University of Maryland · Fall 2026 cohort

Apply.

Ten minutes. No resume required. We read every application. Five to seven people, chosen by application and interview. Applications close when the team is full

Fall 2026 — The application

This year the MZZ team will be supporting Recursive Capital, an early-stage venture capital fund backed by Jack Dorsey, to build an industry and company AI research engine.

Who they are. Recursive backs Bitcoin companies across Africa, from mining and exchanges to wallets and Lightning infrastructure. Fund I closed in late 2024, with Jack Dorsey, Jeff Booth, and Pete Briger among its backers.

What we're building. A research engine their investors actually use: it pulls research on an industry or a company, drafts the write-up, and traces every claim back to its source so it can be checked. We scope the specifics with the fund before we build.

How the semester runs. We meet weekly from September through November and finish with a demo. Roles get set in week one around who is on the team, so there is real ownership here rather than a lane you get slotted into.

What you don't need. You don't need to have built something like this before, and you don't need a particular major. It is a real project with real ambiguity, and we will be working a lot of it out together.

New to MZZ? Start here for what the work is and who we're looking for, or read the story.

What pulls you? * Pick any that fit.

Tools, workflows, real examples. There is no wrong answer here except "I don't."

Code counts. So does a market analysis, a deck, an event you ran, a system you built in Excel, a business you started. Paste a link if it has one, describe it if it doesn't.

What you submit is stored privately, used only to run this application cycle, then deleted. Exactly how we handle your info.