Venture capital is slow by design. Traditional funds rely on months-long processes to vet deals, with an emphasis on relationships, pitch decks, and gut-feeling decisions. But in the age of rapid product innovation, these old practices risk missing opportunities.
Enter Incubater Capital, a firm described as a “new-generation” venture capital company founded by Australian-based Nathan Chen and Will Nicholson. This new model is designed to overcome the bottleneck of slow raises, by directly prioritizing the speed of capital raise, driven by community and customer value. At its core, Incubater Capital believes that the funding a startup receives should be directly proportional to the value and support it delivers to its public, customers, and its community – not to the investor.
As a result, the firm is creating an unique advantage: use better systems to accelerate the fundraising timeline creates a significant competitive advantage.
Founders can swiftly apply publicly, submit clear product traction metrics instead of spending months rehearsing intricate pitch decks. Remarkably, initial funding can be secured within weeks, not months. On top of this, funding is recurring – fully based on value provided by the startup to the community.
This distinctly different, accelerated approach has already garnered considerable attention from both early-stage founders eager to raise faster, build faster and iterate faster.
While traditional VCs sometimes argue that speed without deep strategic input can lead to unstable growth, Incubater Capital counters that with its unique Community Liquidity Offering (CLO) model. They believe that the best deep strategic input, and guidance, should always come from the customer, who are the ones using the product – rather than the investor.
It is a “data-first” approach, community-based model that allows for a level of customer-driven precision and product validation feedback loops that legacy funds, bogged down by human delays and prolonged bottlenecks cannot match. But the broader question is: can this model scale to more complex, later-stage investments?
Early results underline the tangible advantage of this accelerated model. Incubater Capital’s initial cohorts have demonstrated strong returns, particularly among AI startups where traction can be measured and validated quickly. While the challenge ahead lies in scaling this velocity to more complex and later-stage investments. It seems Incubater Capital’s speed-first model is positioned not as just a gamble, but as a necessary evolution of venture capital, directly addressing the long-unmet demand for speed to market.
