Venture studio news

Tegus interview transcript on Redesign Health. Discusses the process of bringing their startup Calibrate to market, as well as Redesign’s overall resources and value-add (Tegus)

Profile of Boston Venture Studio and its founder, Paul English (Kayak.com founder/CTO).

English and his crew, which includes former Kayak and Lola collaborator Paul Schwenk, is working on nine apps right now, with a goal of turning two or three into businesses by the end of the year. The BVS group, a mix of people based in the Boston area and in New York, works with a team of about 30 engineers at a Pakistani company called Arbisoft

(Boston Globe)

VCs may start producing fewer home runs and more doubles and triples.

But now suppose it’s 2015, and you just graduated college, and you’re thinking of moving out to San Francisco to start a B2B SaaS business. You don’t exactly know your chances of success, of course. But you know a lot more than you would have in 1975. The VC industry has compiled massive amounts of data on the failure rates and the exit valuations of companies in your space … And according to Frank Knight, this means you’d be less likely to make truly extraordinary profits … The established nature of the VC/startup ecosystem allows money to flood the space, which increases competition, which probably means fewer opportunities for huge first-mover advantages that lock in giant network effects.

But this kind of shift might mean that VCs need to adjust their strategies and their expectations. If returns are getting less positively skewed all across the distribution, it means that you’re going to need a larger number of successes than before. It might take 4 or 5 moderately big successes to compensate for the inevitable large number of failures, rather than 1 or 2 mega-successes.

While the article focuses on the VC industry, the trend is bullish for venture studios, a potentially better structure for launching startups with a high chance of survival (Noahpinion - $)

Venture Studio Index mentioned in FiveThirtyEight’s “Data Is Plural” column (FiveThirtyEight)

Pre-launch startup EIR / CEO roles

Diagram Ventures - Founder & CEO, Real-Time Rails as a Service

Within the next decade, the majority of account-to-account transactions in the US could go through the FedNow Service and the RTP Network. The last shift of this magnitude happened 50 years ago with the introduction of ACH...Our newest company is taking the burden of setting up and maintaining connectivity to the RTP Network, the FedNow Service and other rails off of financial institutions. Behind the scenes, the venture will set up sophisticated infrastructure involving a mix of dedicated hardware and cloud environments to connect to various rails.

Redesign Health - Chief Executive Officer, Hair Restoration Stealth Co.

Cosmic is a digitally native hair restoration multi-site clinic model that addresses the end-to-end spectrum of hair loss stabilization and regrowth needs for the modern patient. The company is creating a curated, personalized, and concierge-like experience for consumers, grounded in transparency and convenience with an elevated clinic experience, as well as remote access to care support through a purpose-built digital platform

TandemLaunch - Bioplastic Product Lead, Co-Founder (Canada)

TandemLaunch is on the cusp of launching a bioplastic startup based on a game-changing wood waste reactive extrusion process developed by a university partner. The material is sustainably sourced, water-resistant, heat-resistant, and mechanically robust (surpassing ABS and PLA). Most importantly, it is compatible with existing thermal-plastic processing techniques, which enables a smooth transition from fossil-based plastics to a carbon-negative alternative. We’re looking for a product co-founder

Database additions

This week we added 42 additional venture studios and 291 startups to the database, which now totals 303 studios and 1,556 startups.

Note many recently launched studios and startups are still in stealth, so recent years are understated.

Notable studio additions:

• Citi Ventures

  • Venture studio arm of Citi

  • Studio team of 47, founded in 2018, based in New York

  • 3 total startups, raised $76mm, employing 123 people

• Fisher Venture Builder

  • Studio team of 20, founded in 2017, based on Sao Paolo

  • 6 total startups, raised $11mm, employing 477 people

• Zinc Labs

  • Studio team of 19, founded in 2017, based in London

  • 26 total startups, raised at least $30mm, employing 356 people

See data methodology and limitations for more info on the data.

We continually identify studios and startups from our team of researchers and submissions from the community. Please contact data@venturestudioindex.com or reply to this email with any additions.

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