First contact: Aliens and the ReGen Fellowship

During September to November we ran the first edition of the ReGen Fellowship, a program for technical people exploring ideas that could reshape the world from the atom up.

What we learned has only deepened our conviction to continue building this container to ensure a small set of individuals’ visions for the world aren’t normalised by the norm.

It is true that only a few people truly change the world. When you study or spend time with these people, you realise they’ve often spent years chasing ideas that seemed strange and impossible in the beginning. They usually say they kept exploring an idea because they were compelled: an innate drive, a relentless curiosity, an obsession that wouldn’t leave them alone.

At ReGen we call these people aliens. Like the aliens of popular culture, they can appear strange or misunderstood from the outside, but operate at a higher frequency to the average human. They hold ideas that can reimagine our future at the deepest levels, rewrite the code of life, and build an abundant world that is radically better than today.

One alien that we talk about a lot internally is Sir James Dyson. Dyson spent five years and 5,127 prototypes building a vacuum cleaner in a shed behind his house. He cycled back and forth between the shed and the house so many times that neighbours assumed he was crazy. He was unusual, determined and convinced of a world only he could see at the time.

An unfortunate truth is that as a society we (a) don’t really like aliens and (b) we often push them towards a local maxima. Society domesticates aliens by turning the raw, high agency “I must explore this” obsession towards safer and more standardised paths. The result is too many outlier people and their ideas are forced to be legible too early, which often leads to incremental and less transformative outcomes.

We see across many institutions: academia, government and within our world of venture capital. Whilst we 100% believe venture is a necessary vehicle to bring transformative ideas to the world, it does come with constraints. There are time and scaling requirements that could force a person to make their idea legible before it is ready.

That is why we created our Fellowship: a no-strings-attached container where we can be the first believer and trusted confidant of a person and their ideas without needing to force them down the path of a venture-backed company.

The Fellowship is a container where people and their ideas can remain unbounded long enough to matter. We don’t care if someone starts a company or not. We care whether their ambition grows. If they leave the Fellowship with an idea that is even wilder, bigger, and more transformative than when they arrived, that’s a win for us.

But just like the world didn’t need another venture capital firm, the world definitely didn’t need another fellowship. And yet, we’re convinced we’ve built something that’s different. The fellowship, like our firm, is anchored around building deep, compounding relationships, our north star at ReGen. We believe that first belief and conviction in a person and their idea is scarce and we get genuine satisfaction from building the highest standard of trust and belief in our founders (and now Fellows).

We feel honoured that our Fellows felt this during the first program:

“I am incredibly appreciative of your guidance, support, advocacy, belief, generosity, and wisdom.”

“Whatever shape [x] takes from here, a piece of ReGen’s DNA will always be part of it.”

“I wouldn’t have thought this deeply about half of these directions without the conversations we had together.”

It was clear to us that we had to build this now for several reasons. We are convinced a new techno-economic paradigm is emerging across intelligence, robotics, materials and energy and that the time is now to build a future of abundance.

Second, the cost to begin exploring across the domains of biology, robotics, material science and AI has dropped by orders of magnitude. People can experiment with atoms outside conventional institutions and millions of dollars. A small amount of capital and catalytic support from us can create the tiny push to help more aliens escape society’s push towards the local maxima. We believe the Fellowship can help give them the oxygen to keep their flame alive and push towards their global maxima, in the hope that they change the arc of history.

Our first Fellows are great examples of people who’ve been obsessive about non-consensus ideas and have a grand vision to reshape an industry from the ground up.

Luke, a physicist by training, became obsessed with applying deep learning to plants. After building a few companies, working with NASA to build large libraries of plant breeding data, he couldn’t escape the question of how can we rebuild plant breeding from scratch? Thinking about open-sourcing, vertical integration and ways to dramatically change trait discovery, he spent time with us thinking of how we could define agriculture to adapt to an ever-changing planet (and maybe on Mars).

Jehad is a materials missionary. He has spent his whole life thinking about how we make the next versions of matter to take us to an abundant future. Most recently he was at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team, where he concluded that despite the Cambrian exploration in material discovery, we need to figure out how to make those materials by building the world’s largest materials data factory. We explored how you maximise the impact of this foundational dataset and whether open or closed is the best model for this.

Maxx melted our minds with his exploration of integrating lab-grown organoids with semiconductor chips to create embodied intelligence systems.

Andreas, having spent the last few years building frontier models to understand our planet, wanted to push the envelope further and explore how you could build a system that unlocks a truly programmable supply chain from extraction to trading to end demand.

These ideas are wild, not in clean categories and sometimes hard to see as venture companies. But all of these people are operating on a different level. They’re aliens and we felt privileged to keep pushing towards their global maxima.

Based on everything we’ve learned, we’re continuing.

In a world of increasing consensus in capital and ideas, we believe supporting people at the earliest, messiest stages of exploration is meaningful. These aliens create positive visions of the future. They insist that life must become radically more awesome.

Applications are open for the second cohort in early 2026. If you can’t stop thinking about a question, if you’re exploring something that might rebuild the world from the atom up, we’d love to hear from you.

As Dyson put it: “Difference. For the sake of it. In everything. Because it must be better.”