The questions worth answering.

It is not written yet, and we would rather say that than imply one. Drafting the participant terms and waiver is on the list for the next ninety days, and the refund terms will be in that document, published before applications close.

What is already fixed is the mechanics around the seat. A payment link ships with the acceptance. You have 48 to 72 hours to confirm, and a seat that lapses is backfilled from a ranked waitlist. There is a hard cutoff five days before day one.

The reason there is a fee at all is not margin. A free programme fills with people who will not be there on day twenty, and payment is the cheapest available proxy for commitment. Completion rate is the metric that determines whether we have anything to show.

It gets disclosed. Not hidden, not reframed, not quietly dropped from the batch write-up. Saying what happened, including when it failed, is one of the five rules the brand runs on, and a batch record with no failures in it would not be worth anything to the people reading it later.

You will have seen it coming. There are public checkpoints on day 10, day 15 and day 20, where every team demos to every other team — the point of making progress visible is that stalling becomes visible too, and day fifteen is where it gets caught.

Mentor hours are not distributed evenly for fairness. They go to the teams that are struggling.

No. Ambition is the qualifier. One of the three routes into a batch is explicitly for people with no technical background who will build anyway, with AI tooling and with teammates who code.

AI tooling is how a non-technical builder ships in fourteen days. It is not the identity of the programme, and it is not a substitute for doing the work.

What does disqualify you: wanting a certificate, wanting to learn passively, or wanting capital without building. Those are downstream of us.

For most teams, nothing automatic. Catalysis23 does not have a fund yet. Fund I is a year four to five event, and until then any cheque is personal money, starting in years two to three. Nobody is guaranteed to be backed, and most of a portfolio never returns anything — that is the model, not a flaw in it.

What Demo Day does produce is real: a live pitch in front of mentors, alumni, investors and an audience, and the first look investors get at teams nobody else has seen. We open incubator referral relationships in year one specifically so alumni have somewhere to go that is not us.

We back the strongest, first. The rest keep their company, their equity and their decisions — that is true of everyone who comes through, backed or not.