W01
Week
Intilaq is an incubator run as a competition. Five funded seats. Twelve weeks. One measurable number per team, fixed before week one and scored by people who build, operate, and invest for a living. Clear every bar and you leave with a working system, $21,000 kept, no equity taken, and applications in front of the investors who fund what comes next.
Not a course. Not a demo day with certificates. A published bar, real cash at each checkpoint, and a field that narrows until the number is hit.
Ten minutes: a form and a sixty second video. Any LAU student, or an LAU graduate from the last three years; more universities as founding members join. Teams of two or three, and one of you must be able to build the thing.
$1,000 lands on day one. So do lab and rig time, software licences, and the introductions to utilities and operators you cannot get on your own.
Weeks 2, 6, and 10. The expert panel scores your evidence against the published bar. Clear it and more money lands. Miss it and your run ends there, with everything already paid.
Week 12, in public, in front of investors and engineers. Your system hits the published number or it does not. If it does, you take $12,000.
Finishers leave with a working system, verified evidence, and applications written for the programmes that write the first real cheque.
Five teams. $1,000 each on day one. The bar for every checkpoint is already published.
You apply to a seat, not to a theme. Each vertical is a territory where a measurable win changes a real industry. What exactly you build inside it is yours; the number you will be judged on is fixed with the expert panel before week one.
Cut what a facility spends on power and prove the saving on live load, over weeks, without slowing anything down.
Find loss faster. Locate leaks with a fraction of the sensors. Cut waste by an amount a utility can verify.
Run real workloads on less silicon and less energy, at the same accuracy, measured against an off-the-shelf baseline.
Two of the five seats are open to any field. Health, agriculture, logistics, materials, finance: it qualifies the moment it carries a number we can measure, a test we can run, and a deadline we can hold you to.
One number. One test. One deadline. Fixed with the expert panel before week one, published before you start, and judged exactly as written. If it cannot be measured, it cannot compete.
Every checkpoint number is published before the cohort starts and does not move after. Reviewers score evidence against it: measurements, logs, working systems. Not decks, not effort, not potential. The complete rule set ships with the application as a versioned document.
Investors, operators, and engineers active in each vertical score every checkpoint. Reviewer names are published when cohort one is seated. Any reviewer can request an introduction to any team at any point, including teams that were cut. A team cut at week six with three investors asking to talk has not failed at anything.
If no team clears a checkpoint, no team advances. The unclaimed money rolls into the next cohort and the bar stays exactly where it was. Winning here has to mean something, so it is allowed to mean nothing this time.
Not a share, not a warrant, not a right to invest later. You own everything you make, and applying signs nothing away.
We give you the number, the money, and the lab. No curriculum, no workshops, no fireside chats. Ninety minutes a week, and the rest of your time is yours.
Money paid is money kept, equipment included. Nothing gets clawed back, and you can enter the next cohort with the same idea.
$21,000 per team that clears everything. Up to $105,000 on the line each cohort. Every dollar paid stays paid at every exit, and whatever a cohort leaves unclaimed rolls into the purse of the next one.
Finishers leave with applications written for the programmes below, with people who have been through them. None of these cheques are ours to hand out, and none are promised. Our job is that you arrive with a working system and evidence a stranger can verify.
$125K for 7% + $375K uncapped · 3 months, San Francisco
Hard tech only · part cash, part in-kind engineering
Pre-seed on passing investment committee
Backs the individual before the team
Mentor density rather than lab access
Nine months of objectives, and cuts
This is cohort one. No logo wall, no testimonials, no total raised figure. Every programme you respect started at zero too. What exists today is the rule set, fixed before anyone applies: the bar is published, the money is published, and nobody takes a share of what you build. Five teams get to be the proof, and get to say they were first.
The Lebanese American University is the founding member. The remaining positions are open to institutions and companies that adopt the rule set unchanged.
Funds part of the purse, holds a seat on the panel, and its students and recent alumni are eligible to enter.
Adopt the rules unchanged, fund part of the purse, take a seat on the panel. Your students and recent alumni become eligible to enter.
Underwrite one published win condition and it can carry your name. You do not sit in the room that judges it.
Telemetry, test rigs, FPGA boards, lab hours, compute. In kind rather than cash, and at this budget usually worth more.
What partners never get: equity, IP claims, votes over the panel, or exclusivity. Published on purpose. Register your interest.
The winter break sits inside the run. No gate lands during it: week 10 is scored the week everyone is back.
Ten minutes to apply. Applications close 12 October 2026, 20:00 Beirut.
Work in the field? Join the review panel