Alex Krug

Trying something new this week - a studio industry roundup with my take on what matters. The studio model is no longer an experiment being run in a handful of places. It is infrastructure being built across geographies, sectors, and institutional types. 5️⃣ stories from the past seven days:  1️⃣ OSS Ventures hit a EUR 40M first close on a EUR 75M follow-on fund -- capital raised specifically to back the 30 companies their studio created since 2019. The "build then fund" lifecycle is maturing. B'More Venture Studio with a similar thesis: studio operations first, then dedicated capital to scale what's working.  2️⃣ Delta40 raised $20M from 54 investors across 13 countries to launch Africa's first integrated venture studio and fund. The LP base is almost entirely DFIs and foundations. Impact capital is discovering the studio model as a deployment vehicle, something I seeing across geographies (conversations with Michael Bob Starr and Damias McDonald this week alone) 3️⃣ Start Holdings launched Start.vc out of NYC and Barcelona after a $200M EV infrastructure exit. Another operator-turned-studio-founder. This is the pattern we see quite often in our work at 9point8 -- experienced operators like Jason Goldsmith who've built and exited deciding the studio model is how they want to build next.  4️⃣ UBC HATCH admitted 10 new deep-tech spinouts for Winter 2026 -- mostly climate tech. University venture builders are quietly becoming one of the fastest-growing segments. Follow Evan Allen and Jaimie Testai to keep track of its rapid evolution.  5️⃣ The INVEST Act is advancing through the Senate. If passed, it expands qualifying VC fund size from $10M to $50M and loosens general solicitation rules for accelerator and university events. For studio-funds -- and for folks in the The Venture Studio Forum community tracking policy -- this could be the most significant capital formation legislation since the JOBS Act. If this roundup format is useful, I'll keep it going. What other noteworthy news hit your desk this week, and what stood out to you?

13

1 Comment

Every #VentureStudio GP knows some portfolio bets won’t hit. That's expected - and it's one of the reasons studios are such a powerful vehicle for innovation. And while a venture's failure might be what's visible to the outsider, what keeps them up at night isn’t failure at the venture level — it’s failure at the systemic level within the studio. One bad entity design. One IP misstep. One governance gap. That’s how studio operations fall apart. We break down how to spot (and fix) these cracks before they turn into fault lines in our latest paper, "The GP Dilemma" - DM me and I'll send you a copy!

4

What do creative technologists build? At Baukunst, we’ve spent the last few years answering that question in real time. We are a collective of builders — operators, designers, engineers, and investors — committed to advancing the art of building at the frontiers of technology and design. We lead pre-seed rounds with conviction, often as the first institutional capital a founder takes, and we invest deeply in the messy, magical early days of company creation. This deck is the portfolio behind that philosophy, or rather that portfolio that has grown up out of it. We have chosen to champion these companies, and they chosen to co-create with us. These are companies built by creative technologists, founders who think in systems, design for real people, and push beyond the familiar. 

55

6 Comments

You can always build something you’ve already sold. But you can’t always sell something you’ve already built. When I was at IDEO, I watched David Kelley say “yes” to client projects that sounded impossible - six-week timelines, half the budget, specs that defied physics. He’d nod, smile, and say, “We can make that happen.” Then we’d start sketching concepts and building prototypes in the shop, and before long, we had figured out how. Kelley knew it was easier to build toward a committed outcome than to sell an idea no one had asked for. I still see this play out with founders. Many fall in love with the thing they’ve already built - the clever piece of tech, the whiz-bang widget - and then realize nobody’s asking for it. The best founders uncover hidden demand and build products that bring to light opportunities that would otherwise remain unseen. That order matters. Start with the problem or opportunity, then design the solution.

184

29 Comments

AI doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does need to work for society’s most critical industries. From healthcare to defense, current solutions lack the deep knowledge to solve organizations’ highly complex use cases. Enter Trase, led by Grant Verstandig, Baskar Sridharan, and Joe Laws. Trase is combining industry-leading tech with deep domain expertise to deliver autonomous, end-to-end, turnkey agents designed to drive real ROI across highly regulated sectors, with compliance, trust, and security guiding their every move. Today, Trase launched out of stealth with $10.5 million in pre-seed funding from Red Cell Partners and VIPC | Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation. Learn how we’re enabling last-mile AI adoption across various enterprises, starting with healthcare, energy, and national security: https://lnkd.in/egJYdNKz

11

1 Comment

"We've become so insular in who we talk to and listen to, and I didn't realize how much that was keeping me in tunnel vision and tunnel thinking." Seth Levine, Co-Author of Capital Evolution and Partner at Foundry, talks about seeking out more diversity of thought on Tech Scenes Unplugged. #venturebacked #vcbacked #venturecapital #leadership #ceo #founder #operatingsystem #peakOS #foundermode

27

1 Comment

The NYT DealBook piece this week captured the software industry's identity crisis perfectly: $2 trillion in market cap wiped out, everyone slapping ".ai" on their domain, and VCs saying they see through it immediately. But there's a deeper question the article circles without landing on: If code is becoming commoditized — if anyone can build a product management system over a weekend with AI coding tools — what actually differentiates one organization from another? Not the technology. Not the interface. Not the sparkle emoji. It's judgment. The criteria your firm applies when deciding which opportunities to pursue. The reasoning behind why you said no to that deal in 2019. The pattern recognition your best people built over decades. The institutional knowledge that tells a new hire "here's how WE decide, and here's why." That's the asset that can't be generated by a coding agent over the weekend. And in most organizations, it's never been captured in any system at all. The companies that survive this wave won't be the ones that rebranded fastest. They'll be the ones whose institutional judgment was systematized before AI made everything else commoditized. Renaming yourself an AI company is a marketing decision. Capturing what actually makes your organization distinct is an infrastructure decision. We're building that infrastructure at Quantum Mosaic. #SaaS #EnterpriseAI #DecisionInfrastructure #QuantumMosaic #VentureCapital #FutureOfWork

3

1 Comment

Really fun to sit down with Dianne Na Penn, Head of Product for Research at Anthropic, right after the launch of Opus 4.5 to discuss everything about the new model. Dianne has been at Anthropic since the very early days as their first PM and has been instrumental in shipping many of Claude's most transformative capabilities over the past 2.5 years. We discussed how Anthropic builds models, what's actually working with computer use today, how they use Opus 4.5 internally, and why their safety focus is a competitive advantage. Some favorite parts: ▪️How Anthropic conducts research  ▪️How builders should think about computer use and what's newly enabled by Opus 4.5 ▪️What's next for models  ▪️How and why scaffolding and agent architecture have evolved A few takeaways: ➡️ What’s next for models Dianne's AGI timelines moved up this year. She explains the building blocks for transformative, long-running AI are largely in place. The bottleneck shifted from model capabilities to product innovation. She calls this a "product overhang": the challenge isn't whether models can handle ongoing responsibilities like code maintenance or portfolio monitoring, but designing the right experiences to harness them. What's needed: UX patterns for managing agent fleets, evaluation frameworks for long-horizon tasks, and products that move beyond chat toward proactive, persistent agents. ➡️ The evolution of scaffolding AI scaffolding underwent a fundamental transformation. In 2022-2024, most scaffolds were rigid instructions like training wheels keeping models on track. The best scaffolds today are lightweight augmentations using generic tools that maximize autonomy rather than constrain it. As models improve, successful builders iteratively remove parts of their scaffolds that no longer amplify intelligence. The builders who develop "model taste", maintaining libraries of ambitious prototypes and testing them with each release, discover breakthrough capabilities. ➡️ Why safety work is actually intelligence work Most safety discussions focus on preventing bad outcomes, but Dianne highlights an under-appreciated benefit: well-aligned models are better thinking partners. When models are trained to avoid sycophancy, they become independent thinkers that push back and offer genuine alternatives. This happened when she asked Opus 4.5 about pricing strategy: it generated approaches she hadn't considered. Check it out ⬇️ YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gDhVCfVB Spotify: https://bit.ly/3M90hS9 Apple: https://bit.ly/48giSEt

37

3 Comments