Beginning in January 2025, our friends at Borealis will bring remote-eligible workers to Alaska for 2-month cohorts run throughout the year, providing a seamless and curated taste of life in Anchorage. For many participants, it will be a stepping stone to a longer or even permanent presence in the region.

The Alaska Climate Tech Hub is partnering with Borealis to create the Borealis Climate Tech Fellowship.
Our goal is to fill every seat in the May-June cohort with exciting young professionals working on a variety of dimensions of climate change, from startup founders in the energy sector to climate journalists with national reach.

In addition to all the usual perks of the Borealis program, the Fellowship benefits will include:

• A financial award covering half of the program costs
• A pass to the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference (June 3-5, 2025)
• Bespoke programming with Tech Hub Consortium members, including Launch Alaska, a deployment accelerator that is on track to catalyze $1B in climate investments
• Warm handoffs with collaborators across the state
• An opportunity to share your work at the Alaska Climate Tech Summit with the Governor of Alaska and attendees of the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference
• Optional curated volunteer opportunities with students and community members, including program participants at Cook Inlet Tribal Council’s award-winning Denelchin Fab Lab

At the discretion of the Tech Hub, one or more awards may include a supplemental funding award to fully cover the costs of Borealis program fees.

TO APPLY: Fill out the regular Borealis application, indicating an interest in the May-June window (Cohort 3) and your background in climate tech. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis, with selection interviews likely taking place in
December 2024 and January 2025.

Are you a non-American permanent resident/citizen that has a STEM or business background? Have you or are you considering founding a company with potential for rapid growth, particularly in the climate tech space? Are you interested in the US market or currently present in the US and looking to stay? Does Alaska make sense as a place to grow your business? If your answers to these questions are ‘yes’, this program is for you.

The current visa process for founders looking to establish or rehome their start-up in the USA is expensive, complex, and uncertain. GEIR programs deals with all three issues.

The Global Entrepreneurs-in-Residence Peer Network, a group of academic institutions, immigration attorneys, and economic developers from around the country, have crafted a playbook for navigating our nation’s complex visa rules in the name of creating a home for startup founders from around the world. To date, GEIR programs have produced more than a hundred fellows whose companies have attracted well over $1 billion in investments, creating thousands of good jobs.

The Alaska Climate Tech Hub is picking up the GEIR Peer Network playbook and actively working to revive and expand Alaska’s COVID-disrupted GEIR fellowship program. In partnership with the University of Alaska’s Anchorage and Fairbanks campuses, we are building up a GEIR program spanning UAA’s Business Enterprise Institute and UAF’s Center for Innovation, Commercialization, and Entrepreneurship. We aim to sponsor visa application fees for fellows arriving in the fall of 2025.

Program Structure
To understand how the program works, we need to get into the nitty-gritty.

The proven approach for GEIR programs is to help fellows simultaneously secure dual H-1B visas. The first is an ‘uncapped’ visa secured by a partnership with an academic institution, where the fellow is paid a competitive wage for 5-8 hours of work ranging from teaching as an adjunct to mentoring students in entrepreneurship. This step is essential, because it allows fellows to avoid the notorious H-1B lottery that in recent years has yielded a <50% application success rate.

To allow the fellows to work on their own companies, GEIR programs also apply for a ‘concurrent’ visa that is also not subject to the lottery, by virtue of the second, simultaneous visa application. This additional H-1B visa is what allows the fellows to be self-employed at their startup. Predicated on a suitable background (typically an undergraduate degree in a related field suffices), these applications boast a nearly 100% success rate.

One important note: eligibility for the concurrent H-1B visa requires that fellows pay themselves a competitive wage based on the local prevailing wages in their industry. Typically, this means that their startups need to have received seed funding or
other financial investments that can be used as direct monetary compensation for hours worked. (If your start-up is pre-seed or you are otherwise not able to pay yourself the locally prevailing wage for your field of expertise, we encourage you
to still get in touch with us—we are actively exploring partnerships
with funders to secure investments for committed applicants.)

Applicants
that are already legally present in the US through another visa are completely eligible to apply, in addition anyone currently overseas. The dual H-1B visas gives fellows up to 36 months to grow their startup in the US. Successfully running their venture, combined with participation in other GEIR programming will likely position the fellows for eligibility for a more permanent visa (e.g. O-1).

Pending an anticipated announcement from the White House, we are also exploring a J-1 visa route that would have greater flexibility for applicants and provide a 5-year timeline for a fellow.

As we continue building out this program, we would love to engage with prospective fellows. Please use fill out this form if you’d like to get in touch!

Benefits
Successful Alaska GEIR Fellowship applicants will receive:

• Coverage of fellowship visa fees
• Assistance in customer discovery and warm hand-offs to potential backers, partners, or suppliers
• Strategic consulting and technical assistance for an O-1 visa application prior to fellowship completion
• Membership in the Alaska Climate Tech Hub
• Support in applying to Launch Alaska’s Tech Deployment Track
• At least 5 hours a week of paid employment at either UAA or UAF
• Assistance in securing housing

The Alaska Climate Tech Hub is in the early stages of designing and building an additional fellowship program geared toward academic researchers who are interested in turning their findings into commercial products or services. We’re actively pursuing a name-brand partnership in building the fellowship, but until that’s official, we’re calling it the ‘Alaska Lab2Market Fellowship’.

Programs like Activate have proven that high-impact academics can become incredibly successful startup founders, provided they receive the right coaching and support in bringing their ideas out of the lab. From humble beginnings at Berkeley National Lab, they now onboard more than two dozen fellows annually across four geographic hubs, providing $100,000/year non-dilutive stipends, best-in-class programming, and connections to investors. They’ve even developed a fully remote version of their fellowship, Activate Anywhere. Activate fellows have gone on to receive billions in additional investments, founding some of the most significant up-and-coming climate tech companies in the US.

The Alaska Lab2Market Fellowship seeks to replicate the success of Activate in Alaska without reinventing the wheel.

As we continue building out this program, we strongly encourage researchers in Alaska working on climate tech to reach out. Even if our programming isn’t ready yet, we would gladly support an application to Activate Anywhere.

More to come!