Founder // Startup - Vertical-Specific Agents addressing work productivity bottlenecks - Cohort IV in London

This is NOT a traditional paid employment opportunity. It is an opportunity to explore your business idea and build your startup as a founder, with the support of people who have done this before and will go through the journey with you.

Who are we? embryōnic is a venture studio based in London, specialised in the zero-to-one stage. We join problem-centric founders to help them validate their concept, test for early traction signals and when the time feels right, we build and co-found the business with them to take it to market and find product-market-fit. We assign an embedded Squad and deploy our venture hatching playbook. Our sister company (Founders Studio I LLC) acts as the first investor and writes the first-check into the business in three Stage Gates to cover for the studio expenses, AI compute, kick off, de-risk the venture and eventually build a first viable version of the product. Should the venture get traction, you keep up to 70% equity in the business.

Cohort Theme: Vertical-Specific Agents addressing work productivity bottlenecks.

Cohort Thesis: Knowledge work is bottlenecked in places the market refuses to look. Horizontal copilots solved the easy 20%, and generalist vertical AI is crowding into legal, sales, and healthcare. Meanwhile, entire niches remain untouched: marine cargo surveyors, freight forwarding brokers, clinical trial site coordinators, royalty auditors, municipal permitting clerks, IP paralegals, ASC billing teams, reinsurance underwriters - just to name a few. The work is document-heavy, fragmented data, judgment‑intensive, regulated, and structurally allergic to one‑size‑fits‑all software. Headcount is expensive, error costs are punishing, and incumbents are spreadsheets and PDFs. The TAMs look unfashionable on a slide and obvious once you sit with the operators. These workflows share a profile: high‑value labor, structured outputs, regulatory complexity, and often non‑AI‑native incumbent competition. These opportunities are propelled by the labor spend per seat, the willingness to pay for accuracy, and the absence of credible alternatives.

What are we looking for? We are looking for entrepreneurs who are ready to solve work productivity bottlenecks by building Vertical‑Specific AI Agents – intelligent systems designed to automate, streamline, and transform how specific industries and niche market segments operate. This includes AI agents that handle repetitive workflows, Data ETLs, decision‑making support, cross‑team communications, task delegation, and operational efficiency – OR new tools, APIs, or SDKs that enable businesses to embed vertical AI agents into their existing workflows with minimal friction – all tailored to the unique needs of a defined industry niche and to autonomously manage industry‑specific workflows and executed by applying B2B or B2B2C business models only.

If you identified the problem because working in a specific industry or market niche, you have evidence the problem worth solving, and you’re ready to explore a concept and figure out if this is the right time to quit your job and fully dedicate your time and energy to solving the inefficiency you’ve spotted in the market – apply today. Maybe you are still in a job and thinking of quitting, or already have done so. Maybe you are a serial entrepreneur and you are after the next gig. Maybe you have found one or more problems you think it’s worth solving for. Maybe you don’t know yet which one makes the most sense to focus on.

A few things we are sure of:

• You have a remarkable sense of purpose.
• You are in love with the problem you have spotted, much more than the solution / idea itself.
• You want to listen to your potential users / customers (a.k.a. you don’t think you are smarter than everybody else, and have no fear of getting rejected.)
• You value testing hypotheses over perfectionism.
• You love crafting and iterating over time.
• You are not afraid of receiving “tough love” from your team, users or customers.
• Respectful and appreciate the work and time of others.

Details of the programme: We are joining one new founder (or co‑founding team) with specific insights in this category. You don’t need to quit your job yet, but you have the ambition to do so when the time is right. The cohort will be open for applications submitted from June 1st to June 30, 2026. We hatch ventures in 3 Stage Gates and deploy capital progressively to cover the studio services and risk with you. We will start with all the problems you are looking to address with the product and help you validate if they are problems worth pursuing. The goal of this stage is to fully understand the problem, the market you’re entering and the users you will be serving. In the second stage, we’ll aim to test for the problem‑solution fit. A first Assumption Product will be deployed as an experiment to assess the core experience assumptions, and perform customer development activities. Should the signals be the right ones, we then spin off the venture together, build a scalable baseline of the product and prove revenue traction. If the venture gets traction, you’ll keep up to 70% equity in the business and decide if to fundraise further or keep bootstrapping.

We are a team with over 20 years of combined experience in the zero‑to‑one stage, with a track record in validating, iterating and taking products to market. Products we worked on range from pre‑product ideas, all the way to pre‑IPO. We are specialised in Product‑led Growth. We’ve tested and improved a repeatable system and named it "Kinetic V²” – Its name is a reflection of the focus we place on optimising for learning rate acceleration to achieve escape velocity state. It’s based on 3 Pillars: Principles, Learning Velocity Tracking and Stage Gates. We provide a rotating fractional team that allows you access to the capabilities you need, when you need it, so you can avoid the overhead count until you’re ready for it and the product demands it. We have partnered with Hyperscalers and AI Perks to provide AI Compute Tokens and other perks to deploy on the ventures we work with. We cover Product, Technology, Finance and Growth.