowship on.”
Why it works: the first sentence says what Rillbox is. The numbers and the fixed failure show it works, and the last line names the one problem the money would go to.
Question 2: “What cool stuff have you worked on in the past?”
- 1
Picks two or three things you made. Built, ran or shipped, not things you attended.
- 2
Gives each one concrete detail. What it did, who used it, or what you learned that you still use.
Show the made-up example 119 words
“At 15 I built a weather station from a Raspberry Pi and a broken anemometer. It still posts readings to our town’s Facebook group every ten minutes, and in four years it has been down for two days, both during ice storms. At 16 I taught myself to solder by fixing phones, and over two summers I repaired about 140 of them for neighbors. Most were water damage, which taught me more about sealing electronics than any class did. At 17 I wrote a small app that told my school’s cross-country team when the trail was too icy to run; the coach still checks it every winter morning. The repair work is where Rillbox’s cheap waterproof casing came from.”
Why it works: the last line ties the past to Rillbox without making a speech of it.
Question 3: “What is the most important problem facing your field?”
- 1
Takes a position. One problem, stated plainly, that you have a reason to believe.
- 2
Says why it is hard. What has kept it unsolved, from your own work, not a statistic you looked up.
Show the made-up example 111 words
“Water testing still happens after the fact. You fill a bottle, mail it, and learn two weeks later what you were drinking. The reason isn’t cost. It’s drift: cheap chemical sensors lose accuracy within weeks underwater, so anything left in a well needs a technician to recalibrate it. My own prototypes read about 10% high by the end of their first month. Most of the work I read chases sensitivity, but a sensor that is perfect for three weeks is no use in a well nobody visits. Whoever solves drift turns water testing from an occasional lab errand into a constant, boring background reading, the way smoke detectors did for fire.”
Why it works: it names one problem and a cause most outsiders wouldn’t know, learned from the applicant’s own prototypes.
Question 4: “What is the most important problem facing another field of work?”
- 1
Picks a field you have seen from the inside. As a student, a worker or a customer.
- 2
Stays away from your project. Keep it about your thinking, not your plans.
Show the made-up example 105 words
“High school science labs are scripted. You follow a worksheet to reach an answer that’s already in the back of the book, so you learn to follow steps, not to find something out. In four years of labs I never once measured something nobody knew the answer to. Science fairs were the opposite: I picked the question, got it wrong for months, and learned more than in any class. Labs could work that way too. Students should spend at least one lab a term on a question that is still open, even a small local one, like what is in the creek behind the school.”
Why it works: the applicant lived through it, and one line of experience carries the argument.
The four personal questions
These four can be shorter than the first four, but a sentence or two is too thin. Each answer needs to be true and specific to you. If it could appear on anyone’s application, rewrite it.
| Question, and what the answer needs | Made-up example |
|---|---|
| “What are you currently obsessed with that is totally unrelated to your project?”Something you do, not a topic you read about once. | Show the made-up example 62 words“Hand bookbinding. I’ve sewn six notebooks this year on a frame I built from an old cutting board, and I’m now learning to marble my own endpapers in a tray of thickened water. It’s the opposite of my sensor work: slow, nothing to measure, and you can see right away if you got it wrong. I’ve given four of the notebooks away.” |
| “How do you feel about money?”Your real view, with one example of how you handle it. | Show the made-up example 74 words“Money buys time. I pay for Rillbox parts by fixing phones on weekends, which costs me about 15 hours a week I’d rather spend on calibration. I track every dollar in a shared spreadsheet; each prototype costs $38 in parts. I grew up in a house where we didn’t spend what we didn’t have, and I still don’t. I want Rillbox cheap enough that a family with a well buys one without thinking twice.” |
| “What are you scared of?”A real fear, said plainly. | Show the made-up example 54 words“That I’ll build something people like but don’t need. Twelve families saying nice things is not the same as a hundred paying for it, and I don’t know yet which one Rillbox is. And letting my dad down: he drove me to every science fair, and he still thinks I’m going back to school.” |
| “Tell us something tangible you want.”Something physical or countable, not a feeling. | Show the made-up example 49 words“A used cargo van with a workbench bolted in the back, so I can install Rillboxes in 100 wells across Iowa next summer instead of 12. Right now every install means borrowing my dad’s truck, packing tools into milk crates and losing half a day to loading and unloading.” |
What the foundation itself says
- You apply as a person. The FAQ says “we review and accept applicants as individuals,” and its 2025 class announcement says “The Fellowship looks for the individuals behind the projects.”
- Software is not required. The FAQ lists Fellows who “started nonprofits, created consumer products, launched media companies, and built hardware.”
- There is no deadline. Applications are accepted all year, so you can wait until your first answer has real numbers in it.
Want all eight answers written from your own details? Start your free draft preview. You see the preview before you pay anything.
What it covers
Eligible expenses
- Fellowship funds over two years (no use restrictions published)
Ineligible expenses
- See official program guidance
How to apply
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1
Check the age and degree rule
22 or younger and no university degree.
~10 min
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2
Fill in the online form
Basic details and links, then eight written answers with no length limit; no sign-in needed to open it.
~6 hrs
Only apply if you are ready to leave school: the fellowship requires it. Most of the eight written answers are about you, not your project (what you fear, what you're obsessed with, how you feel about money), so they need your own voice.
Deadline & timing
FAQ: "Is there an application deadline? No - we accept applications year round." Fellows must be 22 or younger and without a university degree, and must leave school to accept.
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Required documents
- Online application: eight written answers, links and an optional deck
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Last updated November 6, 2026. GrantCompass is an independent funding-discovery tool and is not affiliated with any government agency. Always confirm details on the official program page.