About The Slingshot
The Slingshot is an interactive business simulation that puts you in the driver's seat of an AI startup. Over 16 quarters, you'll navigate the challenges of building a venture in one of twelve sectors, from healthcare and creative industries to food, sport, wellbeing and on-device AI.
Based on research, real entrepreneurship patterns and startup experiences, the simulation offers a rich learning environment where every decision matters. Will you bootstrap or raise venture capital? Focus on research or product development? Build in-house or partner strategically?
What's new in Version 2.2.1 (September 2026)
🚪 The last day
When a run ends in failure you watch the office close. The team shake hands with the founder and leave one by one, with a word each; the founder has the last word; the lights go down.
⚠️ A warning before the rescue
A quarter that will leave you short is flagged in the quarter brief, with the figures, and you play on. The one emergency rescue now comes only when the cash has actually run out.
What's new in Version 2.2 (September 2026)
🏢 The office
After you commit a quarter, you watch it happen in your office. Your team sit at their desks, go to the kettle, lie on the bean bags and say what they think of your decisions. The room changes as you pass each milestone: a garage, then an office, then a loft.
☕ Day one
Before the first quarter there is a short opening scene: the founder's welcome, the handshakes, the first complaints.
📮 The postcard
When a run ends the game draws a postcard of it, one picture of the whole journey. You can download it.
🤝 A community project
A short page before you play says who the game is for: students and educators, in non-profit education and research. Commercial use needs permission.
💷 Pre and post money
Term sheets now show the valuation before and after the round.
🏠 Rent
Moving into the office, and later the loft, adds rent to your burn, scaled to the city.
We have also made adjustments so that skilful play is better rewarded.
What's new in Version 2.1 (September 2026)
🤖 Ada, the venture builder
Bring your own idea. Ada turns it into a playable venture in a dozen exchanges and hands you a file the game reads. Meet Ada.
🗺️ Twelve sectors
Four new pathways: food, sport, wellbeing and on-device AI, each with full market depth, pivots and locations.
🎨 Rebuilt mini-games
The investor pitch and demo day are now illustrated scenes with sound, one set in London, one in Manchester.
🎓 Schumpeter
An end-of-game debrief: upload your journey report and reflect on the run with him. Meet Schumpeter.
♿ Accessibility
The game is playable by keyboard and screen reader throughout.
📮 Time-stamped play
Every run ends with a franked, tamper-evident mark on the report: unique run code, time played, pace of decisions. Built for assessment.
👥 More staff
Double the hiring pool, now with international hires, visa fees and UK immigration rules.
🃏 More decisions
The event pool has grown past 590 decisions, with a new set on living with LLMs: providers, outages, agents and the price list.
What's new in Version 2 (June 2026)
🏆 Competitive play
Benchmark your run against others in your class and against everyone who has played, if you want. Educators can set up in-class tournaments — at zero cost, with no personal information captured and no registration hassle. See Trajectory.
🌱 Seed
A new learner mode to help new players build knowledge and confidence: you start with more money and more attention. Competitive play is reserved for the Core version.
🎟️ Tokens
Adjust how much you spend on tokens to augment and extend your team's productivity — but be careful, tokens can be costly and volatile.
🧭 Market Opportunity Navigator
Gruber and Tal's "Where to Play" framework is now part of the game: invest in understanding your market opportunities before you pivot.
🔄 Milestones
For fun, your venture now undergoes a Doctor Who-style regeneration as you progress between milestones.
We have also expanded and improved the decision and events database, with new LLM-related decisions and a pruning of weaker events, and made tweaks that better reward skilful play.
The versions
Choose the version that suits you:
🌱 Seed
The learner mode. You begin with more money and more attention, so there is room to experiment and build confidence. Competitive play is off.
🎯 Core
The full challenge and the canonical version: less attention, less starting cash, live competition through Trajectory, and every decision at full weight.
🔥 Extreme
The sternest test, for players who have mastered Core: hidden stat effects, no advisor recommendations, and 20% less starting cash.
What You'll Experience
Strategic Decision-Making
Every quarter, you'll face critical choices about your startup's direction. Allocate your limited attention across research, product development, sales and marketing, and team building. Each decision creates ripple effects that shape your company's trajectory.
Realistic Events
Encounter over 590 unique events drawn from actual AI startup experiences and from the literature on technology venturing. A key engineer gets poached. A competitor launches a similar product. One of our researchers wants to publish an invention that might lead to a patent. A major customer wants to pilot your technology. Your regulatory landscape shifts. How will you respond?
Funding Dynamics
Choose your path to funding. Bootstrap and maintain control, or pursue angel and venture capital and accelerate growth. Navigate term sheets, understand dilution, and balance growth ambitions with runway constraints. Deal with funders expectations.
Team Building
Recruit key hires who bring different skills and perspectives. Manage equity splits, maintain team morale, and navigate the human dynamics that can make or break an early-stage venture.
Market Competition
You're not alone in this market. Competitors will race to the same milestones, raise funding, and vie for the same customers. Track your position in the ecosystem and adapt your strategy accordingly.
Multiple Pathways to Success
There's no single winning strategy. You need to align your resources to your strategy. You might need to pivot. You can be conservative or ambitious in your approach. The choice is yours.
Interactive Mini-Games
Experience key business activities through three hands-on mini-games:
- 🎪 Conference: Work your booth to generate leads
- 🎤 Investor Pitch: Deliver a 30-second pitch to VCs
- 🚀 Demo Day: Engage visitors and close deals under time pressure
What players say
“I really enjoyed the Slingshot AI startup simulation. It was a fun and motivating way to experience how business decisions are made under pressure.”
“I can attest to this! As a student pursuing my MSc in Entrepreneurship, I’ve played the game 30+ times. It’s great fun.”
Choose Your Sector
🧬 BioTech
Aether BioLabs
AI-driven protein design for healthcare applications. Deep science, high stakes.
🤖 Robotics
Vanguard Robotics
Autonomous robots for UK warehouses. Hardware meets software.
📊 FinTech
QuantFlow Systems
AI trading systems for the City. Fast money, faster competition.
🎨 Creative AI
DreamScape Studios
Generative AI for creators. Consumer-facing, culture-shaping.
🔒 CyberSec
CyberShield AI
AI-powered threat detection for UK critical infrastructure. High security, high stakes.
🌍 CleanTech
TerraMind Analytics
Climate prediction and sustainability AI. Save the planet, build a business.
⚖️ LegalTech
LegalMind AI
Contract analysis and legal research automation. Disrupting the Magic Circle.
📚 EdTech
EduSpark AI
Personalised learning that adapts to every student. EdTech meets AI.
🍽️ FoodTech
Voed AI
Food and drink, from kitchen to bin. Consumer trust is the whole business.
⚽ SportsTech
Arene AI
Data for anything with a fixture list. Clubs, studios and broadcasters as customers.
🧘 Consumer Wellbeing
Sorgente AI
Sleep, stress, movement and the ordinary business of getting through the week.
📱 Model Infrastructure
Avam AI
Small models that run where there's no connection. Sold to the engineers who build with them.
The Slingshot Media
A walk through
Credits
The Slingshot was designed by Ammon Salter (Warwick Business School), who built it with AI models, mainly Claude, and maintains it. He set the design, dictated the content and the educator materials and tested every build; the models wrote the code to his instructions. No studio or programmer was involved. Nothing in the game itself is generated while you play: every event, character and line of text was written in advance and checked and approved by him, so players only ever meet material that has been reviewed. Ada and Schumpeter, the two companions, are different. They run on Claude, on the player's own account, and were written to keep them from drifting; Claude was chosen for its stronger safety guardrails. Even so, a language model can make mistakes and say things that are wrong or inappropriate. The game came out of the ESRC-funded project Profiting from Science (ES/X003949/1), on which Stefano Baruffaldi (Politecnico di Milano) is co-investigator and Federico Bignone (Warwick Business School) is research fellow. Federico Bignone shaped the game's mechanics and systems and playtested every version, and his research on AI ventures and Innovate UK funding informed the game's treatment of the science base and grant funding. Cite it as Salter, Baruffaldi and Bignone (2026).
Underpinning Research
The Slingshot was developed as part of the ESRC-funded project "Profiting from Science: the development and valuation of Artificial Intelligence new ventures and engagement with the science base" (Grant ES/X003949/1). The simulation also builds on Innovation and Research Caucus-funded project on "Examining innovation funding lifecycle: assessing the impact of Innovate UK funding on AI new ventures" conducted in collaboration with Innovate UK.
The core part of our research is to map and understand ways in which UK-based AI new ventures develop and create value through their relationships with the science base. We also examine how they draw upon R&D grants (or not) and what impact these grants have on their development. Our research will create a comprehensive public dataset of UK AI new ventures and their engagement with the research base, which will be released at the end of the project.
The Slingshot is open source and free to use under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. We welcome educators and researchers to adopt it in their teaching and provide feedback.
Get involved
The Slingshot is an open, not-for-profit educational project, built and maintained by a small team alongside their other work. It grows and improves through use, and the most valuable contributions are not code:
- Tell us how you use it — the courses, formats and adaptations you have tried, and what worked. This shapes the materials, and we are glad to credit you.
- Share teaching materials — exercises, cases, assessments or translations you are happy for others to use, under the same open licence and with credit to you.
- Spread the word and cite it — recommending it to colleagues, linking to it, and citing it in your teaching all help a community project like this keep going.
- Send feedback and report issues — what confused students, what broke, and what you wish it did next.
However you would like to help, email ammon.salter@wbs.ac.uk. Public support and word of mouth genuinely keep a project like this alive.
