Entrepreneurship is the new black. With startups like Uber or SpaceX becoming exceptionally successful and their founders commanding the same attention as movie stars, a lot of people are considering setting on an entrepreneurial journey. However, while some stories of success may create an illusion that accomplishing this journey is ‘going it alone’ process, it is still an endeavour that requires a reliable partner.
While many people have a clear vision of what their startup will be focused on, they still lack an experienced team, enough funding, relevant knowledge and understanding of the market.
There are many reasons why startups with interesting ideas fail: from the absence of good leadership to the lack of investment. Also, there is no way one can build a company without an experienced team that brings together expertise in marketing, accounting or other fields essential for the company’s effective functioning. This is where venture studios come to the rescue: not only do they offer funds and mentorship, they become committed partners who lead the business to success fast and efficiently. According to some estimates, “studios’ startups get seed funding twice as fast […], and exit 31-33% faster than usual startups”.
60% of all companies created out of studios make it to Series A, says GSSN research paper. Its authors analysed a few hundreds of startups launched with the help of studios and compared time to every round and financial metric with those of traditional startups. The results show, that the studio approach helps to achieve 30% better results “as they build repeatable processes, focus on their specific expertise, have skin in the game from day one as an institutional co-founder, and provide financial resources”.
Since studios do not act as one-time investor and rather become partners, they help to build a solid team of experienced professionals, who will assist with different aspects of business. Advisors’ expertise in the relevant fields will also bring a wealth of knowledge that startup founders may not always possess.
In addition to experience and knowledge, studios make sure business takes care of two things: money and time. Venture studios employ a serial approach to entrepreneurship, which means they launch up to 5 startups every year. This allows studios not to wander in the darkness of the venture world, but to follow the established paths with little errors. Authors of GSSN report calculated that “studios reach seed round 25.3 months faster than the traditional venture investment”. On average, studio startups go from day zero to seed round in 10.7 months, calculated the authors of the paper, while a traditional startup is roughly three years old by the time it raises a seed round.
Studios also take care of the funding of a startup. If the studio uses their own money, business co-founders can focus on their main goal – building a company without worrying about compromises and looking for new investors.
With a such combination of resources, experience and the right spirit, it comes with little surprise that venture studios build successful companies and unicorns. In 2022, for instance, Spendesk, a French b2b fintech that has built an all-in-one corporate spend management platform, became a unicorn. The studio behind it, Hexa, is known for at least three unicorns (others being Front and Aircall).
So if you are looking for an early-stage partner on the global markets with a focus on the hottest niches, such as AI, here are some of the best options to consider:
SKL.vc focuses on building startups for a global market in the areas of generative AI, consumer apps, crypto & blockchain.
In addition to the in-house funds, SKL.vc has a team of advisors with profound knowledge in different areas of business and markets. The studio is known for analysing the market to select the hottest business niches and most actual trends. With such deep expertise on hands, the studio knows which direction to go and how to do that without wasting time: there is no bureaucracy or long meetings. As a result, they build successful companies and scale them effectively.
The studio focuses on startups at early stages and aims at building unicorns within the first few years. SKL.vc was founded by Artem Sokolov, entrepreneur and global investor with a portfolio that included 40 tech companies from Asana and Coursera to Payoneer and Udemy.
Over the years it has been on the market, SKL.vc has built a portfolio of different startups, such as Paige, Essai, Staige and etc that work in the verticals of AI, cryptocurrency and others.
London-based Forward Partners was founded by Nic Brisbourne in 2013, “one of the higher profile VCs on the European tech scene”. His investment portfolio, according to TechCrunch, included such companies as Buy.AT (acquired by AOL for $125m), Zeus Technology (acquired by Riverbed for $140m), WAYN, Tribold, Conversocial, StrikeAd and Lyst.
Forward Partners, like SKL.vc, focuses on early stage startups. It was among top seed-stage investors in the UK tech space in Q1 2023, according to Tracxn, a global SaaS-based market intelligence platform. The studio focuses on eCommerce, marketplace and applied AI. Their portfolio includes such companies as PocDoc, a digital health platform that allows to run tests to check cardiovascular health, and Heights, a company that produces plant-based supplements.
Paris-based OSS Ventures positions themselves as a studio that is set to develop and deploy industrial-scale technologies for sustainable and competitive advantage.
The founder of OSS Ventures, Renan Devillieres, says the studio creates “startups to change the world of operations”. The studio, which is an early-stage investor, focuses on applying digitalization to foster manufacturing processes.
Over three years, OSS Ventures launched 15 companies, including Stargazr that looks at the company’s data and suggests which actions have a more positive impact on its value using AI. “Of those 15 companies, 8 were from the series A and were live in a little over 1000 factories all over the world, and growing between 3x and 4x year on year at the portfolio to them”, says Devillieres.
