El Salvador Fellowship
12–17 October 2026 · San SalvadorA six-day fellowship for founders building public goods that have to survive the pilot.
The first cohort, four founders, met in San Salvador from 12 to 17 October 2026.
A six-day fellowship for founders building public goods that have to survive the pilot.
The first cohort, four founders, met in San Salvador from 12 to 17 October 2026.
Six days · four founders · 12–17 October 2026
For founders whose work already exists in the world.
San Salvador volcano · Wikimedia Commons
The setting
El Salvador built a purpose-made digital asset regime with its own licensing framework, passed a National AI Law, and watched San Salvador climb more than four hundred places in StartupBlink’s 2025 index.
It’s also a country where most people were unbanked until recently, which makes it a good place to find out whether your work survives contact with the real world.
Doors into development finance and public institutions that take years to open on your own.
A room that takes a model apart before a funder or a ministry does.
We took no equity for the week. Meals and program travel were covered.
“Funding the Commons is the best Public Goods Community in crypto and their Public Goods residency is easily one of the top residencies in our space. I was able to exponentially accelerate my product, meet incredible talent and make lifelong friends good as family.”
Theme · infrastructure that outlives its first funding
Our first El Salvador Fellowship took the theme of Beyond the Pilot: what happens to good infrastructure once the demo works and the grant runs out.
Six years after the world committed to open digital infrastructure for public benefit, the Digital Public Goods Alliance registry still lists no certified AI systems. Plenty was built. Very little survived the pilot.
At the same time, money is moving quickly into technology for institutions, and it rewards companies that keep their data closed. A founder who wants their work to stay open is asked to accept less for it. We put that tension on the table early, rather than letting founders find it the hard way.
The week was built for founders who already have users, and who face the unglamorous questions. Who pays for this. Which institution adopts it. What stays open. And what mechanism could fund it when the usual answers don’t apply.
Five areas, drawn from the work this community has been doing for years.
New ways to move and allocate shared resources: grants, treasuries, quadratic flows, and programmable funding.
Payments, savings, remittances, credit, and stablecoin tools designed for everyday use where traditional rails fall short.
Tools for collective action, civic participation, shared ownership, and bottom-up governance.
Verification, credentials, and portable reputation systems that prioritize privacy and autonomy.
Auditable, open AI models built to support coordination, decision making, and public infrastructure.
No shares, no options, no future claim on the company. Meals during the week and travel to every program activity were covered.
Six days like these are how Funding the Commons gets to know how founders work. Some go on to join our portfolio, with capital and ongoing support. When that happens, it is a separate conversation.
Six days built around the questions that arrive after the product works.
A full day with the Ministry of Economy at Centro de Gobierno, scoping pilots in financial access and public services with the people who can authorize one.
Venture, grants, retroactive funding, development finance, and what DPGA certification opens up.
Quadratic funding, retroactive funding, hypercerts, conviction voting. Then each founder designs one for their own product.
A grant pot, allocated by the cohort on the final day using a mechanism they choose together. Binding, and paid.
A community where financial technology reached people the banks had skipped. We went to ask what broke.
Each founder’s model in front of a room whose job that afternoon was to find what doesn’t hold.
Founders arrived over the weekend of 10 and 11 October, and left on Sunday 18 October.
An honest audit, and the one thing in your way
A positioning statement, and where you land on openness
A revenue model, and a mechanism you designed
A capital plan with real funders, in order
A regulatory position and a pilot worth proposing
A real allocation, and commitments for ninety days
The week was built so that by Saturday each founder leaves with a scoped pilot proposal with a named institution, a revenue model tested against real numbers, a capital plan naming actual funders in sequence, and introductions that continue after the week ends.
Four founders were selected through an open call, which closed on 18 September 2026. Selection was run by Funding the Commons directly. The bar: an incorporated company, founders working on it full time, a product with real users, however few, pre-Series A, and a concrete reason El Salvador matters to the work.
What the week gave the cohort
Four founders and one room. Deliberately small, so everyone got real time with everyone else, more than once.
With the Funding the Commons team and visiting guests, to talk through what was stuck, or pressure-test a hard trade-off.
Every founder was connected with two or three people from the Funding the Commons network working on their exact problem.
Meals through the week, and transport to everything on the program, field visit and ministry sessions included.
Something short and public about what each founder learned, and a return visit to mentor the next cohort. That’s it.
The value of a week like this comes from who else is there. The room was built with institutions across government, capital and the local ecosystem.
If your organization works on financial access, public infrastructure, or entrepreneurship in Central America, there is very likely a way to take part in what follows: as a mentor, a session host, a pilot counterpart, or a funder.
Ministries and the national innovation office, in the room for a full day of pilot scoping.
Local investors and a development finance institution, explaining how each of them really decides.
Accelerators, innovation spaces and academic institutions working with founders across the country.
Supported by
The El Salvador Fellowship is a Funding the Commons program, made possible by GSR Foundation.