Anthony Atlas

Anthony Atlas has a minor planet named after him. Asteroid number something or other, orbiting out there in the black. He won first place at the International Science Fair in 2004 with a project on protein tailoring in marine muscle adhesion. He was seventeen, from a town of seventy-five hundred people on the east coast, and suddenly he was on a stage with kids from forty countries, watching flags from around the world while his heart was pounding in his chest.

He didn’t win the grand prize. He remembers that, too. Remembers not getting called for the top honor. And he’s grateful for it. “It’s good to have those checks,” he says now, two decades later.

What he didn’t know then was that this moment, this competition, would become the thread running through his entire career. Because what happened at that science fair wasn’t random. It was the result of a system designed to find and surface the rarest kind of talent in America. A farm system for STEM innovation. One hundred seventy-five thousand kids are entering at the base every year. Two thousand making it to the finals. All competing, defending their work, proving themselves.

From Berkeley to Stanford to tech, Anthony kept running into other science fair alumni. Founders. Investors. People who’d gone through the same crucible he had. And he started asking the question that would consume the next fifteen years of his life: how many of us are out there?

The answer, when he finally pulled it together, was shocking. 

He found other science fair alumni are founding unicorns at three times the rate of Y Combinator baseline companies. Three times. 

Yet there’s almost no institutional capital backing them at the moment of founding. Nobody’s funding them early. Nobody’s built infrastructure around them. It’s like finding the richest vein of ore and leaving it untouched.

Anthony spent years pulling this data together. He talked people into giving him API access. He ran OCR at scale using language models. He built a scoring system. He created a database of fifty thousand people. And the whole time, he was building things, staying in the world of founders and operators.

But he couldn’t shake it. Three years went by. Nobody else was building this. He applied to VC Lab. Got in early. And something clicked.

On his fortieth birthday, he pulled an all nighter. He took his database live. He built an interactive tool so LPs and founders could see exactly what he was seeing. This isn’t theoretical. This is the real pipeline of companies he’s evaluating. Scored by his model. Backed by his community. He locked in and didn’t stop until it was done.

Science Fair Fund exists to close a gap. To get capital to these people before institutional money arrives. To help them with the blocking and tackling on the business side, not the technical side. These are already exceptional. They don’t need help being brilliant. They need help understanding how to hire, how to raise, how to do business development the right way.

Anthony’s spent his career watching high conviction, technically gifted founders succeed or stumble based on one thing: whether they had operators around them who could show them the patterns. How to do it right. Who to talk to. What great looks like. And he’s seen what happens when they do have that. Companies that go from seed to series B on 10x valuations. Teams that scale fast because they had access to the right people at the right time.

“I’m looking for people who have savviness about the business side,” he says, “or they know it’s a blind spot and they’re open. They approach it like anything else. How does this system work? What do we need to do? If they come in with that mindset, not ego, just curiosity, that’s where I think you can help quickly.”

The why, for Anthony, goes deeper. These science fairs have existed since the 1940s and 1950s. They’re in every town. They’re a natural expression of something human: the drive to solve problems, to compete, to be seen. And they’ve been a pipeline for innovation for eighty years. But they’ve always been under supported. Teachers don’t have enough money in the classrooms. Students don’t have the resources they need. And when they graduate, when they go to start companies, nobody’s thinking about them as a cohort.

He thinks about that seventeen year old version of himself, hopeful, eyes full of possibility, standing on that stage with flags all around. He wants to protect that. He wants to accelerate it. And he wants to take whatever success comes from the fund and put it back into STEM education, grants, scholarships. To make sure the pipeline keeps working.

“Basically anything is possible if you actually go after it,” Anthony says. “I’ve seen people go from here to some crazy places. You just got to take your shots on goal. If I can help more people do that and help the ones going further go faster, I mean that makes everything better for everyone.”

On March 24th, join the webinar where Anthony Atlas will be talking about his approach to finding founder talent, the patterns that actually predict success, and what it means to invest behind science fair alumni building the companies that matter. You’ll hear directly from him about what he’s learned from watching exceptional technical founders succeed, and what he sees coming next in the venture world.