The age of leaving uni actually varies quite a bit across Europe, so we get a fair number of applicants above that range.

We try to build the cohorts to maximize the number of potential co-founder pairings and part of that means it has to make sense for people to cofound together; i.e. for them to roughly have the same levels of experience.

It's also about being able to get the best people. We're very focused on finding exceptional developers, exceptional senior developers are often CTOs or leaders in major companies with strong networks and the ability to easily raise money and build teams without our help.

Exceptional junior developers are often still in lower level positions at places like Google or in hedge funds; we're offering them an opportunity to be more than just a cog in the system and that's what we're finding attracts them to us.

I am also interested to know. Could be because they're (generally) cheaper?

Generally speaking the developers who apply to us aren't optimizing for salary today; if that's what they want then they'd be much better off working for Google/Facebook/Stripe/etc rather than founding a startup.

The amount we invest is enough to cover cost-of-living for the founders so they're able to focus on building their startups (it's roughly similar to other accelerators), but anyone building a startup should appreciate that it'll involve trading-off near-term salary for longer-term gain.