Personal news! I'm joining Innovation Endeavors to back technical builders, as our partner in NYC.
Something materially changed as we entered 2026. Some say Q1 2026 may be looked back on as the first quarter of the singularity, and after watching the exponential progress of models over the past six months, I agree with that view.
As a consequence of this rapid progress, what's become clear is that all of our infrastructure and abstractions need to be rethought for an agent-first world. Now is the time to double down on frontier builders.
The home for frontier builders
For the past few years, I've been working with technical founders both as an angel investor and operator-turned-VC, after spending most of my career building infra and developer tools at Stripe and Microsoft.
The founders I love working with are deeply technical. And it turns out that technical people want to work with other technical people - the kind who are curious, love to tinker, and push the boundaries of what's possible.
Maybe it dates back to my childhood obsession with Lego, but I've always thought the most interesting work happens at the platform layer, where you think in primitives, abstractions and composition. The founders I want to back are the ones building those bricks for the next era of software. 🧱
That's where Innovation Endeavors comes in. We're a deeply technical fund, deliberately hands-on, and in a world of capital concentration and mega funds, I believe the future of venture capital is going to be defined by deep focus and deep expertise.
That's us. And with our current $630M fund, we're set up to back technical founders from wherever you are building in the world.
Where I'm focused
As our partner in NYC, I'll be focused on working with founders building software infrastructure across New York, the Bay Area, and Europe.
NYC is where ambitious founders come to build for real customers. The largest financial institutions, media companies, healthcare systems, and global enterprises all run out of this city, and they're the customers every infrastructure and AI company wants. As a European, I'd also argue NYC is the ideal landing spot for European founders entering the American market.
While my base continues to be in NYC, I'll be spending more time in the Bay Area too - which is the undeniable gravitational center for AI and infrastructure.
What I'm focused on
To mark the moment, @Davis Treybig and I are sharing our thoughts on the decade ahead in software infrastructure, where we expect to see a new generation of infrastructure built for an agent-first world.
Read our thesis on the IE blog: https://www.innovationendeavors.com/insights/a-decade-of-software-infrastructure
But, at the moment, these two thesis areas are particularly top of mind for me:
1) Agent-first infrastructure and Agent Experience. We're moving to an agent-first world, something I've been talking about for a while. Every piece of infrastructure that was designed for humans - the dashboards, the abstractions, the conceptual constraints themselves - needs to be rebuilt for a world where agents are the primary users.
2) Sovereign infrastructure. The internet is decoupling. Compute, models, data, and networks are being pulled back inside national borders as the clean global stack we took for granted for two decades is balkanizing and this creates a generational opportunity for founders who are building the infrastructure that lets nations, regions, and enterprises run on their own terms.
If you're building something cool, weird, or in either of these directions - I'd love to chat.
Drop me a line at kenneth@innovationendeavors.com or on X at @auchenberg.
Let's build the next set of bricks together. (I am, after all, Danish.)
/k