The napkin
Forty-five minutes in a room. You draw the thing, we argue with it, nobody writes a deck.
Day oneCr4fts is a venture studio in Nairobi. We put in the cheque, the room and the people, and take the bets the odds are against. You bring the obsession.
Rolling intake — pitch whenever you’re ready.
How it works
Most of what we sketch dies at step two. That is the point — killing an idea in a fortnight is cheaper than killing it in a year.
about 4 in 5 ideas stop at step two — good
Forty-five minutes in a room. You draw the thing, we argue with it, nobody writes a deck.
Day oneThirty customer conversations in three weeks. We try hard to kill it, and usually we manage.
Weeks 1–3A desk in the Nairobi workspace, $$ in the company, and the studio around you.
Month 1Our engineers and designers, your call on every decision. Real software, in front of real users.
Months 1–4We lend you the network. Customers who actually pay, or we stop and say so out loud.
Months 4–6Residence ends, the company leaves with you. We keep a minority stake and our phone on.
Month 6$$ into the company at incorporation, for a minority stake. Not a loan, not a grant, not a prize.
No fee. No retainer.A desk in the Nairobi workspace and the whole studio within shouting distance of it.
Nairobi, in person.Builders and designers in house, on your problem — brand, product, and the thing that ships.
They ship, not consult.Our operator relationships, lent to you. Your first customers come off our phone, warm.
Warm, not cold.Currently hunting
Open briefs, not secrets. If one of these is the problem that has been annoying you for three years, that is the conversation we want.
Compute needs power, and power is the binding constraint on everything downstream of it. Generation, storage and the data infrastructure sitting on top, built for markets that were never going to be served by somebody else's build-out.
InfrastructureClinics, plumbers, schools, workshops. Millions of small operators running on paper, or on six subscriptions they half use. One tool that does the whole job, filings included, so a team of five gets the output of fifty.
SoftwareCommerce and logistics end to end, with whatever the job needs: software, hardware, devices on the vehicle. First mile and last mile both cost too much, and in most of these businesses the cost of the mile is the business.
LogisticsEducation, science and research move at the speed of their tooling. Better instruments, better data and better software shorten the distance between a question and an answer, and that compounds harder than anything else here.
ScienceAfrica holds more human genetic variation than everywhere else combined, and almost none of it sits in the reference data drugs are designed against. A therapy validated on European genomes is a coin toss here.
BiotechInformal trade, real prices, how goods move, what clinics see. Almost none of it lands in a dataset anyone can query, so every model built on the global corpora is confidently wrong about a billion people.
DataConvictions
The queue for the obvious idea is long and expensive. The one nobody is standing in is neither.
By the time a category is hot, the interesting part of it has already been priced in.
If four other funds already agree with you, you are not early. You are on time, which is late.
It flows to the same cities, the same founder archetype, the same ideas everyone agrees are safe.
The pattern describes what already worked. It is a poor description of what will.
A ten-year fund life is an accounting decision. It is not how long a good company takes.
Notes
Why Africa Cannot Skip the Infrastructure That Makes Artificial Intelligence Work
Why Venture Capital Systematically Misprices Frontier Markets, and What It Costs
The Invisible Companies That Venture Capital Cannot See
Send us the drawing. Genuinely — a photo of the napkin beats a twenty-page deck, and we read every one within a week.
Rolling intake · no application form · a reply within a week