Our THESIS

We are living through the largest abundance shock in human history.

‍The costs of content, code, analysis, and labor are collapsing towards zero. So, the most important question for us is: what’s still valuable when intelligence becomes free?

Our answer: that which remains scarce.

The financial rails that machines will transact on. As agents become more capable, they’ll start to transact – on behalf of individuals, enterprises, and, eventually, themselves. A new economy requires an upgraded financial system.

‍Sovereignty over money, data, and mind. As intelligence and power concentrate in fewer hands, the ability to hold one’s assets, control one’s data, and think without surveillance gets revalued upwards. This is true for both individuals and organizations.

‍Distribution and trust. When machines can make infinite everything, the value flows to what people attend to, care about, and believe in. Given the threat that AI poses to social cohesion, trust becomes more valuable.

‍Institutions and networks that software can’t conjure. Meaning, experiences, or services that require real humans or can only happen in the physical world will become even more important. Put another way, communities, organizations, and infrastructure that cannot be replicated with code will compound.

‍NIV invests where abundance meets scarcity, across four categories:

‍Stablecoin Rails and On-chain Capital Markets. Digital dollars are rebuilding the world’s payments plumbing, while assets, funds, and yield are migrating onto programmable rails that settle instantly and never close. Thus, we back the infrastructure and applications moving money and bringing more assets on-chain.

Open and Sovereign AI. The most important question in AI is who will control it, and we do not believe that the right answer is “a few closed labs.” Thus, we back open models, private inference, and permissionless compute.

‍New Markets and Applied Intelligence. Every enabling technology creates assets that couldn’t previously be traded and work that couldn’t previously be sold. Thus, we back the exchanges, standards, and platforms that solve new problems and unlock new use cases.

‍Frontier Institutions.  Most legacy institutions are not built for a world of abundant intelligence, and the scarcest assets and resources exist outside of the software realm. Thus, we back founders building at the edges of human coordination and governance – working on ideas that sound absurd right up until they don’t.

Combined, we believe that these four categories can unleash extraordinary prosperity for real people across the world. Although our premises are economic, our thesis is not just about money – we care about technology’s impact on human beings. And we believe that the most pro-human force in history has been technology that enables greater economic efficiency and economic freedom.

‍Ultimately, our mission is to back the scarcest asset of all: missionary empire-builders with genuine non-consensus convictions.

‍We aim to do all this by building a principled firm that practices big picture thinking, cultivates long-term relationships, and prioritizes values that transcend profits. While our primary goal is to maximize financial success for all partners in our ecosystem, we always want to do it in a way that we’ll be proud of.

To accomplish this, we must partner with founders who have what we call the “three I’s” – extraordinary intelligence, sustained intensity, and unquestionable integrity. And we are particularly attracted to founders for whom their own missions are personal, those who are driven by an unusual sense of purpose. While the frontier of technology is always shifting, founders with these characteristics will only become more important.