Our Approach
Awaken Capital is a platform investor. We invest in innovations that enable the creation of multiple products in multiple markets.
Our thesis is built on three core beliefs.
Technology is supercharging science, allowing companies to understand, predict, and program the physical world in ways not possible a decade ago.
1. Platforms drive premium returns.
Platforms naturally advance novel approaches, applying lessons from one market to the next — lessons that traditional solutions often miss.
Tech-enabled platforms are uniquely able to adapt to rapidly changing conditions. As the pace of change quickens, a platform-based company has a fundamentally better chance of initiating paradigm shifts and coming out on top because they diversify risk and can quickly capitalize on new opportunities.
Our platform-based approach runs contrary to how most others invest in emerging tech, however.
Entrepreneurs love that we don’t want them to take a purely vertical or limited pure-play approach, and that we have a team with differentiated expertise growing platform companies from an operational perspective.
2. Technology is enabling more powerful platforms.
Technological advances in all forms (including artificial intelligence, hardware and wetware) are making it easier for startups to build platforms in and across many industries. By integrating previously siloed functions, platforms also capitalize on operational advantages to make it progressively easier and cheaper to create new products as time goes on.
In the past, building platforms took significant capital and time, or wasn’t feasible. Now, technologies that have been in R&D for decades are becoming ready for application in the real world due to structural cost reduction and more rapid feedback loops during the build and test process.
Artificial Intelligence is enabling companies to optimize processes and outcomes in new ways.
Tools to read and uncover more insights across biological space are enabling companies to continue to personalize and program medicine.
Advanced wetware is allowing bioengineers to rewrite the code of life with unprecedented accuracy and efficiency.
Continued miniaturization of hardware is allowing companies to build smaller, more powerful machines that can go new places and do new things.
3. New ecosystems create new opportunities.
Emerging ecosystems of intermingling people, ideas, tools, and infrastructure are fueling expansive growth. These factors converge to advance knowledge, create breakthroughs, and enable ventures to prove out a platform approach with unprecedented efficiency.
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People
AI is becoming infused into every scientific and engineering discipline, creating interconnections between people to enable platforms that would not otherwise exist.
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Infrastructure
The ecosystem of science and technology-focused startup incubators and accelerators has expanded, enabling more founders to test early concepts and achieve more with less.
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Advancing scientific knowledge
As scientists understand more about the complex biological, chemical and physical world around us, new knowledge empowers companies to solve previously intractable problems.
