Crane

We Believe the Future Belongs to Synthesists. Today we announced $484 million across multiple investment vehicles - nearly half a billion dollars to invest from inception through seed across Europe, the US, India, and Asia-Pacific. We are excited about the capital. We’re even more excited about the much bigger search space it creates. Specifically, the ability to find more synthesists. A synthesist isn’t a generalist. They go deep in one discipline but refuse to stay inside its boundaries. The physicist who ships software. The biologist who thinks like a machine learning researcher. The materials scientist who understands computation. We think more of the world’s important companies will be built by people like this. For most of history, becoming fluent in a second discipline was expensive - another degree, another career, or an unusual set of life’s stepping stones (h/t @kenneth0stanley). AI is collapsing that cost, at the exact moment many of the hardest problems in science are becoming computational problems too. The interesting opportunity isn’t on either side of those combinations. It’s in the space between them. The next great category may not exist yet because the disciplines required to create it have only just learned how to speak to each other. This is the idea behind our Meridian Principle: human progress accelerates when extraordinary people connect ideas across disciplines, cultures, and generations. @BoydVarty writes in The Lion Tracker’s Guide about following the track rather than fixating on the destination. Venture at its best has that quality. You follow exceptional people. You notice unusual intersections. You stay curious about things that don’t yet fit a category. Occasionally those tracks converge into something much bigger than anyone planned. Consensus is good at pricing categories that already exist. Venture returns come from recognising the ones that don’t. The search and adventure space just got a lot bigger. We intend to spend the next chapter following the most interesting tracks and stepping stones we can find. Thank you to all of the Founders and LPs that have entrusted us to be their partners.