What is Meraki Labs?

Meraki Labs is a venture studio, designed to take highly concentrated bets on deep tech moonshots in technology areas that have the potential to transform the world. We recognize that deep tech projects have much longer incubation periods and require patient capital as well as painstaking building of differentiated IP. We partner with founders with deep domain expertise, passion for deep tech and a sense of mission about building technology and products that truly matter.

Why Now: The Age of Applied Intelligence

We as society are starting to see a huge shift in productivity with Applied Intelligence popping up everywhere. It's like when calculators or computers first came out and made math and computation easy. Similarly, with AI basically digitizing the process of cognition, reasoning and action, a lot of tasks we do in society will get automated.

There are two broad classes where we see this being applied in the near future. The first class of tasks would be the ones that are boring, repetitive or error prone for humans - requiring a lot of mental energy. Applying AI there will make society more productive, freeing up our time for more productive or interesting stuff. 

The second class of problems involves democratizing access to personalized experts. Today experts are either very expensive when they give you personalised service (doctors, lawyers etc), or the information you access is broad and general and available for free (Googling for medical or legal advice). Due to the vast knowledge amassed in the models, ability to scale their context windows, and ability to finetune them towards specific vertical tasks, it is now possible to get the same level of highly personalized expert service from them, without the high costs that previously only the wealthiest could afford.

Application of AI is going to boost productivity and help society grow in a big way, expanding the lightcone of social productivity. This is just the beginning.

Speed + Depth: Our Playbook

Here’s how we operate at Meraki Labs: we move fast, and we go deep. To make it happen is all about bringing in the absolute best people we can find – seriously talented folks who are passionate and driven.

Also, information is like the lifeblood for us; we invest effort in constantly learning and sharing our learnings. We believe that the best work requires a deep understanding of the domain in which we want to build something. But no matter how smart the team is, and how much research it has done, we always keep our eyes glued on the user – what do they really need? “Focus on the user, and all else will follow” is our mantra. 

And when it comes to getting things done as a group, we operate like a sports team. Everyone is great at their art, everyone has got a role to play, and we either win together or learn together. No job is too small or too big, we trust in the game plan, and move together fast and deep.

How We Work

The incubator brings together driven and talented individuals eager to tackle ambitious, moonshot-type challenges, united by a passion for science and emerging technologies with profound societal impact. We actively track and engage new emerging technological areas such as quantum computing, neuromorphic computing, autonomous vehicles, clean energy, nuclear fusion, gene editing etc. and develop our viewpoint on the ones that might create new industries. The whole process goes through following phases. Some will go through all five phases while many others may fizzle out earlier, reflecting the moon-shot nature of the things that we do.

1. Open ended exploration (Ongoing): In this phase, we just start reading papers, talk to experts and visit labs. This is purely serendipity driven and the initial interest may start because of an article in Nature, meeting an interesting company, insights from a domain expert or meeting an inspiring founder.
2. Tinkering (3-6 mo): In this phase, we just start to play with the technology with in-house lab to get our hands dirty, get first hand feel for the problem and explore the art of possible. This helps us truly understand what’s possible, what the limitations are and where we might be able to create an edge.
3. Thesis building (3-6 mo): In this phase we start to study the area in a more organised manner, studying who else is working in this area, what are the recent technical breakthroughs, what’s the potential market and what the initial prototype may look like.
4. Co-founding: If we like the initial prototype that we have built and find the thesis compelling, we start the process for starting the company. This requires finding the co-founders, lining up the capital from Meraki Labs and other venture funds and building the initial team.
5. Building (forever!): Building a deep tech company is a minimum one decade commitment and often longer. We intend to work with the team in trenches in co-founder capacity, go through ups and downs together, dealing with the challenges of an early stage set-up and helping shape the business that can stand out as a category leader.

Residency at Meraki Labs

Residency at Meraki Labs is a six month program where you are paid a monthly stipend to explore any deep tech idea that you are interested in and share/debate the thesis as it develops. It can lead to a Meraki incubated project at the end of residency, opportunities at any of our portfolio companies or just shared learning together about some cool topic of mutual interest.