Zero-to-One Company Forge

Back better-formed startups
before the market prices them
Or commission the next one, built from scratch to your spec

Request the memo Commission a venture →

A company forge, not the thing
you're used to comparing it to

❌ Not a fund
❌ Not a venture studio
❌ Not an accelerator
❌ Not an incubator
❌ Not a single startup bet

01 Foundry is a company forge, a system that originates and shapes its own ventures from one founder's thesis and product vision. Investors back specific ventures or the entire forge. Enterprises commission complete ventures built to spec, and choose to invest, hold, or acquire them.

We originate our ideas and control
the company-creation moment from day zero

Venture creation has a spectrum. Accelerators select and coach. Funds select and finance. Venture studios go further — they shape companies from inside the company. That's why studios already outperform every other early-stage model (data in the next section).

Venture studios are already the best-performing class of early-stage investing.
We just don't operate like one.

Traditional studios still leak your capital — management fees, service fees, carry, generic portfolio noise, external founders chosen for studio convenience. We removed all of it. You keep 100% of the carry. You pay no management or service fee. You choose the specific venture. You back ventures built from one founder's own thesis.

Metric
Classic Venture Studio
01 Foundry
Management fee
2 – 2.5% / year
0%
Service fee on check
15 – 30% absorbed at your expense
0%
Carried interest
20 – 35%
0%, 100% to you
Origination
External founders + studio mix
In-house only
Allocation
Blind pool
Direct, you pick
Alignment
Partial, fees decouple incentives
Full, we earn only when you earn
Acquisition-readiness
Founder-led, high integration risk
Second-number CEO by design
Track A

Own ventures (default)

Originated from in-house thesis. Investors back specific ventures or the entire forge.

Track B

Build-to-acquire

Large corporations commission a venture built to spec: full company, team, product, validation. Invest from inception, hold any share, or fully acquire. Built from day zero with a second-number CEO.

CHAOS

CHAOS, the operating system we built
to make all of this possible

CHAOS is our in-house OS, playbooks for company creation, encoded in software. It coordinates best-in-class human specialists with AI agents in parallel, async workflows.

You can think of it as our equivalent to BlackRock's Aladdin.

20+ ventures of founder pattern recognition

Sergei has been building companies since 2007 across services, education, recruiting, events, venture initiatives, and crypto, in Russia, Indonesia, and the US. What kills a venture, what compounds, what's irreducible, that pattern recognition isn't available to a first-time or second-time founder. The forge runs on it.

CIS-grade talent at US-grade quality

Founder is from Russia, with a 20-year direct network into CIS talent. Each forge venture is staffed with world-class specialists at 5-10× lower cost than their US equivalents. For AI-software ventures (our current focus) talent is the dominant cost line, so 5-10× cheaper talent translates directly into ventures shipped 5-10× cheaper than the average US-built startup, without compromise on quality.

100% skin in the game.

Studios earn from fees. We earn only when our companies do.

The class you'd be entering,
and what the data already shows about it

Sources: PitchBook 2026, CB Insights, GSSN, Crunchbase, Startup Genome. 15-year data.

2×
Studio-built vs Accelerator-built unicorn rate
Venture Studios
1.40%
Accelerators
1.12%
Independent
0.75%

2× more likely to hit unicorn vs accelerators.

1 in 9vs1 in 42
Unicorn probability
Top 30 Venture Studios
Top 30 Accelerators

1 in 9 startups they build hits unicorn. Acc: 1 in 42.

11.64%vs2.40%
Success rate at $150M+ outcomes
Top 30 Venture Studios
11.64%
Top 30 Accelerators
2.40%

~5× more $150M+ outcomes vs top accelerators.

That's the floor of the class. Our model adds zero fee drag, direct allocation, and acquisition-ready architecture on top of it.

Building one company is hard. Building a forge
that builds them was supposed to be impossible

Three structural shifts in the last five years made it real.

// History

Systematic creation works, measured, not theoretical

Top studios outperform top accelerators 3-5× across every metric.

// AI

Cost and time of building collapsed

Multi-million-dollar 3-year cycles became tiny-team months. Teenagers ship unicorns now.

// Combination

Our edge: all three at once

19-year founder pattern recognition + best-in-class specialists + in-house human/AI OS.

Every industry is being remade. AI is the medium. Discipline is the wedge. We have both.

What's in the forge right now

CHAOS
AI · Enterprise OS
Problem

Modern organisations now run on people and AI agents in parallel. The existing OS-of-work was designed for humans, with AI bolted on. The result: fragmented context, broken workflows, no shared memory.

Solution

An AI-agent-first operating system, where human specialists and AI agents share the same workflows, the same context, and the same memory from the ground up. The same OS the forge runs on, generalised for any company.

imin
Events · Social
Problem

Event discovery, audience targeting, and meaningful connection are fragmented across half-broken platforms. People show up, but networks don't compound.

Solution

Infrastructure for events and the social graph around them, so each gathering creates lasting network value rather than evaporating after the venue empties.

MISE
Food tech
Problem

Healthy nutrition demands time, planning, multi-app coordination, and discipline most people don't have. Travel makes it worse.

Solution

An AI-guided nutrition workflow designed for actual behaviour: low-friction logging, adaptive recommendations, and a path into a broader food and wellness layer.

Unrole
Talent · Hiring
Problem

Hiring still runs on resumes and keyword filters. Real fit (capability, motivation, culture) stays invisible until late, expensive stages.

Solution

A talent-fit layer built around reusable, validated candidate profiles. Structured signal that travels across roles, replacing one-shot resume guesswork.

FeedBucks
Customer · Voice
Problem

Companies pay separately for surveys, reviews, UGC, and referrals, none of it routed back into action. Customer participation leaks instead of compounding.

Solution

A customer-participation engine. Feedback, content, and referrals flow into one incentivised action layer, tied to business outcomes, not vanity metrics.

Hey, corporates 👋

Your vertical Your market

This slot is empty for now.

It could be a venture we forge specifically for your strategic playbook: built end-to-end, plugged into your structure, acquirable cleanly.

You bring the wedge. We bring the system that's been building companies for 19 years. AI-coordinated, founder-led, no founder-departure risk.

Let's talk before someone else commissions yours.

Tell us what you'd build →
!

Descriptions above are intentionally general. Each venture targets a multi-billion-dollar wedge of an even larger category. We're confident in the depth of these theses, the product visions, and the operating angles. The substance (moats, models, point-of-view, current traction) is shared in private conversation.

From thesis to financeable
company in five gates

  1. 01

    Origination

    A new valid venture idea shows up every few days, on average. Most stay in a notebook. The ones that survive carry a clear wedge, credible timing, and pattern recognition from 20+ companies the founder has already built. Every venture starts here: one mind, then one decision. Not a brainstorm with consultants, not a corporate ideation sprint.

  2. 02

    Architecture

    Before any hire, the founder works through strategy, product logic, GTM, team design, and the full company architecture, the operating system the venture will live inside. This is the founder's super-power and the reason 01 Foundry exists as a forge format: to do exactly this part at full intensity, across several ventures in parallel, instead of being trapped inside one.

  3. 03

    Core team

    The first hires are best-in-class specialists who love their function. Not generalists, not "will figure it out" hires. People for whom product, sales, marketing, or operations is the thing they wake up wanting to do. Teams built this way move differently from teams built any other way. The founder's working belief: people compound when they love the work.

  4. 04

    Validation

    MVP into the market, with kill criteria explicit from day one. The forge is built around early signal, not around protecting founder ego. Ventures that earn the next gate get the next gate. The ones that don't, don't. Four bankruptcies survived earlier in the founder's career taught the difference between persistence and denial.

  5. 05

    Handoff

    At product-market fit a strong scaling CEO joins, the round is raised, the venture is handed over, and the founder shifts to board chair. The operator scales 1 to 10. The founder doesn't sit inside the company after that, by design. Zero-to-one and one-to-ten are different jobs; the forge keeps the founder pointed at the first one.

Three offers, one forge

01

Back the forge as a whole

For: LPs, FoF, family offices in LP-mode, sophisticated allocators.

What you get: a single allocation gives you exposure to the entire forge: every venture currently being built, and every future venture the forge originates. Studio-level economics with zero fee drag.

02

Pick a venture, back it directly

For: angels, HNWIs, family offices in direct-mode, follow-on VCs.

What you get: direct allocation into one or more specific ventures. Available at multiple stages, early-stage (most current ventures) through growth-stage as the portfolio matures. Structures include SAFE and priced rounds depending on the venture and the moment.

03

Commission a startup, built from scratch to your spec

For: enterprise corporates, CVCs, board-level and founders of large companies.

What you get: a complete venture built under NDA: co-founder/CEO, team, product, GTM, validation. You can invest from day zero (often significantly cheaper than acquiring later), hold any share, fully acquire when ready, exit partially, or sell to a third party. CEO is wired as second-number from inception, so there is no founder-departure risk by design.

Deep dive →

VC funds: deal-flow sharing, follow-on relationships, partnership conversations. We don't invest in other people's startups, our capital and energy go into ventures we originate, but we welcome anyone joining ours at the right stage.

Strategic partners, operators, advisors: open conversations about how you might engage with the forge or a specific venture.

Commission a startup,
acquire it cleanly

Internal innovation inside corporations rarely produces real startups, and is wildly expensive (corporations overpay by default, structural inefficiency is baked in). Acquired startups die when the founder leaves. The forge solves both, and gives you full optionality.

// You define

The wedge

Market, integration goal, eventual disposition. Under NDA from day one.

// We build

The company

Co-founder, team, product, GTM, validation. Same forge, same discipline.

// You decide

What happens next

Invest from inception. Hold. Fully acquire. Sell. The optionality is real.

↓ Tap to expand each. Full reasoning kept private-ready, not on the surface

// Not a dev shop, not a software agency Most studios came from dev shops. That's why their reputation is patchy. We didn't

Most "venture studios" on the market came out of software dev shops. Teams optimised for building software on demand decided to try building companies, and usually it doesn't work. Software is one small piece of building a company.

// Direction

Vision, strategy, product shape, market positioning.

// Core team

Assembling the first specialists the company grows around.

// Resources

Capital, partnerships, infrastructure.

None are "build software." The forge is built from the founder side. Sergei has spent 19 years doing exactly these three functions across 20+ companies, never an engineer, always an architect. That's the right order. Most studios got it backwards.

// What you actually get A complete company. Not software, not a prototype, not a deck

Co-founder/CEO, leadership across all functions, team across product, sales, marketing, operations, quality, GTM strategy, customer flows, supplier relationships, processes, the full operating system, built to your spec under NDA. Then yours to invest, hold, or acquire.

// Why this matters to you No founder-departure risk. Acquired startups stop evaporating

The biggest reason acquired startups fail post-deal is founder departure. We design that risk out from day zero. Forge-built CEOs aren't ego-bound founders, they're operators who plug cleanly into your structure when you choose. No team unwind. No 18-month evaporation.

Zero-to-one is our category, by track record, team selection, and the OS that coordinates us. World-class at it by design.

// Direction-agnostic Robotics, defence, healthcare, fintech, SaaS, we build in any vertical

For each commission, we select a co-founder who leads daily execution in your specific domain. We provide architecture, in-house OS, best-in-class specialists, and 19 years of founder pattern recognition. The co-founder is wired second-number from inception, acquirable cleanly from day one.

// The economics A fraction of an internal innovation lab. Months, not years

Corporations are bureaucratically heavy and miscalibrated for zero-to-one work; their internal labs run for years and tens of millions, and most fail. A small autonomous team with the right founder pattern, specialists, and AI-coordinated tooling ships better, faster, cheaper.

Not by cutting corners, by having the people, systems, and discipline already in place. Build timeline, milestones, commercial terms, IP transfer, discussed under NDA.

Open across most industries. Mutual NDA from the first substantive call.

Discuss build-to-acquire →

Who you'd be trusting, and why he's
the one to build this forge

  • → Founder since 2007. 20+ companies built across services, education, recruiting, events, venture initiatives, crypto, in Russia, Indonesia, and the US. Founder is the only role he's ever held.
  • → 400+ direct hires. 4 bankruptcies survived. 3 fully autonomous teams handed off.
  • → His world-class category and real passion: forming companies, shaping the product, and assembling star teams. He has the experience and knowledge to run companies long-term, but operating isn't where his fire lives. His working belief: every role belongs to whoever is world-class at it and genuinely loves it. So at PMF each venture goes to a scaling CEO who lives for one-to-ten, and he shifts to board chair.
  • → That belief is exactly why 01 Foundry exists as a forge format, so he can run at full intensity on what he's best at, across several ventures in parallel, instead of being trapped inside one.
  • → Fifteen years ago he built a forge in events, one of Russia's largest event agencies, serving top-tier global clients including Louis Vuitton, Mars, Ormco, and Deutsche Bank. The current 01 Foundry is the same logic applied to startups.
  • → Not technical. Psychology degree gives him a sharper read on complex human-driven systems and feeds how he shapes products, companies, and high-performance teams. Founder skill stack: direction, core team, resources, architecture. Engineering is a function you hire; founding is a function you are.
  • → Started architecting 01 Foundry in 2025, when AI made the missing piece available.

Other ventures

Cheesevent2007–2013
W2008–2020
Tertsiya2009–2010
First Concert Agency2010–2012
General Show2013–2020
Event Academy2020–2021
Evecom2020–2021
Power BA2020–2022
Aspirine HR2020–present
Scrypto2022–present
Sign Adventure2022–2023
ALines2006–present
Easy Leasing2023–2024
tier1.community2025–present
Venture Mafia2026–present
Unfair2026–present
nera2026–present

The questions that
actually matter, answered

Is 01 Foundry a venture fund?

No. 01 Foundry is a company forge: we originate and shape ventures in-house. We discuss specific opportunities privately with selected investors and enterprises. This site is informational and does not constitute an offer to invest.

Am I backing a blind pool?

No. Your access is built around specific ventures or studio-level exposure with full visibility into the portfolio. Mechanics are shared in formal investor materials.

What specifically do I get that a traditional venture studio doesn't give me?

Three structural things: (1) zero management fee, zero service fee, zero carry, 100% of upside stays with you; (2) you choose specific ventures, not a blind portfolio; (3) every venture originates from one founder's in-house thesis. Plus: every venture is designed for clean acquisition (second-number CEO from inception). Studios earn from fees. We earn only when our companies do.

How is the forge sustainable without a management fee?

The structure is the point. We operate lean pre-PMF: studio-led execution, remote teams, minimal overhead, AI-leveraged build cycles powered by our in-house OS. Once a venture reaches PMF and raises its first round, the forge's economics come from its own equity in that company, not from fees on your capital. That's why our incentives are 100% aligned with yours.

What stage are the ventures?

All current ventures are early-stage and in shaping or validation. As the portfolio matures, growth-stage opportunities will open. We deliberately don't publish specific metrics on the public site, those belong in the conversation.

Who is the right fit?

Investors: entrepreneurial family offices, HNWIs and angels with appetite for direct startup exposure, operator-turned-angels, emerging-manager-friendly allocators, select early-stage VCs. Enterprises: heads of innovation, CVC, strategic M&A in Fortune-1000 and large enterprises, C-level and founders of large corporations exploring new revenue lines via build-to-acquire.

How are investment terms structured?

We use the structure that fits the venture and the stage: studio-level participation, direct venture allocation, SAFE, or priced round. For commissioned ventures: invest-from-inception terms, partial-acquisition structures, full acquisition. Specific terms, valuations, and minimums are discussed in private.

What's been killed or pivoted? Is the kill-discipline real?

Yes. Each venture has explicit kill criteria from day one. We've shut down concepts at the validation stage and reshaped others materially before launch. We share specific kill-history in the investor memo, it's part of how we prove the system is real, not narrated.

Why are venture descriptions on this site so general?

Because the substance of each venture (the wedge, the moat, the operating angle, the current traction) is what we protect. We're confident in the depth of these theses. We just don't spoil them publicly. Selected investors and enterprise commissioners receive specific materials after a private fit conversation.

Does this website constitute an offer to sell securities?

No. This website is for informational purposes only. Any opportunity, where available, is discussed privately and documented through formal materials in accordance with applicable law.

(Enterprises) Can we commission a startup we'd later acquire, or invest in?

Yes. That's our build-to-acquire track. You define the wedge, target market, and integration goals (under NDA from day one). We select a co-founder for your domain and build through the forge's full process. You decide what to do with the company afterwards: invest from inception (often significantly cheaper than acquiring later), hold any share, fully acquire when ready, or sell to a third party. The CEO is wired as a second-number role from inception, so post-acquisition founder-departure risk is designed out.

(Enterprises) How is confidentiality handled?

NDA from the first substantive conversation. Strategic intent, target markets, integration goals, and any sensitive context shared by you are held under mutual NDA. We don't publicly disclose commissioning relationships unless you choose to.

Do you invest in other people's startups?

No. We don't invest in startups we didn't create, our capital and energy go into ventures we originate. But we're open to deal-flow sharing with VC funds, follow-on relationships, strategic partnerships, and operator conversations. We welcome anyone joining our ventures at the right stage.

If the founder isn't coding 14 hours a day, is he really 100% focused?

Yes, but focused on the right function. Investors expect a founder to be 100% committed. We agree. But in Silicon Valley, most funded founders spend their hours doing software development inside their own product. They're focused on the wrong job. Engineering is something a founder hires. The founder's job is direction, core team, resources, and architecture, the four irreducible functions of company creation. Sergei was the coding-founder once, in the early 2010s. The shift came over 400+ direct hires across 20+ companies. That accumulated muscle staffs each forge venture correctly from day zero, so the co-founder/CEO isn't left to figure out delegation alone.

Doesn't giving CEOs limited equity early kill motivation?

This is one of the first questions investors ask, so honest answer: pre-PMF the forge runs lean: studio-led execution, salary-only roles, remote cost-efficient teams, AI-leveraged build cycles. We don't pretend to pay early-stage operators founder-equity for operator work. Once a venture reaches PMF and we install a CEO to scale 1-to-10, that CEO gets ~10% performance-based options against a baseline already at tens of millions in expected valuation. The unicorn upside on that performance window is massive, and properly aligned to a de-risked, already-validated company. Motivation comes from real upside on real value, not from holding speculative equity in a venture that may not have shaped yet.

Back better-formed startups before the market prices them,
or commission the next one
Start with the memo

The fastest way to evaluate 01 Foundry isn't a long deck, it's a short memo and a direct conversation. Tell us briefly who you are and what's interesting, and you'll get the appropriate next step.

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