AltaLab Opens Applications for the Fall 2026 Cohort
AltaIR Capital announced that applications are open for the Fall 2026 Cohort of AltaLab, a hands-on program designed to help founders build scalable and investable companies. The cohort begins September 7, 2026, with applications closing September 4, 2026.
The Fall cohort follows a successful first run of the program, which launched in March 2026 and drew more than 750 applications. Over 250 teams completed the Online Sprint, 30 were selected for the in-person bootcamp in Barcelona, and 10 received investment offers. Among the companies backed out of the first cohort are Profymarket, an AI agent for construction procurement, Sensia, a personalized allergy management app, and others.
According to Crunchbase, global startup funding reached $425 billion in 2025. Nearly half of that capital went to AI companies, with large players such as OpenAI, Scale AI, Anthropic, Project Prometheus and xAI alone raising a combined ~$84 billion — about 20% of total VC funding. The concentration only intensified in Q1 2026, when just four companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo — collectively raised $188 billion, or two-thirds of the total capital invested in AI companies. Capital is still flowing, but it's pooling around fewer and fewer companies.
This shift creates both opportunity and pressure for founders. In a market where competition is intensifying and investors are more selective, execution, focus, and validation matter more than ever. AltaLab was built to address exactly that.
"In the current landscape, simply building a wrapper around an LLM is no longer sustainable. A competitor can replicate your entire product in days if you don't have a real advantage underneath it," said Igor Ryabenkiy, Founder and Managing Partner at AltaIR Capital and founder of AltaLab. "Defensibility today isn't in the code or technology. It starts with the ability to build distribution and go-to-market, and extends to proprietary data, deep workflow integration, real customer relationships, a brand that commands trust, and the discipline to communicate a vision and get to market fast. Very few founders manage all of that on their own. At AltaLab, we look for teams with real conviction, and we teach them how to build across all of these dimensions at once."
The program is designed for founders at any of three stages: those still shaping an idea, those with early traction searching for product-market fit, and those raising or scaling who need to sharpen the story and find the real bottleneck. The methodology draws directly from Ryabenkiy's two decades of experience backing early-stage founders — including 10+ unicorns such as Deel, Miro, Turing, PandaDoc, Mesh, Fundamental, and others — and from his book Unicorn Focus, which codifies the frameworks he has used with founders across hundreds of investments.
AltaLab runs in three stages:
Online Sprint — Three weeks of practical sessions and assignments. Every framework is applied directly to the founder's own company: validating ideas, sharpening strategy, refining messages for their team, customers, and investors.
Founder Residency — Deeper, hands-on work with the AltaLab team: one-on-one sessions, founder masterminds, workshops, and preparation for investor conversations and Demo Day.
Build and Scale — Selected teams may have a path to a $50,000 SAFE investment dedicated to GTM, and teams with proven traction and solid metrics may receive up to $500,000 from AltaIR Capital.
For founders who went through the first cohort, the impact was less about tactics and more about how they think about building their companies:
"The greatest thing I took from AltaLab wasn't tactical advice — it was a mindset shift. Before the program, I was testing different hypotheses, trying to build a universal solution for every allergy problem,” said Maria Monastyrskaya, Founder of Sensia. "AltaLab pushed us to pause and choose one core experience worth building. Now every day I can feel how the whole roadmap is aligned with one goal."
AltaLab sits inside a broader capital strategy at AltaIR Capital. The firm has hundreds of millions under management, investing across early stages through its pre-seed and seed fund, and continuing to back companies as they grow through Series A to C. On top of that, AltaIR Capital has committed $15 million a year specifically to back early-stage teams from AltaLab, with growth-stage capital ready to follow.