This white paper explores the venture studio model. In doing so, we present the venture studio as a new generative framework central to boosting frontier tech ecosystems. Seen by many as an emerging asset class, venture studios efficiently reframe the dynamics between time to market, resources allocation, and capital structures that frontier tech startups need to become the next unicorns.

1. Building frontier tech startups
from the ground up
GENERATIVE
VENTURE
STUDIOS
White Paper
ADVANCED
MATERIALS +
MANUFACTURING
AM 2
S I N G A P O R E

2. AM
AM2 is the first Singapore-based venture studio
that creates and strengthens science-startup
projects in the advanced materials and advanced
manufacturing fields. We are on a journey to build
eight companies over five years. Will you join us?
www.am2.sg
2
Hello Tomorrow Asia Pacific is a mission-driven global
organisation that aims to accelerate the transfer of
deep technologies to solve some of our most pressing
industrial, environmental and societal challenges.
www.hello-tomorrow-apac.org
About
About

3. GENERATIVE
VENTURE
BUILDERS
Building frontier tech startups
from the ground up
GENERATIVE
VENTURE
STUDIOS
CONTENTS
04 Executive summary
06 The challenge of frontier tech
07 Key learnings in frontier tech
08 Understanding the venture studio model
09 A value-booster for frontier tech
11 Current state of operations
13 Key takeaways
14 The Singaporean scene
15 Conclusion
03 Generative venture studios: building frontier tech startups from the ground up

4. GENERATIVE
VENTURE
BUILDERS
EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
The turn of the 21st century has brought
about the accelerated digitization of the global
economy. Among an abundance of high tech,
startups and fundraising, one indicator has
remained stable: nine out of ten startups still
fail in their first two years of existence.
In this context, Singapore is no exception. Over
the last decade, more than 200 incubation and
acceleration structures have been created in
the Little Red Dot. Accelerators and incubators
provide startups with timed support including
advisory, expertise and infrastructure. They
work closely with local investors who provide
financial resources, such as venture capital
funds, family offices and business angels.
This has worked well in the digital space, but
we have yet to see the same results for frontier
technologies. We believe the dual vision of
supporting startups—constrained timing on the
one hand, money on the other—generates
discontinuous, incomplete and ultimately
insufficiently effective coverage of the needs
of frontier tech entrepreneurial projects.
Financial support is challenging as investors
favor low technical risks. The local frontier tech
ecosystem is still nascent and coming to terms
with how to adequately support the kind of big
idea, research-driven innovative solutions
Singapore needs to be developing.
The venture builder model—aka ‘startup
factory’—seeks precisely to rethink this
relationship and fill the space. By enacting a
much more hands-on and collaborative
approach, venture builders actively make
investments in frontier tech projects safer
while supporting entrepreneurs who need
more time to develop disruptive solutions.
This white paper explores the venture studio
model. In doing so, we present the venture
studio as a new generative framework central
to boosting frontier tech ecosystems. Seen by
many as an emerging asset class, venture
studios efficiently reframe the dynamics
between time to market, resources allocation,
and capital structures that frontier tech
startups need to become the next unicorns.
04 Generative venture studios: building frontier tech startups from the ground up

5. KEY HIGHLIGHTS
01
The frontier tech scene is morphing
A new frontier tech ecosystem is taking shape,
with big ramifications for all players, most notably
companies, investors and startups. While the US
and Europe have been the forerunners in those
fields, Asia has started to catch up.
02
Singapore is a regional tech leader
Singapore is acknowledged as a global leader in
scientific research and boasts a dynamic startup
ecosystem which will mature over the next decade,
embracing its role of regional tech beacon and
anticipating the next waves of innovation.
03
New translational capabilities will be
key to further frontier innovation
Local operational forums whereby industry,
investors, entrepreneurs and researchers can
rigorously interrogate R&D and go-to-market
pathways are still rare in the region.
04
Writing collectively a Singaporean
frontier tech playbook
Most accelerators and venture capital firms
today do not work on the kind of frontier
tech big idea, research-driven solutions that
the Singaporean academic elite produces.
Universities
Institutes
Research
Corporations
Investors
Market
Generative
Venture
Studios
Fundamental
Science
Applied
Research
Product
Development
Prototyping
Production
Industrialization
Scalability
Bring business to science
Turn ideas and brain power into
industrial products and solutions.
Bring science to business
Raise awareness about frontier tech
in the business world and collaborate.
05 Generative venture studios: building frontier tech startups from the ground up

6. GENERATIVE
VENTURE
BUILDERS
THE CHALLENGE OF
FRONTIER TECH
06 Generative venture studios: building frontier tech startups from the ground up
In many countries, an obsession with digital
technologies and exponential growth has
captured entrepreneurial mindsets and
current innovation discourses and, with it, the
economic and political life of their ecosystems.
The venture capital model largely inherited
from a US market-centric philosophy and risk
perception strongly influenced how new
ecosystem entrepreneurial thinking has been
globally rationalised and operationalised.
As a consequence, the appetite for “fast tech”
became the norm motivating technological
entrepreneurship. Exponential growth thinking
has also permeated public policy globally in the
search of solutions for innovative statehood.
However, politics of exponential growth does
not embrace politics of technology when it
comes to frontier tech. While frontier tech
technologies offer society the opportunity to
solve grand societal challenges, the road to
market is a high-risk venture that requires
massive investments and hybrid venturing
lenses. The long gestation period means
returns are typically slower to materialize,
unlike for general consumer tech.
Across Asia, Singapore has one of the most
advanced startup ecosystems. Still, frontier
tech investments are still few and far between.
New innovation vehicles are necessary to keep
pushing the entrepreneurial scene forward.
Three areas need some collective attention:
• A new approach to market timing. Frontier tech
research and go-to-market pathways require
lengthy gestation periods. Behind each
discovery is years of research, requiring large
repeated rounds of funding. New hybrid models
such as venture studios, indie hard tech funds
and public-private partnerships will be crucial to
bring world-class research to market. More
must be done to leverage the fantastic efforts
made over the last two decades to build a rich
and dynamic fundamental science ecosystem.
• Availability of talent. The number of available
experienced professionals with both industry
and supply chain knowledge of how to
commercialize frontier technologies is a large
obstacle. Consequently, frontier tech
valorisation channels tend to stagnate, as the
ecosystem still lacks simultaneous depth and
breadth found in other high-tech hubs. A special
emphasis on talents and amalgamation of local
and international expertise is essential.
• The dawn of a local frontier tech venture
scene. The absence of a sophisticated frontier
tech community in Singapore results in startups
that end up having to look overseas for capital.
Few local investors view frontier tech venture
capital as a viable asset class. Venture returns
are still largely unproven in Singapore, while
returns for traditionally non-liquid, such as
real estate, are high. New models will help
demonstrate the value of hard tech.

7. GENERATIVE
VENTURE
BUILDERS
KEY LEARNINGS IN
FRONTIER TECH
Frontier technologies are novel and offer
significant advances over technologies
currently in use. Advanced materials,
biotechnology, blockchain, artificial
intelligence, drones and robotics, quantum
computing as well as photonics and electronics
make Hello Tomorrow and BCG’s list of top
sectors. They all require substantial R&D to
develop practical business or consumer
applications and bring them from the lab to the
market. Many of these technologies address
big societal and environmental challenges and
will likely shape the way we solve some of the
most pressing global problems. Frontier tech
venturing is more than ever a key endeavour.
The central roles in the development of new
scientific discoveries and their transfer to
commercial applications have traditionally
been played by large entities and institutions—
corporations, governments and universities.
These roles are increasingly augmented, and in
some instances replaced, by startups. The
shape of technology R&D, productization
and commercialisation is changing quickly.
Nowadays founders can start, test and scale
their frontier tech solutions with fewer
resources and considerably faster than ever
before. They benefit from technological
advances that have substantially lowered the
ignition costs. Longer development cycles and
higher capital needs, however, are still the
norm compared to their digital counterparts.
A global survey of 400 frontier tech startups
carried out by Hello Tomorrow and BCG back
in 2017 revealed that the five core challenges
faced by frontier tech startups were time to
market, capital intensity, technology and
scaling risks, and uncertain commercial and
regulatory pathways (see figure 1).
These challenges essentially stem from three core
characteristics of frontier tech startups:
• Non-conventional value propositions.
In frontier tech, product development depends
on fundamental research and/or advanced
R&D, based on the early combination of unique
skillsets, know-how, and infrastructure.
• Implementation in complex value chains.
Many frontier tech products require hardware
integration, involving the collaborative work of
specific experts and industrial stakeholders to
procure, prototype, manufacture, and scale.
• Intensity of the capital and labour needs.
The infrastructure, skills, and resources needed
by a frontier tech startup over its lifetime
require substantial capital allocation as well as
innovative or hybrid financing mechanisms.
Over the last years, support organisations such as
incubators, accelerators and investment firms have
adapted their approach to supporting the needs of
frontier tech startups, with limited success. In this
paradigm, a new operational model is expanding in
most mature tech ecosystems: the venture studio.
Time to market
underestimated by 40% of startups
Other
- Conservative market
- Find the right contact
- Aptitude to scale up production
Figure 1: core challenges for frontier tech
Source: Hello Tomorrow and BCG survey among 400 startups, 2017
Time to
market
Capital
intensity
Technology
complexity
Uncertain
go-to-market
Regulatory
framework
Other
reasons
07 Generative venture studios: building frontier tech startups from the ground up

8. UNDERSTANDING THE
VENTURE STUDIO MODEL
A venture studio is a structured organization dedicated to repeatedly
creating startups by providing human and financial capital from day one.
A venture studio is an entrepreneurial
project with a top-gun team of founders,
unique expertise, requisite capital, strong
networks and the singular ambition of
building on these capabilities to develop
and scale ventures over a few years.
Most studios originate the ideas and
projects they develop. They do not join
entrepreneurs or existing projects but
initiate and mature them. They generate
ideas, establish the base value proposition
and engineer possible economic models
before spinning off startups that are led by
partners and managers within the studio.
In order to create and develop successful
ventures, a studio acquires long-term
assets: teams, methodologies, know-how
and technologies. A fundamental
characteristic is the provision of everything
that is necessary for an idea to come to life
from the start, in particular the combination
of human and financial resources.
This is especially relevant in the frontier
tech space. It’s no longer the era of fail fast
and break things. Instead, we are entering
an era of articulated development of
technologies that provide long term value-
based businesses and performance.
08 Generative venture studios: building frontier tech startups from the ground up
The industrial analogy of being a ‘startup
factory’ defines the key principles of a studio:
• Reducing operational venturing costs.
Built around a multidisciplinary team and
(often) a technical platform, venture
studios make it possible to generate
significant synergies, both in market terms
(startups share their sectoral knowledge or
even their clients) and in terms of costs
(pooling of skillsets, know-how and tools).
• Consolidating the company building
processes. Repeating the startup creation
journey with consistent quality is a key
objective for studios that differentiate
them from solo (and riskier) approaches.
• Balancing project risk and value. For a
studio, a project is not "doomed" to become
either a major success or a total failure. For
example, it can remain small but develop
technologies used by other internal
ventures. This ability to share between
them spreads the risk for studio investors.
• Mastering market timing. From ignition to
exit, based on a flexible and bespoke relay-
race approach, the support duration is
longer for a venture studio, often several
years. This is the opposite of the “spray
and pray” and ”winner takes all” strategies.
• Gathering the best capabilities, at all times.
The multidisciplinary and operational
support provided by venture studios
involves constant proximity to venture
leads. The studios are also often called the
"third founder" by reference to the typical
pattern of regular entrepreneurial teams.
A venture studio can be seen as
the hybrid form, within the same
initiative, of an investment
vehicle, a prototyping company
and a long-term accelerator.

9. A VALUE-BOOSTER
FOR FRONTIER TECH
Highly intensive and generative capabilities
09 Generative venture studios: building frontier tech startups from the ground up
As a hybrid asset class, the venture studio model is a perfect candidate to develop and scale frontier
technologies, building on its capacity to “manufacture” companies. The model calls for specialization,
the mastery of sectorial value chains as well as portfolio defensibility.
1
• A distinctive degree of specialization and
market knowledge. In frontier tech, studios tend
to offer very advanced technical know-how and a
unique access to laboratory and prototyping
equipment in addition to traditional forms of
support (e.g. strategy, HR, back office). The high
levels of specialization, resources, network
alongside productization and industry familiarity
constitutes a hefty moat against competition.
• A generative capacity to launch ventures.
The venture studio capitalizes on emerging
transformational technologies and their capacity
to serve as generative mechanisms for disruptive
innovation and entrepreneurial opportunities.
They reproduce innovation success better than
individual entrepreneurial stories, capitalizing on
collective best practices, learnings and networks.
• A “manufactured” portfolio strategy balancing
ambition and collective defensibility. A studio
portfolio is able to aggregate assets not meaningful
(and often not even conceivable) to an individual’s
entrepreneurial journey, but whose impact is
critical for the whole studio performance. Market
and technical expertise both generate and leverage
knowledge inside the studio: every learning, action,
and failure is internalised, digested and re-used.
• The availability of human and financial capital
from the start. To progress from running lab-based
experiments to prototyping products, frontier tech
requires investment and support at a very early
stage. But typically, significant investment is hard
to come by without a running prototype, which
puts many founders in a catch-22 situation. On the
contrary, the venture studio model brings
experience and capital as soon the startup ignition.
• A collection of projects spearheaded by a top
operational team. The scientific and engineering
challenges of frontier tech startups are great, and
each project requires talent—people with key
knowledge and experience. From the start, studios
provide an interdisciplinary team of doers, from
product managers to industrialists, and attract
managers and entrepreneurs along the way.
• A degree of internalization calibrated to
accelerate the portfolio . To ensure relevant tech-
to-market support, venture studios have internal
teams that are able to internally support core
developmental themes while others are entrusted
to partners in their network. For example, studios
can internally create hardware prototypes, while
individual ventures might need to call on external
design offices, studios and laboratories.

10. • A different approach to go-to-market and
venture alignment. Alongside the potential for
wide-reaching applications and problem-
solving, science-driven ventures are often
distinguished by significantly longer time-
frames and specialised resources needed to
take their innovations from the lab to a
product. As a “third founder”, the studio is
built to support this journey over the years.
• A scalable process organized as a relay race.
The scaling journey of frontier tech is long and
arduous, requiring the navigation of multiple
phases and challenges. While frontier tech
startups are just as likely to exit as regular ones,
it can typically take close to ten years to see
returns, versus the usual three to seven years.
• A different approach to pivoting and value
generation. Some science startup projects will
pivot and change direction altogether. Much
more flexible than an accelerator or a fund, a
studio, while aiming for success for each
project, can adjust its support for each startup,
both in terms of duration and resources.
A VALUE-BOOSTER
FOR FRONTIER TECH
Bespoke value and equity story
2
The venture studio model features a business model structured on building startups. It may seem
simplistic, but that is exactly what venture studios are about. Unlike investors or innovation programs,
venture studios not only provide capital, but are also hands-on and engaged in the startups they co-create.
• A strategic and operational view of value
creation. Venture studios resemble venture
capital firms in that they grow a portfolio and
own shares of the various businesses they
develop. The scope of their activities
encompass the entire process of designing,
developing and strategically managing the
enterprises in which they participate.
• A strategic view of equity. Shareholding
varies a lot at the time of spinout. Most venture
studios are in the 40-60% range, especially
when working in the frontier tech space or for
corporations. Studios closer to the accelerator
model tend to keep a lesser portion of shares.
This is no surprise. The venture builder keeps
a board seat and acts a co-founder. Issues
such as employee compensation, key hires
and partnerships all require the flexibility to
reallocate equity accordingly. A venture studio
has the latitude to reorganize the cap table of
the spinout in order to be “attractive” for a
roadshow with more traditional venture capital
firms or to bring talents in.
10 Generative venture studios: building frontier tech startups from the ground up

11. CURRENT STATE
OF OPERATIONS
1
2
3
4
STUDIOS
HUMAN CAPITAL
FINANCIAL CAPITAL
STARTUP FACTORY
+
-
Open—opportunistic—studios
No specialization, various ideas
Mostly external resources
(e.g., Bam Ventures, Atomico, Expara)
Financial studios
Mostly built around financial support
Closer to accelerator VCs
(e.g., Idealab, Pioneer Square Lab, Science Inc.)
Service-driven studios
Providing HR and expertise, mostly invoiced
Closer from specialized incubators and consultancies
(e.g., Colab, venture builder consulting services)
Value-driven studios
Strong interaction with corporates, governments
or universities to ignite and develop projects
(e.g., Prehype, Techno Founders, Post Urban Ventures)
11 Generative venture studios: building frontier tech startups from the ground up
In maturing markets, venture studios can make up for patchy ecosystems. The ability of studios to
attract human capital, to retain knowledge, and to grow networks of potential investors compensates
for ecosystems that are not as deep as already mature markets like Silicon Valley, Boston or Shenzhen.
Many challenges await the founders and builders in a maturing field or frontier tech space in which
problems like lack of calibrated investment culture, excessive bureaucracy, a shortage of skilled labour
and long development cycles are commonplace. The venture studio model helps frontier tech
entrepreneurs in all these aspects, allowing founders and managers to spend more time on product
development and growth. Spinouts from a venture studio can access and leverage the same processes,
resources and talents present in mature collaborative ecosystems that facilitate synergistic
entrepreneurship. Studios focus on expertise scalability as much as market scalability.
The venture studio structure facilitates connections and alleviates costs among the studio’s projects,
providing enormous benefits in terms of efficiency.
- -
An easy way to categorise today’s existing venture studios consists in segmenting them in accordance
with the flexibility of their operational frameworks, as well as their provision of financial and human
resources. For frontier tech, value-driven studios are a booming sub-category: they operate in specific
ways, being more guided from the outset of ideas by strong links with industrial groups or universities
who submit specific innovation themes to them.

12. GENERATIVE
VENTURE
BUILDERS

13. KEY TAKEAWAYS
The 7 pillars of the model
A powerful human and financial capital.
Venture studios are all about sharing resources
and talents from the start, and leverage hands-on
these capabilities on a portfolio of startups.
A prolonged support period.
This duration is generally long for a venture studio,
often several years from the idea stage to the
profitable commercial development of the startup.
A high level of specialization.
To guarantee the performance of their operational
teams, venture studios specialize in creating
several startups per sector, often choosing one.
A long-term venture alignment.
The studio, at the origin of the projects and "third
founder" is, by nature, totally invested alongside
the managers in the success of each startup.
A solid and flexible capital holding.
As the creator of projects, a venture studio “starts
up” with 100% of an idea, while an accelerator or a
fund “starts up” with 0% when it does.
A natural propensity to collaborate.
A venture studio thrives on shared solutions,
shared talents and shared growth, which in turn
result in reduced costs and better applied efforts.
A balanced repartition of risks.
The core team and partners usually search for
hotspots for innovation and proactively conceive
new businesses, spreading the risk over the value
chain to ensure traction and defensibility.
13 Generative venture studios: building frontier tech startups from the ground up
GENERATIVE
VENTURE STUDIOS

14. THE SINGAPOREAN
FRONTIER TECH SCENE*
Academia and national agencies
Active corporations
National supporting bodies
Local industrial clusters
Non profits and clubs
Venture capital firms
Accelerators and accelerator VCs
14 Generative venture studios: building frontier tech startups from the ground up
* Non-exhaustive list

15. GENERATIVE
VENTURE
BUILDERS
CONCLUSION
Frontier tech is no longer the primary purview
of deep pockets or of the scientific community.
Scientific innovation is a much more
fragmented and diverse endeavour than
ever before - geographically, functionally,
and industrially. Clearly, a new frontier tech
ecosystem is taking shape worldwide, with big
ramifications for all players, most notably
corporations, investors and entrepreneurs.
While the US and Europe have been the
forerunners in those fields, Asia has started to
catch up. Singapore in particular aims to
become a global node of frontier technologies,
innovation and enterprise. The country is
already acknowledged as a global leader in
scientific research and IP protection, and boasts
a dynamic and growing startup ecosystem.
Recently, a string of national schemes have
helped catalyse frontier tech investments and
made the risk more palatable for investors to
consider shifting their investments from
general technologies to frontier tech. But this is
just the beginning, and a major cultural shift is
expected to strengthen these first efforts.
Looking at the current generation of local
frontier tech startups, we predict a bright
future for venture studios in Singapore. The
model constitutes a new approach to creating
innovative businesses which has learned from
the recent but rich history of hundreds of
incubators and accelerators. Studios set
themselves apart through deep expertise,
bespoke resources, approaches and cultures.
We strongly believe that venture studios
are relevant in addressing the technicalities,
complexities and risks involved with the
frontier tech fields. Nowadays it isn’t enough
to work hard. One must work smart to
achieve exponential success—and venture
studios emerge in this exact scenario.
In order to thrive and be impactful, venture
studios should not remain a collection of
independent initiatives but seek to become a
sector that is structured and developed.
While sharing stories and best practices,
venture studios will confirm their model
relevance with the emergence of the first
frontier tech unicorns and decacorns.
15 Generative venture studios: building frontier tech startups from the ground up

16. AM2 is the first Singapore-based venture studio
that creates and strengthens science-startup
projects in the advanced materials and advanced
manufacturing fields. We are on a journey to build
eight companies over five years. Will you join us?
www.am2.sg
Hello Tomorrow Asia Pacific is a mission-driven global
organisation that aims to accelerate the transfer of
deep technologies to solve some of our most pressing
industrial, environmental and societal challenges.
www.hello-tomorrow-apac.org
About
ANTONIO
CASTRO NETO
SCIENCE
PIERRICK
BOUFFARON
VENTURING
FLORIAN
DOETZER
INDUSTRY
XINYI
TOW
INVESTMENT
ERNEST
XUE
ECOSYSTEM
CONTRIBUTORS
16 Generative venture studios: building frontier tech startups from the ground up
Disclaimer
The information, analysis and opinions (the “Content”) contained herein is provided as a source of information. While the authors endeavour to ensure
that the Content is correct as of the date of publication, the authors do not warrant the accuracy or completeness of the Content. The authors shall not
be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, punitive, or consequential damages or expenses (including loss of profits or revenue, business interruption,
loss of data, or failure to realise anticipated savings or benefits) arising from or related to the Content.
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About

17. ADVANCED
MATERIALS +
MANUFACTURING
AM 2
S I N G A P O R E