エピソード

  • Meet the Team: Nagisa Sakurai

    Meet the Team: Nagisa Sakurai
    2026/05/18
    We’re pleased to welcome Nagisa Sakurai, who is joining as a Director and as Silicon Foundry’s first Asia-based team member. With a background spanning life sciences, regenerative medicine, corporate venture capital, and corporate innovation, Nagisa brings a multidisciplinary perspective to emerging technologies and global innovation ecosystems. Her experience includes roles across research institutions and industry organizations, including City of Hope Cancer Center, Washington University in St. Louis, and Astellas Pharma. At Silicon Foundry, Nagisa will help strengthen collaboration between Japanese and global innovation ecosystems, working with corporates, startups, and investors to navigate emerging technologies and unlock cross-border opportunities. We recently sat down with Nagisa to learn more about her career journey, Japan’s evolving startup ecosystem, and the future of innovation across Asia and beyond. Press play to listen to this conversation https://sifoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ElevenLabs_MTT_Nagisa_Sakurai.mp3 To start from the very beginning, what would you say first sparked your interest in innovation, venture, or working at the intersection of technology and business? What first got me interested in innovation and the intersection of technology and business was realizing that even great technologies do not automatically create impact unless someone can connect the science and business. During my time working in life sciences, a pivotal moment was when I was evaluating a delivery technology related to cell therapy. Since I had spent almost ten years in that area, I immediately felt the technology had strong potential to become important in the future of cell therapy. However, people on the business side could not clearly see how the technology would create business value. That experience surprised me because we were looking at the same technology inside the same company, but seeing completely different things. Throughout my career, I’ve found that there is a limited number of people who can work between the intersection of science and business, especially when I worked in CVC and corporate innovation. Venture ecosystems often amplify certain technology trends, and startups move very quickly toward those trends, but not corporates. They also have to think about existing businesses, internal priorities, timing, and organizational structure. So I recognized that if we want innovation ecosystems to work well, we need people who can understand and translate between those different worlds. That is still the part of innovation I find the most interesting today. As Silicon Foundry’s first Asia-based team member, what excites you most about this role, and what opportunities do you hope to unlock? I’m excited to help connect Japanese and Asian companies more closely with the global innovation ecosystem, and to bring more visibility to the strengths and perspectives coming from this region. Japanese companies have incredibly strong technical capabilities and deep industry expertise, but there is still a lot of opportunity to strengthen collaboration with global startups and emerging technology ecosystems. At the same time, many startups outside Japan do not fully understand the Japanese market, how Japanese companies make decisions, or what kinds of problems enterprises are actually trying to solve. Because I have worked across life sciences and corporate innovation, I’ve seen how different players operate with very different timelines, incentives, and expectations. Your background spans life sciences as well as venture and corporate innovation. How does that shape the way you evaluate new technologies or opportunities? Does that experience give you a different lens when assessing what will scale or create real impact? My background helps me evaluate both technologies from a technical perspective and how innovation gets adopted and scaled in the real world. Through my experience in life sciences, I saw how long and complex the path can be from breakthrough research to real societal impact. Through my experience in venture ecosystems, I recognized how certain technology trends can attract attention and capital very quickly. But corporates do not always move on the same timeline due to their broad priorities. So when I evaluate new technologies or opportunities, I tend to look not only at whether the technology itself is impressive, but also who will adopt it, whether organizations are ready for it, whether the market timing is right, and how it’ll fit into existing industry structures. Ultimately, I believe technologies scale when these various factors come together at the same time. From your perspective, where do you think Japan is making the most progress in expanding its tech ecosystem, and where is there still room for improvement? The ecosystem has changed significantly over the past five to ten years, but the progress really depends on the ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1分未満
  • The Corporate Venture Trap: Why Chasing VC Returns Is The Wrong Race

    The Corporate Venture Trap: Why Chasing VC Returns Is The Wrong Race
    2026/05/18
    Press play to listen to this article https://sifoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/ElevenLabs_The_Corporate_Venture_Trap_Why_Chasing_VC_Returns_Is_the_Wrong_Race.mp3 The AI wave is creating the biggest corporate innovation opportunity in a generation. Most CVC programs are too busy copying the VC playbook to seize it. Every few years, corporate venture capital goes through the same cycle: capital floods in, programs launch with ambitious mandates, and most quietly disappear within a few years. It isn’t because they made bad investments, but because they never built a durable reason to exist, one that survives leadership turnover and internal shifts in priority. We are in that cycle again, only this time the stakes are different. In 2025, the global venture market hit $512 billion in deal value, its second-highest year on record. AI accounted for more than half of that total. In the U.S., AI captured nearly two-thirds of all VC deal value, which is up from just 10% a decade ago. Moving away from the sidelines, corporations are right at the center of the boom, with CVC-backed deal activity surging past previous highs. On paper, that looks like maturity. However, in practice, it is the earliest sign of a deepening identity crisis. The Trap Hidden in the Boom The pressure on corporate venture teams right now is not subtle. AI rounds that once took months to close are now closing in just days, with multi-billion dollar financings becoming routine. In that environment, the instinct inside every CVC team is the same: move faster, act more like an independent VC, and optimize for the metrics the board recognizes. That instinct is understandable, but it is also strategically dangerous. The programs that collapse fastest are almost always the ones that most aggressively tried to compete with financial VCs on their own terms. In benchmarking IRR and chasing hot rounds, they lost the one advantage that set them apart: offering founders something no independent fund could. That advantage is not capital, but access to customers, distribution, and internal capabilities that can accelerate a company’s path to scale. The question that needs to be asked is not whether CVCs need more discipline, but what they should be disciplined about. To answer, Harvard Business Review offers an explanation where the central finding directly challenges the dominant narrative: the best-performing CVCs do not succeed by eliminating the tension between startup speed and corporate processes. They succeed by designing mechanisms to make that tension “productive.” The study describes what it calls a “frontstage/backstage” operating model: a fast, founder-oriented external face for deal-making and relationship-building, paired with a structured internal system for activating strategic value through business units. The programs that fail treat these as one job. The programs that last treat them as two distinct, carefully managed ones. In our advisory work at Silicon Foundry, we see this pattern play out consistently: CVC programs that build lasting relationships with founders as well as lasting credibility with their own business units are the ones that invest in internal architecture as seriously as they do in external deal flow. The Unfair Advantage Corporations Are Abandoning No independent VC can offer a live enterprise customer, internal champions, and direct access to distribution, for the right startup, that can compress years of sales into months. The founders who choose a CVC over a financial VC are making a deliberate trade: a smaller check in exchange for strategic access. But that trade only works when the access is enabling, not constraining. Meanwhile, the circular financing model, where corporations invest in AI companies that become major customers of the parent’s own infrastructure, is drawing both regulatory scrutiny and skepticism from founders. This model, which now defines Big Tech’s biggest AI bets, is raising questions about CVC capital coming with strings that look a lot like handcuffs. The data reflects it. At Series D and beyond, CVC-backed companies carry median pre-money valuations of approximately $1.5 billion, roughly three times the median for non-CVC-backed counterparts. That premium is the market pricing of what strategic capital, when deployed correctly, actually delivers. And the value runs in both directions. A peer-reviewed study published in Strategic Change found that CVC investments serve as a key mechanism for accelerating corporate AI adoption, enabling knowledge transfer that compounds over time in ways no internal R&D program alone can replicate. The corporations moving fastest on AI are winning not because they picked the best financial bets, but because they built early relationships with teams shaping the technology. When CVC programs abandon that integration imperative in favor of pure financial benchmarking, the cost compounds quickly. Closure does...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1分未満
  • Meet Our Venture Partners: Yuki Shirato

    Meet Our Venture Partners: Yuki Shirato
    2026/05/11
    We’re pleased to welcome our newest Venture Partner, Yuki Shirato, Managing Director of Techstars Japan. A seasoned investor, serial entrepreneur, and attorney with more than 25 years of experience across global markets, Yuki has backed over 50 startups as an angel investor and founded Yakumi, an international angel network connecting investors across Japan, the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He also serves as Senior Advisor at Pangaea Ventures. At Silicon Foundry, Yuki works alongside corporate leaders and venture investors to strengthen cross-border innovation strategies, unlock global startup ecosystems, and translate emerging technologies into durable business growth. We recently sat down with Yuki to learn more about his past experiences and current work today. Press play to listen to this conversation https://sifoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ElevenLabs_Meet_the_Team_Yuki_Shirato.mp3 Across your work in law, startups, and investing, you’ve operated at the intersection of strategy and execution. What has been the consistent thread in how you approach that work? The throughline, for me, is the work of translating complexity into something executable. Whether I was navigating the legal intricacies of cross-border M&As, scaling an early-stage startup, or sitting on the investor side of the table, my focus has always been on translating high-level vision into operational structures that actually work in practice. From the outside, my path may look eclectic and even a bit random: I started my career as a researcher and lobbyist, then moved into management consultancy, then corporate law, and finally became a founder and an investor. However, each move was an intentional step closer to the point where vision meets execution. The roles I’ve taken were less a function of linear progression than a deliberate movement toward where I believe the future is being built: at the seams across disciplines and geographies. What ties it all together is a conviction that the most interesting problems live in those seams, and that someone needs to be fluent enough in each language to hold them together. How has your perspective as a serial entrepreneur shaped the way you evaluate founders? Being a founder myself has taught me that a pitch is just a hypothesis at a particular moment in time. The deck you write in January can mean something completely different by February. This is not because the founder changed, but because the world does. Imagine pitching a portable device the week before the Walkman or iPhone launched, or an AI startup the day before ChatGPT shipped. Overnight, some ideas become obsolete, and others suddenly have a completely new meaning. Founders don’t get to choose when those moments arrive; they only get to choose how they respond. That’s why what I’ve learned to look for is the founder’s underlying operating system. When I evaluate early-stage founders, I prioritize resiliency and persistence without losing drive or momentum. Resilience without momentum becomes stoicism; momentum without resilience burns out. The founders who compound are the ones who can absorb hard feedback, update quickly, and still walk into the next meeting with conviction. Having lived through many of my own pivots and near-misses, I also have a high tolerance for incompleteness and imperfection. I care less about the story’s polish and more about how the founder thinks and demonstrates the vision. In your opinion, what makes an accelerator program genuinely catalytic versus simply supportive? In my mind, being supportive means providing a network and resources, which is, of course, incredibly foundational. A catalyst instead provides velocity, momentum, and compresses years of learning and struggling into only months. The difference usually comes down to two variables: the density and quality of the network the founder is plugged into, and the pressure the program is willing to apply. Programs that simply “support” tend to be comfortable; catalytic programs are productively uncomfortable. At Techstars Tokyo, my method is more Socratic than prescriptive. I try to help founders realize for themselves what needs to be done, rather than handing them a playbook. When a founder concludes their own reasoning, with mentors as a sounding board, that conviction sticks and scales. When you tell them what to do, you’ve created a dependency. Catalytic programs build founders who can think; supportive programs build founders who can follow instructions. What inspired you to found Yakumi, and what gap were you aiming to solve? When I came back to Japan from North America, I saw a massive “trust asymmetry” in early-stage investing. Great deals in Japan couldn’t reach the right global angel investors. At the same time, operators in the US, Europe, and Asia wanted exposure in Japan but had no trusted entry point. The angel ecosystem is fundamentally local and deeply ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1分未満
  • The Bank in The Agent Economy

    The Bank in The Agent Economy
    2026/05/07
    Press play to listen to this article https://sifoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ElevenLabs_The_bank_in_the_agent_economy.mp3 Every major paradigm shift in consumer behavior has followed the same pattern: the infrastructure layer is built before adoption reaches scale. The foundations of the internet were laid decades before the web went mainstream, and the payment rails and logistics networks underpinning e-commerce were laid long before consumers were purchasing from direct-to-consumer brands. We are now entering the infrastructure buildout phase for agentic payments. Card networks, AI model providers, and fintechs are actively investing in the protocols, rails, and interfaces that will allow AI agents to initiate, route, and settle financial transactions autonomously. With nearly half of consumers expressing interest in using agents for commerce and AI agent adoption projected to grow at a 45 percent CAGR over the next five years, the shift to agentic payments is inevitable. The commercial conditions are in place, but the question for financial institutions is what role they will play in the transition. The dominant narrative suggests banks are at risk of being cut out, as stablecoin wallets and agent-to-agent payment systems begin to bypass the traditional financial infrastructure. While that outcome is possible, it underestimates what banks already own. Custody, execution, and the verified data layer are not legacy constraints. They are core capabilities that agentic payment systems will need to solve for. Building on existing bank infrastructure will be easier than rebuilding it. The agent economy will run on bank rails, as long as banks open access to them. Agentic Payments as Governed Execution Systems Agentic payments are systems in which AI agents execute financial transactions within pre-defined boundaries, and operate within regulatory requirements, payment network rules, and the constraints of existing payment infrastructure. Given the liability, auditability, and real-time risk controls that financial services demand, agentic payments will not operate outside compliance frameworks. They will operate within a rules-based workflow, with AI operating within the defined parameters. This architecture keeps banks at the center of the stack, not at the periphery. Mapping the Agentic Payments Stack Agentic payments require three segments to function: card and payment networks, AI model providers, and banks. The first two are moving quickly. Visa has launched Intelligent Commerce with Anthropic, IBM, and Microsoft, allowing AI agents to transact as verified parties on its network. Mastercard has introduced Agent Pay and Agentic Tokens, enabling AI assistants to execute within predefined spending limits and merchant categories. On the model provider side, Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) is emerging as the interoperability standard for how agents connect to tools and data, and Google’s Agent-to-Payments Protocol (AP2), backed by more than 60 partners, is doing the equivalent work for payment authorization. OpenAI and Stripe have already demonstrated in-chat checkout that completes a purchase inside a conversational interface. Each of these players is building toward the same stack, and each assumes a bank sits underneath it. The question is which banks show up to occupy that position, and on what terms. Three Structural Advantages Banks Still Control The Custodial Layer of Trust Every agentic payment system still relies on a trusted custodian of funds. While many players can build on top of the system, banks remain the only institutions that can provide that role within today’s regulatory frameworks. As agents begin initiating payments, the need for a clear, accountable holder of funds is fundamental. That’s true whether those funds sit in a bank account or back a stablecoin. The custody layer does not need to be rebuilt. It needs access through permissioned, API-based access that allows agents to act within boundaries set by the customer, while banks continue to hold the underlying responsibility. Control of Payment Execution Banks control direct access to the settlement rails on which money moves: ACH, SWIFT, CHAPS, SEPA, and real-time rails, including FPS and RTP. Access to these rails is governed by banking licensure and settlement account relationships that cannot be disintermediated, regardless of how sophisticated the AI layer above becomes. As agents assume greater responsibility at payment initiation, the bank’s role as issuer and execution counterparty becomes structurally more important. Agents operate at machine speed and volume, and they require credential validation, pre-authorization, and fund routing with greater precision and lower latency than human-initiated transactions demand today. A bank that builds agent-native execution interfaces becomes the default integration point for the stack above it. The Decision ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1分未満
  • The Great SaaSpocalypse: When Software Starts Doing the Work

    The Great SaaSpocalypse: When Software Starts Doing the Work
    2026/03/27
    Press play to listen to this article https://sifoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ElevenLabs_SaaS.mp3 Why AI is rewriting the economics of SaaS and shifting value from tools to outcomes Over the past few months, more than $1 trillion in SaaS market value has vanished. That tends to get attention. Our clients are asking a very practical question: what’s actually happening, and what does it mean for how they choose partners, investments, and acquisition targets? Because the real risk isn’t missing the next big thing, but it’s backing companies whose advantage is quietly disappearing. What’s Really Happening: A Reset in Confidence, Not Performance The SaaS sector has shed more than $1 trillion in market value. That’s not a small correction; it’s a structural repricing, and valuation multiples have compressed dramatically too. Public software companies are now trading at around 3.9x forward revenue, down from 15x to 25x at the 2021 peak. That’s a 70 to 80 percent contraction. Free cash flow multiples tell a similar story. Salesforce, for example, has seen its multiple fall from roughly 30x to closer to 15x. At first glance, this looks like a sector in distress. But the underlying fundamentals tell a different story. Revenue growth has not collapsed. Customer churn has not spiked in any meaningful way. Net retention for strong companies remains healthy. In other words, the operating performance of SaaS businesses does not justify the magnitude of the repricing. So what’s actually going on? To understand it, you have to rewind the tape. For years, SaaS was treated like a growth annuity. Predictable recurring revenue, high retention, strong visibility. These characteristics made future cash flows feel not just likely, but dependable. That perceived durability supported premium valuation multiples. What has changed is not the revenue. It is the confidence in the durability of that revenue. The market is no longer asking when SaaS cash flows might taper off. It is asking whether they are as defensible as once believed. That shift in the question is everything. This is not a revenue collapse. It is a reset in terminal value assumptions. What the Data Actually Shows: Expansion Under the Surface Here’s the tension. The market is pricing in disruption, but the operating data points to expansion. Software engineering job postings are still up ~11% year over year, even as AI makes code easier to generate. AI capex is approaching ~2% of GDP, and nearly 2,800 data centers are in development to support growing compute demand. Adoption is progressing along a typical S-curve, not a sudden displacement event. This is where Jevons Paradox comes into play. When something previously constrained becomes cheaper and easier to use, we don’t use less of it. We use more. Lower cost of code does not reduce demand for software. It expands it, driving more company formation, more use cases, and more infrastructure. That is exactly what the data is showing. This is not a collapse in software demand. It is a recomposition of how and where that demand is created. Both things can be true at once. Markets are repricing durability, while the real economy is accelerating investment. The Next Era of Software Is Agentic The shift underway is not subtle. Software is moving from enabling work to performing it. For decades, enterprise software functioned as a productivity layer. It improved workflows but relied on human execution. Today, that boundary is now breaking, because AI systems are increasingly capable of completing tasks end-to-end. This changes how software is built, priced, and evaluated. The implication is straightforward: the unit of value is no longer the user. It is the work completed. Seat-based pricing reflects access, and agent-driven systems reflect output. As a result, pricing models are beginning to shift toward consumption and outcomes. At the same time, a new layer is beginning to emerge. As workflows become automated, coordination across models to data becomes much more complex. The platforms that manage this orchestration, from routing tasks, allocating compute, to governing decisions, become structurally important. In this environment, the “user” of software is no longer always human. While the buyer remains human, the operator is increasingly not. That distinction matters. Where Value Accrues (And Why) By the end of the decade, AI agents could represent more than 60% of the market, marking a shift from software that helps people do work to software that completes it. The implication is not contraction, but redistribution and growth. While the software market may expand by more than 20% in the coming years, that growth will not be evenly captured. Instead, value is bifurcating across three categories: Software that helps humans do workSoftware that completes workSoftware that performs work humans cannot do Historically, nearly all enterprise value sat in the first category....
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1分未満
  • Meet Our Venture Partners: Nicolás Melero

    Meet Our Venture Partners: Nicolás Melero
    2026/03/24
    We’re pleased to welcome our newest Venture Partner, Nicolás Melero, former Head of Digital Partnerships and Innovation at Falabella. Today, Nicolás works with corporate leaders and investors to design build–partner strategies, connect with startups, and scale innovation with measurable impact, while simultaneously pursuing his MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management. At Silicon Foundry, Nicolás will work closely with leaders in corporate innovation and venture capital to continue turning emerging technologies and partnerships into scalable business outcomes with clarity. We sat down with Nicolás about building disciplined corporate venture platforms, designing scalable pilots, and strengthening innovation pathways across Latin America. Press play to listen to this conversation https://sifoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ElevenLabs_Meet_the_Team_Nicolas_Melero.mp3 What was the moment or experience that first drew you toward venture strategy and innovation, and how did that lead you to your work with Falabella Ventures? Across my career, I have been deliberately trying to become a better investor. For me, a good investor can answer two questions with clarity: why am I investing, and what is the purpose of this investment. The path I chose to answer those questions better was information. In venture capital, better information improves judgment under uncertainty and tends to improve returns. In corporate venture capital, there is a second layer, because you are also accountable for strategic value to the corporation. That is what drew me to venture strategy and innovation. It is where you build an information edge by sitting close to real operating problems and real customers, and where you can connect a technology decision to a clear business outcome and a realistic path to adoption. Warren Buffett has a line I have always found directionally useful: “Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing.” I try to take it modestly, as a reminder that clarity and understanding reduce downside. At Falabella Ventures, we tried to make that discipline a habit. We were explicit about the why and the purpose behind each investment, what evidence would validate it, and what had to be true for scale. That clarity helped us make better decisions and deliver a strong track record. When you look back at your time at Falabella Ventures, what enabled the team to consistently get into high-quality rounds and build that reputation for disciplined investing and corporate integration? A big part of our success came from combining global ambition with real operating discipline. We wanted to connect the company with the best talent globally, participate in the strongest rounds in the region, and co-invest alongside world-class funds. We earned the right to do that by being consistent and rigorous in how we selected, diligenced, and integrated startups. We used a simple framework to stay disciplined: the 6Ts, which stand for Team, Target Market, Traction, Technology, Terms, and Together. Team and Target Market set the foundation. Traction showed evidence of pull. Technology was not just the product, but scalability, reliability, and how it would hold up inside an enterprise environment. Terms kept us honest on valuation and structure. Together forced the strategic questions: why this company, why now, and why should we be the right partner. Governance also mattered. Investments were decided by majority vote at the investment committee, and we required a business sponsor. That created real accountability and made integration much more likely, because someone in the business owned the outcome. We also ran rigorous technical diligence, especially on scalability and integration readiness. And importantly, we often invested after working together for a while. The partnership came first, then the investment followed once we had evidence that the solution could deliver value in our context. That combination, clear evaluation criteria, strong governance, deep diligence, and patience on timing, is what built credibility with both top founders and top co-investors, and helped us build a strong reputation in the market. From your experience inside a global retail organization, what structural factors ultimately determine whether corporate venture becomes a growth engine versus a symbolic initiative? In my experience, whether a corporate venture becomes a growth engine or a symbolic initiative comes down to two pillars: culture and strategy. First, culture. You need an organization where people are genuinely eager to innovate, improve continuously, and surprise the customer by creating value. When that mindset is widespread, corporate venture is not “a separate team doing experiments.” It becomes a channel the business actively uses to move faster, solve real problems, and raise the bar. In that environment, pilots get pulled into the organization and scaled because teams want them to work. Second, ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1分未満
  • Inside Silicon Foundry: Managing Director Mark Menell on Building and Evolving Corporate Venture Capital Programs

    Inside Silicon Foundry: Managing Director Mark Menell on Building and Evolving Corporate Venture Capital Programs
    2026/03/13
    This is the fifth post in our blog series unpacking Silicon Foundry’s full suite of offerings and the thinking behind each one. In this installment, Managing Director Mark Menell explains how Silicon Foundry can serve as an extension of Corporate Venture Capital teams, with end-to-end support from fund setup to post-investment execution. With Silicon Foundry’s guidance, corporates gain the strategic insight and operational infrastructure needed to build or accelerate investment efforts and create lasting value. Press play to listen to this conversation https://sifoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ElevenLabs_Our_Offerings_CVC.mp3 Let’s start with the “why.” What inspired Silicon Foundry to create Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) offering? CVC is a natural part of our business, and we work with clients who are looking for innovative solutions to business problems, and we help them leverage technology from emerging companies to solve those challenges. When a corporate engages with a startup, there’s a wide range of potential outcomes. We think of it as a continuum. More often than not, it starts on the left side. That’s what we call venture clienting. In that scenario, the startup becomes a vendor. The corporate learns about a promising company and then adopts its product or service within their business. It’s a commercial relationship. On the far right of the spectrum, you have M&A. That’s when the solution is so critical that the corporate decides they need to own it outright. At that point, it becomes a build-versus-buy decision. In between those two ends of the spectrum, you’ve got everything from simple partnerships or joint ventures, which may or may not involve any economics, to strategic investments. These aren’t full acquisitions, but they reflect a belief that supporting the startup is aligned with the corporate’s long-term interests. Maybe the corporate becomes a major customer, which in turn helps the startup raise its next round. That alignment is beneficial to both sides. Then you get into questions like: Is investment part of the corporate’s standard operating procedure, or do they need to create a specific vehicle to do it? Over time, we’ve seen more corporates institutionalize their investment programs, not just investing opportunistically in helpful companies, but actively seeking them out and supporting them through formal processes. That means doing the same upfront work, scouting, diligence, founder interactions, and economic evaluation, as they would in venture clienting. The only difference is the outcome. Whether they’re forming a commercial partnership or making an equity investment, the motions are the same. It’s muscle memory at this point. Why do you believe CVC is particularly relevant right now? One of the things we’ve consistently found, especially in corporate development, is that these areas are significantly understaffed. A common path for a corporate to establish a CVC is that, somewhere along the way, they’ve made a handful of investments, often tied to partnerships, but without a clear process or structure. Eventually, they come to the realization that a defined investment strategy could align closely with their broader strategic goals. But you can’t just press a button and have a functioning CVC. Typically, someone from corporate development, M&A, or investments steps in to take on that responsibility. More often than not, though, they don’t have true venture capital experience. These are small teams to begin with, and that experience gap is real. That’s where we come in. We essentially plug in and provide the infrastructure, access, and expertise they need. Because you can’t just hang out a shingle and say, “We’re a CVC now,” and expect startups to line up. You have to build visibility. You have to be a compelling storyteller. And again, that’s where we add value. We integrate directly into these under-resourced or under-prepared teams and accelerate their time to value doing everything except, in most cases, actually writing the check. In your own words, how would you explain the impact this offering has for corporate leaders? I think it’s huge. Imagine the scenario I just described. You’ve got one corporate development person at a legacy company in the Midwest who now suddenly holds the title “Head of XYZ Ventures.” There isn’t really a playbook for him. That’s why the timing and opportunity here are so important. From a CEO’s perspective, it all comes down to time to value. That new investment professional or team might take six months or more to get their sea legs. We can have them up and running almost instantly, starting a real program right away. I recently worked with a client in that exact situation. They see the value in being able to skip the long setup process. Instead of hiring a whole team or figuring out the structure and best practices from scratch, they’re ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1分未満
  • A Year in Acceleration: Silicon Foundry Advances Enterprise AI and Global Innovation in 2025

    A Year in Acceleration: Silicon Foundry Advances Enterprise AI and Global Innovation in 2025
    2026/02/10
    Press play to listen to this article https://sifoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/ElevenLabs_Momentum_Release.mp3 The advisory firm scaled enterprise AI execution capabilities, expanded its European and Asian presences, and intensified its Piloting, CVC, and M&A offerings to Members. SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Silicon Foundry, a Kearney company, marked 2025 as a pivotal year in its evolution, moving decisively from innovation advisory into hands-on execution as enterprises accelerated the deployment of artificial intelligence and venture-driven growth initiatives. Over the past year, the firm expanded its global footprint, deepened its enterprise AI execution capabilities, and broadened its innovation offerings to support clients not just in identifying opportunity but in piloting, scaling, and delivering measurable outcomes. As corporations moved beyond AI experimentation toward structured pilots, agentic solutions, and enterprise-wide deployments, Silicon Foundry emerged as a trusted execution partner to over 50 multinational corporations, governments, and private market investors. With two-thirds of its business now driven by clients outside the United States, the firm scaled its global team and execution platforms across AI, corporate venture capital, pilot studios, and M&A to meet rising demand for disciplined, outcome-driven innovation. “This has been a breakthrough year in every sense,” said Neal Hansch, CEO of Silicon Foundry. “We expanded the global coverage of our professionals and ecosystems we’re deeply embedded in, broadened the ways in which we support the innovation agendas of our Members, and scaled the execution of outcomes across our offerings. The momentum we built over the last year is representative, durable, and, as expected, has continued to accelerate into the first quarter of 2026.” Dominance of Artificial Intelligence Across all industries, enterprise AI and the exploration/adoption of agentic solutions emerged as the single strongest demand driver over 2025 and into 2026. Universally, corporations increasingly sought understanding of the true ‘state of play’ – eager to separate hype from reality – and an unbiased view on the crowded landscape of emerging AI platforms and capabilities. With a sense of urgency balanced with justifiable caution, leaders are anxious to selectively leverage AI to enhance operational efficiencies and unlock new opportunities for their businesses. At the same time, these leaders are seeking clarity on how to gauge enterprise readiness, navigate endless vendor noise, and decide between the available buy-build-partner options that exist today. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, the undeniable epicenter of the AI revolution and home to nearly two-thirds of all AI-related venture capital funding, SiF has further solidified its role over the past year as an independent, trusted advisor to C-suite leaders navigating these challenges and opportunities. Enterprises increasingly turned to SiF for systematic, comprehensive support and structured pathways to identify, evaluate, pilot, and scale the rollout of, investment into, or acquisition of relevant emerging technologies. Expansion Across Europe & Asia While SiF has served a wide range of corporations hailing from across Europe and Asia since its inception over a decade ago, it was a milestone year for the firm as it established direct presence with team members today on the ground in Germany, France, and Japan. This expansion fulfills the firm’s previously announced growth plans and reflects increasing enterprise demand for structured, execution-driven innovation programs that bridge major innovation ecosystems. Similarly, in the Middle East, SiF’s footprint and impact have broadened in recent quarters to support the design and operation of Innovation Hub programs and accelerators in the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. In addition to growing its roster of full-time talent, SiF actively added to its Venture Partner program, comprised of seasoned industry leaders who have spent decades building companies, shaping markets, and leading complex transformations inside F1000 enterprises. These extended colleagues bring an additional layer of depth to SiF’s work, expanding the firm’s deep networks, contributing targeted industry expertise, and helping SiF provide its Members with unique and proprietary, real-time insights. From Advisory to Execution Across the enterprise landscape in 2025, corporate leadership teams sharpened their focus on disciplined venture execution, operating efficiency, and scalable innovation models. As organizations moved beyond strategy and sensing toward real deployment, SiF accelerated its evolution from trusted advisor to hands-on execution partner. This shift has been most visible across SiF’s Corporate Venture Capital, Pilot Studio, and Corporate Development as a Service (CDaaS) offerings, leading Members to turn...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1分未満