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Conduit Venture Labs

Seattle-based venture studio incubating hardware- and AI/ML-driven startups at the intersection of physical and digital.

Seattle, WA, USA

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Description

Conduit Venture Labs is a Seattle-based venture studio and investment firm that focuses on the "0-to-1" phase of company building. Unlike a traditional VC, they act as professional co-founders, providing the operational and technical heavy lifting required to transform an idea into a scalable business. 
  • Ideation & Pre-Seed: Conduit specializes in the earliest possible stage, often before a company is even incorporated.
  • Venture Building: They work with "Entrepreneur-In-Residence" (EIR) candidates to co-create companies from scratch.
  • Method: Founders and prospective EIRs can apply or submit ideas through the Conduit Venture Labs contact portal.
  • Target: They seek "high-conviction" individuals with deep domain expertise who lack the technical or operational team to build their vision.
  • Focus: They look for "boring" but massive problems in legacy industries that can be solved with modern software and AI. 

Eligibility

  • Sector: Industry-agnostic, but with a preference for B2B SaaS, FinTech, and AI-enabled marketplaces.
  • Geography: Primarily Pacific Northwest (Seattle) and the broader United States.
  • Profile: They look for experienced operators, researchers, or executives who have identified a "gap" in their specific industry. 

Process

The studio follows a rigorous "validation-first" building cycle: 

  1. Validation (4–8 weeks): Rapid testing of the market demand and unit economics of an idea before a single line of code is written.
  2. Building (3–6 months): Conduit provides an in-house team of engineers, designers, and growth experts to build the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
  3. Spin-Out: Once the product has traction and a founding team, Conduit helps "spin out" the company as an independent entity.
  4. Capital Formation: They lead the initial fundraising process to secure outside institutional seed capital. 

What an Applicant can Obtain

  1. Full Technical Team: Access to "Fractional CTO" services and a dedicated engineering squad to build the initial product.
  2. Operational Support: Hands-on help with legal, accounting, recruiting, and go-to-market strategy.
  3. Initial Capital: Funding to cover the initial validation and development costs.
  4. Fundraising Edge: Direct introductions to a network of Tier-1 VCs for the spin-out seed round.