Fall Academy 2025: A Week of Tactical PMF Training

We’ve just wrapped our 2025 Fall Unusual Academy,  a week-long, intensive program where technical enterprise founders worked side-by-side to learn and apply unusual, yet proven, techniques for finding product-market fit (PMF).

While there are many accelerators out there, we keep our Academy intentionally small and focused. By selecting a tight cohort of deeply technical builders, we can go deep on the hard, foundational work that early-stage companies need most. This year’s group was one of the strongest we’ve ever had — and the numbers speak for themselves.

Fall Academy 2025 Overview

• 10 deeply technical founding teams
• 0.9% acceptance rate
• 100% technical founders
• Company categories included: AI security, ML infrastructure, developer tooling, intelligent automation, next-generation data and reasoning systems, and synthetic user simulation
• Founders came from top Enterprise AI teams at: Google DeepMind, Cloudera, VMware, Intel, Meta, and Palo Alto Networks

Program Recap

Throughout the week, founders learned our highly unusual — and battle-tested — process for going from initial insight to product-market fit. In the early days of building a company, finding PMF is all that matters, and we’ve distilled decades of learning into one week of tactical lessons designed to dramatically increase a founder’s odds of getting there.

This year, founders learned directly from John Vrionis, Jyoti Bansal, the Founder Services team, and seasoned founders & operators from companies like Rippling and Relyance. They also received dedicated 1:1 mentorship from Unusual Partners throughout the week.

While we keep specific portions of the Academy curriculum proprietary for our cohort, we encourage other founders to explore Unusual’s methods in our Startup Field Guide. 

Community

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey — especially for technical enterprise AI founders — but Unusual Academy is designed to change that. By bringing together a highly focused cohort of like-minded builders, we create an environment where founders push, challenge, and support one another.

Throughout the week, the group connected outside of sessions as well: happy hours, dinners, a field trip to Harness, and even a boat trip around the San Francisco Bay. Many founders walk away not just with a framework for finding PMF the Unusual way, but with a new community of peers they can build alongside for years to come.

Alums of this PMF program include the co-founders of companies like Pinterest, Snapchat, Notion, Omnition, and Relyance AI — and this year’s cohort is already well on its way to joining that trajectory.

This is just the beginning for the Fall 2025 Unusual Academy companies!