Prospinity, which allows college students to share their future incomes, just raised $2 million

Samvel Antonyan, Andrea Zanon, Aarya Agarwal, and Andrea De Berardinis founded Prospinity.

When they were freshmen at Yale, Aarya Agarwal and his roommate, Samvel Antonyan, struck a handshake deal.

If either of them ever started a company that went supernova, they would sign away 10% of their income to the other.

“We shook hands, and at the moment it was a bit of a joke,” Agarwal said. “But we realized the deal actually made a lot of economic sense. It was a way to multiply by two times our chances of doing something super improbable.”

Now, their startup, Prospinity, allows college students to enter into similar contracts. Through its platform, smart young people can join “success pools” of other smart young people who put a percentage of their annual income into a shared pot. Each year the pot gets distributed evenly among the group. The idea is that if one of them becomes the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, they’ll all succeed.

Just a year old, Prospinity is already used by students at Yale, MIT, Princeton, and Harvard with job offers at firms like Blackstone, Bridgewater, and Amazon. Now Prospinity has raised $2 million in a round led by Slow Ventures’ managing director, Kevin Colleran, to reach more students beyond the Ivy League.

Prospinity and Slow Ventures declined to comment on the valuation. Patrick Chung, a managing partner at Xfund who invested in Sam Altman’s first company, Loopt, also joined the round.

Slow Ventures has explored income sharing as an investment strategy before. It set aside $20 million from recent funds to buy equity in influencers, taking a percentage of their future profits for a set amount of time in exchange for up-front capital. Regulatory filings show that Slow is raising $275 million across two new funds, which Fortune first reported.

Colleran said the firm was “instantly interested” in the model Prospinity was developing, describing it as part insurance policy, part lottery ticket.

“I can also see this spreading to the point where,” he said, “students who have never met (likely at other schools) choose to pool together to diversify the types of students and career paths that will be in their pod. For example, a Wharton finance major may want to pool with a Stanford computer-science major, an MIT AI software developer, a Yale law student, and a Harvard medical student.”

How Prospinity works

When Prospinity rolls out to a new university, it researches the student body and selects a handful of high achievers to create or join a success pool. They can hop on Prospinity, check out the profiles of existing members, and filter by university or industry. Prospinity is now recruiting students from the University of California, Berkeley, to join the platform.

Prospinity says the contracts are legally binding and can ensure everyone pays their share over the agreement’s term, typically 10 years. Pool members can also set a minimum income; if someone’s earnings fall below the threshold, they’re excluded from that year’s distribution. Prospinity takes a 5% distribution cut in exchange for providing the technical and legal infrastructure to execute the contract.

While the company’s hundreds of members are mostly still in school, they can start collecting distributions as other pool members contribute.

Agarwal, who studied computer science and economics at Yale before dropping out to focus on Prospinity, said the company’s premise was loosely based on the power law, a principle in venture capital that describes how a small number of investments often create the majority of returns while the rest break even or fail.

“As markets get more efficient, you’re going to see more and more of these distributions where a few people make it big and then everyone else tends to be left behind,” Agarwal said. “I think success pools are going to be a very important way to hedge against that sort of uncertainty.”

The company’s founders — Agarwal and Antonyan along with Andrea Zanon and Andrea De Berardinis — belong to a larger success pool that agreed to share 2% of their income over a 10-year horizon.

Prospinity rolls out to more students

Hassaan Qadir, a Yale senior who took a semester off to start a company developing software for biology researchers, joined a Prospinity pool. He later folded the startup and accepted an internship at AppLovin, a Palo Alto company that provides marketing services to mobile-app developers. Qadir plans to start another tech company someday and said being part of an income-sharing agreement with other founders gave him more chances of hitting the entrepreneurial jackpot.

Law-school students, finance associates, and aspiring entrepreneurs compose his success pool of about 30 members.

“Theoretically, someone that you know is going to become really successful,” Qadir said. “It’s not totally up to who works the hardest.”

Aron Ravin, another member of that Prospinity pool, hopes to capture some upsides of being an entrepreneur as he climbs the corporate ladder. He joined that pool during his senior year at Yale and now works as an associate at a prominent hedge fund. Ravin stands to make good money in finance, though he said he may not hit the jackpot as someone starting the next Uber or Palantir might.

Ravin declined to share how much of his income he’s contributing to the pool but said it was between 1% and 5%. At a Prospinity mixer in New Haven, Connecticut, he mingled with some international students working on a sustainability venture, which got him thinking.

“It’s a little promiscuous of me,” Ravin said, “but maybe I’ll join another pool in the future. Share the love.”