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 eight sectors, from healthcare to creative industries.
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
🏆 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 550 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
🏥 Healthcare AI
Diagnosis, drug discovery, patient care
🏭 Industrial AI
Manufacturing, supply chain, predictive maintenance
💰 Financial AI
Trading, risk assessment, fraud detection
🛒 Retail AI
Personalization, inventory, customer insights
🎨 Creative AI
Content generation, design tools, media
🔒 Security AI
Threat detection, compliance, privacy
🚗 Transport AI
Autonomous vehicles, logistics, routing
📚 Education AI
Personalized learning, assessment, tutoring
The Slingshot Media
A walk through
Underpinning Research
The Slingshot was created by Ammon Salter (Warwick Business School), with Stefano Baruffaldi (Politecnico di Milano) and Federico Bignone (Warwick Business School), 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.