Edge City Newsletter — March 2026

Open roles, a new deep tech residency, a kids creative residency, a founder who raised $250K in a month, and the countdown to Edge Esmeralda 2026. ͏

Edge City Team

April 6, 2026

Hello friends! ☀️

We're only two months away from seeing each other again at our next flagship village, Edge Esmeralda (May 30 - June 27)!

With so much happening and so much still to come, we're excited to share some updates and ways you can meaningfully get involved.

Let's dive into the details.

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TL;DR

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Join us at Edge Esmeralda 2026 →

Remind me, what is Edge City?

Edge City is a society incubator that gathers people working at the frontiers of science, technology, and culture in month-long popup villages around the world.

We build living labs to experiment with new ideas, technologies, cultures, and organizations. All with the goal of advancing human flourishing.

We’re building towards a global network of temporary and permanent innovation hubs. Explore our roadmap to see how we plan to grow.

Collaboration is essential to achieve our vision. That’s why we aim to partner with folks who are interested in hosting residencies for builders, scientists, and artists at our popup villages. If you’re interested, please reach out here.

The story and impact of Edge City in 5 minutes - Timour at the Network State Conference 2025. Watch the talk →

Join an Edge Esmeralda Fellowship or Residency

This year, we're running three funded programs at Edge Esmeralda.

  1. The Long Journey Residency
  2. The Inflection Fellowship
  3. The Zee Prime Residency (applications are still open)

Each comes with housing, a dedicated cohort, and programming designed to accelerate what you're building.

Zee Prime Deep Tech Residency | Application Deadline: April 19

A dedicated Founders House for 10+ deep tech founders, with Zee Prime's investment team on-site for the full month. Their portfolio includes Polymarket, Solana, and Terra Fusion.

This is for you if:
→ You're building something with real technical depth
→ You want to pressure-test your work with people who can actually break it
→ You're looking for investors who understand long time horizons and hard problems

Apply to The Zee Prime Residency →

Coming soon: A Consciousness Residency at Edge Esmeralda

We're putting together a dedicated research residency for scientists, builders, and practitioners working on the frontier of consciousness science. 10-15 residents for a full month. More details coming soon.

If this sounds like your world, keep an eye on this space.

Get the updates as they land →

NOTE: You don't need a residency or fellowship to join Edge Esmeralda. A general ticket gets you the full access to co-working, talks, workshops, and 500+ builders for the month. Apply to Edge Esmeralda.

What's Coming Up

Edge Esmeralda 2026: May 30 – June 27, Healdsburg, CA

We are getting closer and closer to our annual flagship village in one of California's most beautiful small towns, Healdsburg, California.

A full month of building, living and experimenting alongside 500+ people working at the frontiers of tech, science and culture. If this sounds like an environment you could thrive in, take it as your sign to apply!

Key infomation and opportunities to get involved:

If you've been before, you know. If you haven't, the recaps from 2024 and 2025 will give you a feel for what a month there actually looks like. We recommend joining for 2–4 weeks to allow deeper collaborations to form and new ideas and habits to settle in.

Co-organized with Devon Zuegel and the Esmeralda Institute.

Collaborate with frontier minds →

Open roles and opportunities

Manager for Inflection Fellowship and Inflection Grants - Want to help the next generation of frontier builders find their footing? You'll run our fellowship and micro-grant programs for exceptional builders under 25. Please note this role is specific to Edge Esmeralda (May 30 - June 27) in California.

Volunteers at Edge Esmeralda - Want to help run the village this summer? Volunteers get a subsidized spot, they're embedded in the community, and play a real role in how the month unfolds.

Introducing Edge Tomorrow: The new Kids Program at Edge Esmeralda

We are excited to announce a month-long intergenerational program where kids ages 7 to 12 and adult collaborators design and build real projects that shape the village.

  • Kids ages 7 to 12 conceive, build, and present projects to the whole Edge community every Friday
  • For kids aged 2.5 to 6, we're partnering with Sonoma Arts School for a dedicated experience
  • Runs alongside @EdgeEsmeralda, May 30 to June 27. Monday to Friday, 9am to 4pm
  • Weekly cohorts, each anchored by a theme-question. Kids lead the projects
  • Adults, teens, and elders welcome as collaborators
  • $1,680 for the full month, $560 for a single week (per child). Prices increase monthly

Apply now to Edge Esmeralda and mention your child/children and you'll be among the first to get invited to in Edge Tomorrow when tickets go live ☀️

Quick News and Updates

🇿🇦 The team got together in Cape Town

There's something about being in the same room that makes the crazy ideas start to feel possible. This month, the team flew to Cape Town for a week of deep planning on Edge Esmeralda, filmed conversations and content we'll be sharing over the coming months, and spent evenings with community members who travelled from around the world to join us.

🧪 Crypto Academic Camp is back (with Uniswap Foundation)

The Crypto Academic Camp is back for a third year. A full week in the redwoods with leading researchers (invite-only), with the first two camps led to grants from the Uniswap Foundation, and multiple published papers. Runs June 14-19.

🌿 Welcome, Herasight

Our newest partner at Edge Esmeralda. They're building genetic screening tools that help families make informed decisions during IVF. The kind of work that belongs in a multigenerational community.

🏕️ Join the DWeb Camp, 8–12 July 2026, Alte Hölle (Berlin, DE)

Our friends at DWeb (an independent project founded by the Internet Archive) are running a five-day gathering in Berlin for builders working on the decentralized web.

Think censorship resistance, identity for the stateless, and data sovereignty. They've been bringing together builders, researchers, activists, and artists since 2016.

Early bird tickets are open, they're looking for volunteers, and the call for proposals is live.

On the horizon

Edge City India - Scouting Underway

We're actively scouting locations for Edge City India in Q4 2026. More details to come. Stay tuned and follow us on X/Twitter for updates.

Builder Spotlight: Keoni Gandall, Long Journey Resident @ Edge Esmeralda 2025

Keoni is trying to make biotech cheaper by automating wet-lab experiments. Before the residency, he was heads-down in the weeds.

During it, he completed a Pichia plasmid that lowered his own costs and opened a new product line, uncovered key lessons in DNA cloning, and raised $250K to extend his runway by six months. He even ran real DNA tests on-site from scratch-built hardware, which somehow ended with many loaves of CRISPR-edited grape-flavoured bread.

But ask him what actually mattered and he'll talk about the people around him. Living alongside other founders made the difference. The constant exchange and casual feedback reminded him that biology can be playful and powerful at once.

"I got back some of the joy of biology… small, stupid, unprofitable projects just for fun… in many ways, those projects can be very valuable."
- Keoni

Read the full Long Journey Residency recap here.

Want to build surrounded by people like Keoni Gandall?

✦ Zee Prime Deep Tech Residency — a dedicated Founders House with Zee Prime's investment team on-site. Application deadline, April 19th.

✦ Inflection Grants — micro-grants for early-stage builders under 25.

Apply at edgecity.live ☀️

Tell us what you are building!

One of the things we love most about this community is the incredible range of what people are building. We want to make sure none of it flies under the radar.

If you're working on something, share a quick update and help us keep a pulse on what's happening!

Share your project update→

What We’re Reading and Watching

Beyond Edge City, but still relevant to the ideas we're exploring:

BONUS RESOURCE: Camp Claw - Free AI Agent Course

A 4-week self-directed program for learning how to use OpenClaw and other AI agents. Free, beginner-friendly, and a solid way to catch up to the frontier.

→ campclaw.ai

Have you watched Endgame?

Our friends at Serotonin created the Endgame podcast to explore the trends, technologies, and power shifts quietly reshaping civilization. If you want to understand where the world is actually headed, this is the signal in the noise.

Host Amanda Cassatt will be bringing the podcast to Edge Esmeralda this summer, where she’ll be interviewing some of the brightest minds across the tech landscape.

“As nation-states double down on borders, nationalism, and readiness for war, some people are choosing not to wait around to see how that ends.”

Listen to this episode with Timour and Amanda on Spotify or watch it on Youtube.

The Serendipity Tracker (share a project update)

Did something good come out of your time at Edge? A company, a collaboration, a project, a friendship, a life change?

Sometimes these things take months or years to unfold, and we rarely hear about them unless someone mentions it in passing. We're building a running log of outcomes that trace back to Edge. If you have one, share it here.

We'll feature stories in future newsletters and on our site.

Submit an update→

If you attended Edge Esmeralda 2025 or Edge Patagonia 2025, we would love 12 minutes of your time.

Thou Ārt Research is producing the first cross-case study of pop-up cities (75 interviews, 48 communities) and both Edge editions are potential focal cases.

The survey covers governance, coordination, safety, and outcomes, feeding a public-good report designed to make future editions better for everyone who shows up. Your individual response carries real weight.

If you attended other past Edge editions, you can still take the general attendee survey and contribute to the broader dataset.

Take the survey →

Food for Thought

"The rise of IRL events and popup cities reflects something deeper than nostalgia. It’s less transactional than it used to be. The currency has evolved - from breadth to depth, from follower counts to being genuinely known by a tight group of people who matter. People who’ll vouch for you, pull you into rooms, and share what they’d never post publicly.”

- Angelica Vidal, The Demand for IRL Is Real

Whether you're applying to a residency, volunteering, bringing your kids, or just curious about what a month in the village looks like, we'd love to have you at Edge Esmeralda this summer.

As always, thank you so much for being a part of this community. See many of you in Healdsburg soon. ☀️

Timour & the Edge City team