Y1 Memo

After building our company quietly over the last few months, we believe the time has come to share our progress and ambitions with the world. We are officially launching Ryft, a pure-play venture studio.

Ryft's mission is to propel the next wave of B2B tech companies from APAC onto the global stage.

Over the next 10+ years, we will explore and validate ideas. Once they gain traction, we fund those ideas through pre-seed and seed stages while bringing in Founders-in-Residence (FiR) to grow our companies.

The capital to fund our companies will come from our first fund, Ryft Zero, which currently has $3M+ raised (goal of $5M closing in August) from an impressive collection of accomplished exited entrepreneurs and investors.

 

Why Now?

AI is the most essential technological advancement of the twenty-first century, poised to transform the world as profoundly as the printing press, steam engine, electricity, and the internet.

The AI revolution unlocks unprecedented business opportunities to drive innovation, efficiency, and growth. As organizations embrace AI's potential, they position themselves at the forefront of a smarter, more agile, and fiercely competitive landscape.

We want to be part of this transformation. With advancement happening at a rapid pace, businesses must respond swiftly to innovation, and there has never been a greater opportunity to unlock value.

By unlocking value, we mean more than mere chatbots or surface-level AI integration. AI's most profound impact occurs when it seamlessly integrates into products and services, resonating with human needs and aspirations.

 

Why Us?

Ryft will be exclusively run by experienced craftspeople, operators, and entrepreneurs. Our team focuses on being hands-on, turning great ideas into great companies.

I couldn't be more excited to have Chris Moore and Ben Morreau as co-founders and partners on both the studio and fund sides. Just among the three of us, there are years of expertise in building startups from 0 to 1 in multiple markets, our history of building exceptional digital products during our time at Roam Digital, and our building that studio through to an acquisition in 2021.

We will be deeply involved in founding our companies, actively engaging in product development end-to-end, participating in pitch sessions, crafting the technology, generating ideas, conducting research, and establishing standardized frameworks and processes to ensure the success of our ventures.

We can't wait to bring the best ideas to life and, with the help of our investors and founders, bring great companies to the world.

 

What are we cooking in the studio?

Our central thesis is building companies that utilize AI as a platform. We are committed to ventures where AI is not just an addition but a fundamental driver of capability, helping startup businesses run more efficiently and allowing us to build more with less.

We are exploring early opportunities in four key theme areas: Creativity & Productivity, Security & Compliance, Finance & Wealth, and Healthcare & Climate.

While our opportunities are too early to share much, I can say that we are very excited about our early explorations and the potential for SMBs to leverage agents as a system of action, from general-purpose assistants capable of performing everyday tasks to specialized agents designed for intricate functions like data analytics, marketing, human resources, and finance.

We are also developing our internal set of technology tools and building blocks to accelerate and lower the cost of product development, testing, and validation for all our companies. This allows us to take more bets with a higher risk tolerance, increasing our likelihood of finding winning ideas.

 

What's next?

We are building a portfolio of global B2B companies with a total value of $700M+ over the next ten years, and that is a long and complex road. So, we are starting with launching three to five great companies over the next couple of years.

The next few months and initial years will be all about validating Ryft as a big experiment, yet we are confident that staying true to our values, being curious, putting product and craft first, and being surrounded by great people you enjoy will help us pivot around the challenges that come our way.

We intend to keep sharing our journey as we go along so you will hear more from us. There is a lot to do and no time to waste.  

It's time to build.