Venture Studio Index - Jan. 3, 2023
Venture Studio Index - Jan. 3, 2023
2023 investment themes, another PE-backed venture studio, 3 new venture studios and 5 new startups
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Venture studio news
Andreessen Horowitz published its 40+ investment themes of 2023. These are the problem-areas large VC firms are looking to fund, and I expect to see many studio startups emerge to tackle them. Studios are particularly well positioned for several of them, thanks to the high-level relationships of their partners and their teams’ ability to diligence many potential verticals:
Compliance as a competitive advantage
Industrial robotics scale vertically
Modern bio software stack
Next generation of SaaS applications
Specialized labor marketplaces
The infrastructure stack for business banking
Value-based care stack
(a16z.com)
New PE-backed venture studio focused on compliance for the wealth management industry. Menlo Park-based Surge Ventures represents a few themes of successful studios:
Focused on building businesses in byzantine, regulated industries with difficult to obtain pilot customers
Backed by a strategic pool of capital, in this case software PE firm Virgo Capital
According to Surge Venture’s press release, the firm will both incubate new companies as well as pursue acquisitions. This may be a third theme we will explore later (WealthManagement.com)
Steve Blank, who created the lean-startup movement, published an overview of venture studios in Harvard Business Review (HBR.org)
CEO roles for upcoming studio startups
We have created a new page tracking every venture studio CEO role. This is a great resource for founders interested in partnering with a venture studio, and for anyone interested in themes of startups in development.
Create - Co-founder, Moby
“Create has identified an opportunity in the device as a service space, which is a multibillion dollar market. Small to medium-sized businesses need a cost effective, seamless way to procure tech devices for their employees. Moby provides monthly device rentals for SMBs that are affordable, flexible and seamless.”
Create - Co-founder, Wedsy
“Create has identified an opportunity in the wedding planning space, which is a multi billion dollar market. There is currently very little overlap between people who need help planning their wedding and people who can afford a wedding planner. To resolve this issue, we are building a best-in-class platform that connects newly engaged couples with wedding planners and designers at an affordable price. The company’s vision is to democratize the wedding planning and design process for newly engaged couples around the world.”
Platform Venture Studio - Founder In Residence, Smart Truck Routing
“Truck drivers can drive 11 hours a day, but drive on average for only 5 due to inefficiencies in matching orders and drivers. Assigning one driver to a long route limits speed to an average of 30 mph due to the regulatory limit of 11 hours max driving per 24 hours. Truck drivers spend a lot of time away from home, leading to strain on relationships.
We are looking for a founder who is interested in designing a two-sided marketplace to solve this problem. We think this solution could look like:
app or mobile web for drivers where they can find and pick up routes, and get updates and coordinates so they can successfully rendezvous for handover
a loadboard like solution where a trucking company can post a route and have it broken into segments that get pushed out to drivers
something else you come up with”
Redesign Health - Chief Executive Officer, SDOH Supplemental Benefit Platform
“We are launching a Social Determinants of Health vendor management and data optimization platform that enables payers to seamlessly offer targeted, high-impact, SDOH interventions to their chronically-ill members. This will be supported by an integrated, easy-to-use software platform enabling Community Based Organizations & health plans to collect high-value SDOH data, driving powerful analytics, improved health outcomes and member satisfaction. Health plans recognize the potential in SDOH support, but continue to face challenges in implementing programs to address members’ needs. By enabling health plans to provide customized SDOH benefits, Stealth Co’s end- to-end solution addresses key pain points and offers differentiated value, serving to close the care gap at the intersection of social determinants of health and chronic disease.”
Struck Studio - Chief Executive Officer / Co-Founder: Proptech
“This venture, still in stealth mode, is aiming to transform the traditional real estate rental model. With more and more companies embracing remote work, workers want flexible living arrangements that allow them to similarly evolve their personal lives. This venture aims to flip the traditional rental agreement on its head and enable location-flexible workers to live wherever they want whenever they want.”
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See every venture studio CEO role for a list of 50+ active startups in development.
Database additions
We added 3 additional venture studios and 6 startups to the database, which now totals 391 studios and 1,835 startups.
Note many recently launched studios and startups are still in stealth, so recent years are understated.
Submit studios and startups to data@venturestudioindex.com or reply to this email