HopStart cohort #2: the three startups we're backing next

Back in January, we welcomed the first group of founders into HopStart, our program designed to take infrastructure off the plate of early-stage teams so they can pour their energy into the products they're building.

Since then, applications for the second round have rolled in, and the bar has only gone up. As a reminder, each cohort runs quarterly and supports three startups with up to $50,000 USD in credits for bunny.net, regular touchpoints with our team, and early access to features and products before they launch more broadly.

Picking just three was genuinely hard. There were plenty of products we'd have loved to back. Ultimately, we look for teams solving real problems for their users, especially when bunny.net is a natural fit for the infrastructure behind their product.

Here are the three startups joining HopStart cohort #2.

1st place: Sublimly

Founder: Patrick Faust

Year founded: 2025

URL: https://www.sublimly.com/

Credits received: $50,000 for one year

In the founder's words: "Sublimly is a SaaS platform that empowers real estate agents, luxury brands, travel companies, and UGC creators to produce professional-quality videos and photos in minutes — without any design or video editing skills. Users upload their raw photos, and our AI-powered pipeline handles the heavy lifting: intelligent photo enhancement, automated background removal, smart cropping, and AI-generated copy tailored to each industry context. Users then select a template adapted to their vertical, and Sublimly programmatically generates polished, branded video content ready for social media."

2nd place: Writizzy

Founder: Hugo Lassiège and Thomas Sanlis

Year founded: 2025

URL: https://writizzy.com/

Credits received: $25,000 for one year

In the founders' words: "Writizzy is a European publishing platform designed as an open alternative to Substack or Medium. The goal isn't just to provide another CMS, but to give creators back control over their digital real estate. In an era of platform lock-in and centralized moderation, we provide a space where authors truly own their content and audience."

3rd place: ScratchUpload

Founder: Nathaniel Sturtz

Year founded: 2025

URL: https://scratchupload.org/

Credits received: $10,000 for one year

In the founder's words: "ScratchUpload is leading the way in privacy- and accessibility-focused image hosting for an underserved community: users of SimplyPlural and Pluralkit."

Apply for HopStart cohort #3

The window for the next round is open now. If you're building something with real ambition behind it, and you can see bunny.net playing a role in helping you get there, we'd love to hear from you. Submit your application via the short form before May 31.

If you applied previously and didn't make it through, please don't take that as a ‘no’ for good. Fit shifts from one round to the next, and what didn't land before could be exactly the right fit this time.

We'll share the cohort #3 lineup in July.

We can't wait to see what you've been working on!