How do we design technology for children without letting technology take over childhood? Children of second-gen dot-commers and tech millennials are now at the age where serious choices must be made about technology in the home: schools, screens, smartphones, smart “friends”... How much? How young? As they turn to sources like Third Oikos for new perspectives on homemaking, they are also looking for thoughtful products that embody a clear philosophy about how children should engage with technology.

A category of sophisticated, well-made family-focused products is growing to address this need. Tonies, the German maker of kid-friendly screenless audio devices, reported around €600M in revenue in 2024 and trades at over a billion dollar market cap. Yoto, its British competitor, reported revenues of $128M in 2024, and recently added former Apple and Square engineering executive Jesse Dorogusker to its board.

Nichole Rouillac, industrial design leader, mom of two, and Baukunst collective member, is right in the middle of this new hardware wave. Her studio, level, is the industrial design shop behind Nex Playground, the hit camera-based game console. Nex has moved more than 1 million units in just over 2 years on the market, landed on Time’s Best Inventions of 2023, and was named the Toy of the Year by Parents. Since its launch, level has become the go-to industrial design shop for technology that a family invites into the home. Recent family-focused work from level includes the sold-out Skylight Buddy, a screen-based routine companion for kids, and the inflatable, portable adventure bed Starhaven. level’s client list includes tech heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, and Logitech, but the studio is currently on a run of iconic designs for children and parents.

At its best, technology can help families stay connected and organized while supporting children’s learning and independence. Nichole, and her team at level, seem to have cracked some of the guiding principles with their own unique design approach and philosophy around children’s tech. How did level become the go-to design studio for new family products?

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Nichole Rouillac built her early career at some of San Francisco’s most recognized industrial design studios. At NewDealDesign, she launched the first Fitbit, a pioneering product in the emerging wearable technology category. She later joined One & Co, where she played a key role in designing multiple generations of HTC smartphones and bringing some of the earliest Android devices into people’s hands. When HTC acquired One & Co to form the foundation of its industrial design organization, Nichole became part of the company’s design leadership.

At HTC, Nichole and her team became known for bold and human-centered design choices, including vibrant plastics and expressive use of color. Their work, which included the first unibody metal smartphone, and HTC’s flagship devices for the Windows Phone 8 launch, helped establish Nichole as a leader in color, material, finish. When she left HTC in 2016 to establish level, it was, at the time of its founding, the only industrial design studio in San Francisco founded and led by a woman.

Some of level’s best-known projects demonstrate Nichole’s design approach and expertise in health and wellness. Tempo, the compact at-home fitness kit, uses rich colors and rubberized weights, while the storage cabinet’s wood and textile details make it fit in with other home furnishings. Dandi is a caringly designed, fully on-body kit that expresses a full range of therapeutics for IVF patients. These products, designed to be comfortable and easy to handle, paved the way for level’s later work for families.

When Nex went looking for a design partner for the motion-tracking game console Playground, they wanted someone who understood how to create a product families would welcome into their living rooms and feel comfortable leaving on display. Nichole understood the brief right away. The feel of an object, she says, is psychologically important. Quality, fit, and finish build trust. So many toys look and feel cheaply made, but pick up a Nex Playground and you’ll notice a level of solidity and polish comparable to a product designed by Apple, where Nex’s founding team originates. There are no gaps, part lines, or loose rattles. And where conventional gaming consoles increasingly look like tower PCs, the Nex is a recognizable icon, colorful and reminiscent of the simplest children’s blocks.

There’s also the matter of the camera. It’s a big ask for a family to let an unknown device watch their kids, and Nichole mentions being wary of the new slate of companies working to install unrestricted recording devices in the home. For Nex, level devised a solution that playfully communicates trustworthiness and control: a monocle-shaped cover that magnetically clips to the camera.

When designing physical experiences for children, Nichole believes that age and developmental abilities must be taken into account. Her team’s work on the Skylight Buddy, a companion device designed to help children of multiple ages build routines and greater independence, demonstrate this approach. Firstly, Nichole advocated for Buddy’s gigantic button. Not only are children naturally drawn to pressing buttons, but a generous physical control is intuitive and accessible for younger users whose fine motor skills are still developing.

But as children grow, she points out, their relationship with objects increasingly becomes a form of self-expression. Nichole cites her older daughter’s backpack, covered in keychains and figurines, and a favorite hoodie customized with heat-press patches. This insight shaped Buddy’s opportunities for personalization, allowing children to make the product their own.

Nichole references a small retro-revival of physical objects beyond Tonies and Yoto, both of which she cites as inspiration. Her sister recently sent her a Tin Can Phone, the landline phone for kids, and she talks about how her daughters recently learned from a record player at Sea Ranch that that music can simply run out. The appeal for the analog, for Nichole, is not nostalgia. There is a desire for responsiveness and hominess in devices that makes adults and kids alike appreciate this new generation of tactile, purposefully simple family technology.

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When we ask Nichole how her studio managed to attract this kind of work, she attributes it to the workplace culture she has built. “When I was in my early career, I didn’t know what it was like to leave work earlier than midnight most nights. It was expected that we were working regularly on Saturdays. There were so many nights that I stayed until 2:00, 3:00 o’clock in the morning, just to keep up with the pace of work. I remember asking: how can anybody possibly have a family?”

When she started level, Nichole set out to create a more supportive environment, starting by modeling healthy behavior herself. She takes time off to take care of her kids, family, and interests, and expects colleagues to do the same for themselves. level has employees who bike, climb, and high dive. And recently, level matched California’s paternity leave program, providing 100% of a new father’s salary. “You don’t have to make people work until 3:00am every night in order to do good design. And you don’t have to compromise your design in order to spend time with your family.”

It goes the other way around too, with Nichole’s kids frequenting the level studio, making juice with the team, and being a part of photoshoots. Her children have grown up around her work and are welcomed as part of the level team.

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So what is this home technology designer’s approach to tech in her own home? She insists on the importance of rituals for family togetherness without technology, daily family dinner being one example. But she is also enthusiastic about modeling how to use technology and AI for fun and work. Her daughter makes characters in Midjourney with her father, and together they use professional sketch tool Vizcom to turn sketches into renders. The other day at the studio, daughter and colleagues played together making new Pokémon cards of the family dog with ChatGPT.

While Nichole has designed lots of smartphones, she has decided her daughters won’t have them anytime soon, citing the research that shows how social media can compromise teenage girls’ mental health. She has, however, given her elder daughter an Apple Watch, which allows her to navigate the city independently. Nichole grew up in the suburbs where she couldn’t go anywhere by bus. With the Apple Watch, her daughter can use maps and GPS to go to the library or museum, call home, and order boba.

“I love the independence that the watch allows her to have, without opening up the trapdoor of endless social media that you would get on a phone. She can call me, use her GPS, get herself around the city. It’s been the tech that’s transformed our family the most.”

In the 90s, home technology meant landline phones and early home computers, devices that were picked up and put down and used with intention. Since then, we’ve experienced a constant encroachment of always-on technology into the home: cameras, listening devices, and the infinite entertainment device that is always in one’s pocket, the smartphone. Almost 20 years since the introduction of the iPhone, many of us have come to realize that we don’t wish our own relationship with tech on our kids.

Nichole is one of our own role models for a balanced life with technology, and we continue to learn from her. She refuses to be a mom in one place and a studio director in another; she merges together the perspectives earned in each of the many spaces she moves through. No doubt it’s the integration of mother, designer, technologist, and founder that enables Nichole to build impactful family-focused technology.

Learn more about Nichole and level: leveldesignsf.com

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Bay Area Creative Technology Happenings

Baukunst First Fridays: Strange Loops & Knots | Our First Fridays series is back on September 4th with a solo exhibition by protocol artist Duncan Wilson. Entitled Strange Loops and Knots, the show features large-format computational textiles, drawing inspiration from Afghani war rugs and digital hypercollage. With works designed between 2022 and 2026, this is the first solo exhibition of Duncan’s body of work. Strange Loops and Knots opens on Friday, September 4th at 5pm.

Agentworld | Technology theory group Disintegrator and philosopher of technology Benjamin Bratton are giving a double lecture at Gray Area on Friday, September 11th. They’ll be discussing how the coming world of trillions of agents and fully automated agentic systems will reconfigure society. Register here.

Earthling | Created by Baukunst’s own , San Francisco’s favorite experimental outdoor listening event is coming back on September 26th. For those who haven’t been, we assemble at Elk Glen Meadow in Golden Gate Park for an afternoon of ambient / electronic / experimental / label-free musicians performing on a beautiful sound system. This Earthling’s lineup is extraordinary, with L.A. experimental jazz trio Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes, outsider psychedelic pop legend The Space Lady, fantasy synth artist Dream Crease, and SMARTBOMB founder from Oakland, W.A.L.A. Get tickets here.

HTML Day SF | August 8th was global HTML Day, created by everyone’s favorite old-skool webmasters, HTML Energy. HTML designers and artists gathered in over 70 cities around the world to host events. The Bay Area edition, cohosted by artist and engineer Spencer Chang and designer Ivan Zhao, met outside in Golden Gate Park to freewrite HTML and find creative ways to apply HTML as a concept in life.

Baukunst Updates

Kaavio

Our portfolio company Kaavio builds AI powered tools that help technical people buy and sell technical products. They are hiring for two serious engineering roles: a backend engineer and an applied AI person. Kaavio already works with some of the world’s biggest industrial and science distributors, using AI to turn massive catalogues with millions of products into workable data. Kaavio’s founders, Derek and Sam, are two super open-minded and sincere fellows who a have strong perspective on how to build a good company culture. This is a great opportunity to make a meaningful impact at a company that is growing quickly in a huge space.

Recess

Molly Morse and Amy Kiska, cofounders of Recess, were featured in the August issue of Mothered Magazine with a great interview on how they were inspired to start their company. Mothers, longtime collaborators in business, marketplace growth experts, and now cofounders, Molly and Amy are making an impact in an area where parents already struggle: booking and managing after-school care and camps for kids. Recess grew incredibly fast in Austin, and launched this spring in Houston and Dallas. Check out their interview on Page 38 of Mothered.

By Matt Thoms, Co-founder & General Partner at Baukunst

A couple weeks ago, I published an article breaking down recent trends in venture funds from an investor and LP perspective. Here’s the TL;DR:

• Venture firms are splitting into two categories: Megafunds raising upwards of $1B per fund cycle, and funds like Baukunst that are smaller than $200M per fund.

• These fund categories are, by necessity, investing in different kinds of companies. Traditional funds can see fund-returning multiples with $1-3B outcomes, while megafunds can only return the fund with outcomes of $5-20B+ in value.

• To contextualize these exit ranges, this is the difference between an exceptional company, and a once-in-a-decade company.

I’d encourage reading the piece on its own, but in this post I want to address why this bifurcation in firms matters for founders.

Founders don’t typically spend their time thinking about the market for venture funds. Instead they’re asking: What kind of company should I start? Who should I raise from? How much should I raise and at what valuation? But founders need to understand this trend, because it’s changing which funds will be aligned with your answers to those questions.

Let’s break down how.

From the founder’s perspective, the notable features of the megafund era are eye-popping pre-seed valuations and seed rounds of $50M or even more. While these large rounds make headlines, they are relatively rare: pre-seed rounds of over $5M in the last two years make up less than 5% of pre-seeds raised. Still, many entrepreneurs we talk to are wondering whether they can take advantage of this new funding environment. Why not try to raise $10M from a bigger fund that is willing to show me a $50M post-money valuation?

The biggest choices a founder will make, however, are how they want to build their company and who they surround themselves with.

For two decades now, the typical startup path has been to raise several subsequent rounds of funding at higher and higher valuations, leaving the founder diluted and beholden to more owners over time as early investors demand multiples. A high-valuation seed round is a guaranteed step onto this escalator.

Of course, the amount raised at company inception, historically speaking, has no correlation to outcome. It’s well known that over-capitalizing can even be worse for companies. Companies with too much money in the bank tend to be undisciplined when making hard decisions around product scope and team. The funding history of some of the world’s most successful companies, on the other hand, began with very modest raises. Airbnb’s seed round was $20K from Y Combinator and $600K from Sequoia. Constraints make good founders into great ones.

For these reasons, the large initial rounds and rapid growth hasn’t appealed to every entrepreneur. But for the last couple decades, the only viable alternative was to start a lower ambition lifestyle business with limited impact and modest upside.

With AI, this may be changing.

Much like AWS and cloud infrastructure before it, AI is transforming the cost basis and the team composition strategy of starting an early stage company. In the last year, many founders we’ve spoken with are beginning to leverage AI heavily across all aspects of their company operations—even when their product itself doesn’t have AI features. As they hire effective technical generalists competent at building AI systems, and even rebuild expensive software licenses internally, these companies are executing faster, and with greater capital efficiency, than ever before.

As a result, we’re seeing that serious company-builders can now get further with fewer rounds of funding and less dilution on the same capital raised. Some companies heavily leveraging AI—like bread delivery box Wildgrain, discussed further in my original piece—have even been able to get away with raising a single pre-seed round to reach over $100M revenue. It’s now possible to build a lean company that is high impact and high return.

In the past, this strategy was colloquially known as “seedstrapping,” but this awkward term never stuck. “AI-native companies” may also be a bit of a misnomer, as what’s truly important to building a billion dollar company in this fashion is a founder’s discipline and decision making to reach profitability and grow their business in a capital efficient way. Whatever we call these lean companies, we suspect that many—if not most—of the next decade’s $1-5B outcomes will be businesses of this kind.

Lean companies are also more likely to have life-changing outcomes. A $2B exit with lots of ownership left is better for the founder than a $20B exit where the founder is highly diluted and behind a huge preference stack. And $2B outcomes are much more likely to happen. In fact, $1B-$5B exits have been 20x more common than $20B+ ones over the last decade. As AI makes it possible to scale and grow companies, we can expect to see even more billion-dollar outcomes in this range.

With the bifurcation in venture capital funds, founders do increasingly face a choice. For those who want to build in a lean way, raising capital from a megafund can be risky. They’ll always push you to grow bigger, and raise more money at higher markups. Even if you execute perfectly, you might not get the support you need, because a $1-$5B company is immaterial to the return profile demanded by megafund composition.

But if you’re excited by the idea of raising less and getting to profitability faster with a small team, there’s an investor base that’s interested in founders like you.

Read Matt’s original essay on LinkedIn: AI-Native Companies and the Return of Venture Alpha

The Status of the Intersection

By Toby Shorin, Researcher in Residence at Baukunst

Everywhere one looks in Silicon Valley these days, one finds new attempts to define what a technologist is. From my perspective at least, the latest generation of founders have broken with the ascetic productivity culture of early tech, and are parting ways with one of tech’s most dearly-held principles: the notion that the best are “10x” experts in their specific field. Instead they are smushing tech and other things together, exploring the intersections of “tech” and “anything else.”

The new crop of entrepreneurs—and I don’t just mean young founders—want to care for their bodies, to reach blissful meditative states, to read poetry and literature and philosophy and understand these things deeply. They go to mystery schools and workshops. And they want technology to serve these expressive human aims. They are through-and-through technologists, but not hardline techno-optimists. They have broader references, and they dare to be expressive in many areas of their lives.

I’m not the first to notice this. David Lang observes that many people seem to be in search of a “post-founder archetype,“ and Brie Wolfson celebrates “floundering“ as a vital stage in this evolution. While Michael Dempsey has argued that the institutionalization of the startup path has diminished its status, he sees this provoking a metamorphosis of the founder role. “People will still build things,” Mike reassures us, “but with a different orientation around their founding principles and capital partners.” In other words, the new archetype we’re in search of reconciles startup principles with a more integrated, expressive, and human-centric way of life.

This search is not only embodied in persons, but also overheard in “taste” discourse, activated in new physical places, and expressed in experimental projects merging tech with art, culture, philosophy, and spirituality. Regardless of medium, each is an intersection where technologists are trying to make the ends of technology meet with aspirational humanistic means.

The Intersection of Art and Technology

In his excellent review of the 2020 title Technocrats of the Imagination, Lucas Gelfond describes how high technology and art have always struggled to meet one another. The difficulty of bringing these two subjects together is immortalized in the many memes about the “intersection of art and technology.” (What if we kissed there?) Even the famous E.A.T program struggled to find a productive collaboration between engineers and artists. Today, the situation is no different:

Tech companies launch creator programs that treat art as purely instrumental, or they present art as a kind of technical demo that functions as advertising. Bored big tech employees, dubbing themselves “creative technologists,” make cutesy web apps and artists attempt “research art,” both of which often are technically and creatively mediocre.

Lucas is right: most of the art techies make is still glorified tech demos. Likewise, Chia Amisola’s Are.na channel “Forward Deployed Creative Technologist” satirizes whimsy corporate-sponsored vibe-projects.

But that hasn’t stopped tech’s intensifying interest in art and aesthetics. The Svane Family Foundation, founded by former Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane, has provided a variety of grants to art spaces projects in downtown San Francisco. TIAT, a space that has named itself after this mythical intersection, has set itself up on Powell Street. The SF Opera recently secured a sizable ongoing commitment from Jensen Huang and has sold out recent shows, while the SF Ballet is finding new audiences with shows like Mere Mortals, which reinterprets the Pandora myth in the context of technosingularity.

Most promising is the New Aesthetics grant from Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison, which now funds a variety of artists and projects with a special interest in architectural aesthetics. The recipients generally, though not entirely, match the typical profile of a Tyler Cowen grantee: someone who communicates in the style of tech and who shares its cultural optimism and go-getter attitude. Still, the projects funded are higher quality, at least to my eye, than most of the stuff that has historically passed for art in the tech world. No tech demos to be found here.

Will these projects herald more collaboration between artists and technologists? Although the Bay Area has a thriving underground arts community, it is weakened from the recent closure of its two best art schools, SFAI and CCA, and on the whole is very suspicious of the tech world. There are few places where these two communities can meet and produce new ideas together. But perhaps that will change. In 2027 the Bay Area and surrounding counties will play host to the Further Triennial, a massive new endeavor dedicated to Northern California’s major contributions to the arts. I am interested to see what happens.

The Intersection of Culture and Technology

TIAT is part of a new generation of culture spaces coming alive in San Francisco, many funded by tech patrons. Some of these spaces, like Ephemera and Midnight Teahouse, offer a respite from screens; Avalon House hosts regular philosophy readings, plays, and nights for original poetry—and the poetry is pretty good. Others strike a balance, such as the 1517-funded Nautilus residency house, or The Fold, a cafe and community space home to comedy, music, and community events, while also playing host to Foresight Institute and a rotating cast of space-related companies.

Two more startup-friendly spaces with strong programming: Dog, a project space started by renowned brand studio Landscape, which hosts music and lectures; and our own Baukunst Studio in Bernal Heights, where we have founder events and tech teardowns as well as art openings and music performances every month.

While these places provide new outlets for culturally-interested techies in SF, “tech” and “SF” are not totally equivalent. Indeed, the best place to understand the tech psyche is still the website formerly known as Twitter.

On X dot com, you can directly see tech’s new aspiration to be cool and tasteful, as well as witness the roasts when its attempts to be cool and tasteful turn out to be anything but. You just have to laugh at OpenAI socks and defense tech merch ripping Off-White from 2016. But despite repeated embarrassments, tech just won’t stop posting about “taste.” There’s a weird cultural equilibrium right now where you can get hundreds of likes by tweeting something generic like: “how come nobody dresses cool and tasteful in SF? We must change this” with a mediocre fit pic and get hundreds of likes.

What explains this? What these posts show is that tech as a culture has not yet developed an adult sense of self. To me, the so-called “vibe shift” towards the right wing over the last few years feels just like a rebellious teenage phase. Tech even has its own version of a Young Republicans club now, with Hamilton Society hosting dreadful debates on insipid questions like whether America should have a monarch. The “taste” discourse and this current obsession with “fashionable” company merch reads as part of this awkward phase in tech’s dawning cultural self-awareness.

What’s odd to me is that although plenty of people in tech have diverse references, these rarely make their way into public conversation. Perhaps what is viable as a public performance for the Big Other is just a function of what tech people think other tech people will like. There’s a tendency to run the same old reference points back over again (e.g. references to Whole Earth Catalog even in newly released publications like Culture Slop).

The intersections of culture and technology I find most interesting are those that combine tech with a substantive engagement with non-tech reference points. A recent longform essay attempts a Dostoevskian hermeneutics of artificial intelligence. The Vesuvius Challenge, which provides a prize for reading carbonized papyrus scrolls, is a fascinating kind of digital humanities project that shows a concern for the history of human knowledge.

The Intersection of Philosophy and Technology

Tech is a bastion of very smart people, and very smart people like to do philosophy. Until recently, the main venues were rationalist and EA forums, with their strong focus on rigorous epistemology, meticulous logical consistency in argumentation, and utilitarian ethics. This body of work, I will be the first to admit, is one of tech’s most impressive cultural contributions.

The explosion of artificial intelligence—an eruption of technē into the human domain—has opened up the field of philosophical consideration in tech much wider. There’s the question of whether it’s conscious, the question of human worth, the question of labor, and the question of how to make them safe and not propaganda engines. All these philosophical questions motivated by AI are being given serious consideration by a vast range of AI labs and research organizations, as well as anonymous savants like Janus. Now that computers speak as we do, the illusion of separation between “tool” and “human,” as tenuous as it was for those well-versed in media theory, is finally breaking down. Conversation is now the interface, and both psychoanalytic theory and philosophy therefore have a central role to play in AI alignment.

Alignment researchers are increasingly leveraging virtue ethics for aligning AIs with human values, with Anthropic’s constitution making much ado about Claude’s character. Interestingly, this seems to coincide with some prominent EAs like Ajeya Cotra re-evaluating utilitarianism. The load-bearing word in tech’s final vocabulary has shifted from “progress” to “flourishing,” another signal that there is a movement away from utilitarian thought toward more holistic notions of well-being. I hear that the upcoming issue of Asterisk magazine, also flourishing-themed, will feature an essay on the turn to virtue ethics in Silicon Valley. In short, much like what is happening in art and culture, an expansion of what is buildable and likable, what is thinkable in tech also seems to be expanding.

The appetite for philosophy in tech has reached such a fever pitch that the Cosmos Institute is promoting the archetype of “philosopher builders” who “translate philosophy into code.” Outside of AI research labs, very few orgs will hire a philosopher. But I am lucky to say that Baukunst has hired one.

The Intersection of Spirituality and Technology

Intersections of technology and spirituality are plentiful here in the Bay Area. One intersection is the figure of the founder who becomes a better leader through inner work, as well as the ex-founder who steps away to rethink their life after an ayahuasca retreat. Tech has always had a thriving enclave of execs who attend the superclass of events I like to call “weird California workshops.” Throw a rock in San Francisco and you’ll hit a founder who’s attended a meditation weekend at Esalen, organized an immersive psychedelic gathering, or worked with an energy healer. At Baukunst, we’ve even started hosting our own “Baukunst Mystery School,” where we bring startup people together for an afternoon of deep inner work with expert practitioners we know.

These intersections are becoming more and more a visibly mainstream part of tech culture. Almost everyone has heard of the Jhanas at this point. Just the other week, a16z media guy Erik Torenberg tweeted that he’d pay for 20 people to attend the infamously intense Hoffman Process workshop. At the popular Human Tech Week, you can hear about the latest in consciousness-altering technologies and meditation apps. There is even someone trying to raise a Spirit Tech Fund. And the recent use of the term “psychotechnology” to refer broadly to any consciousness-altering practice modalities, substances, or neuromodulation devices, speaks to how spirituality and technology are headed for a direct collision.

The spiritual stakes of tech, however, are also up for debate. Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah was recently present at the Vatican to give comments at the release of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas.” Only a few months ago, Peter Thiel was also in Rome, lecturing on the Antichrist to round disapproval by the Vatican. The juxtaposition of these two tech luminaries on the same plane as the leader of one of the world’s great religions is a flashpoint in a spiritual arms race, centered on the growing power of AI.

On the Nature of the Intersection

When bringing two things of any kind together, one must check the results with some basic arithmetic. Does one plus one equal two here? Or does it equal three? The best kinds of combinations are those which synthesize two parts into a gestalt—a new whole, a “secret third thing.” At Baukunst, interdisciplinary people are a core value, and the creative technologist is our part of this search for a “third thing,” a sum greater than its parts.

An interesting characteristic of many of these “tech + x” intersections is their two-ness. They end up feeling like “tech does its own version of x.” Indifference to legacy institutions and lineages is a hallmark of tech culture, and the very thing that allows it to be so open and inventive. On the other hand, some of the most effective intersections I’ve mentioned come from a deep engagement with things that do not come from within the tech citadel. We’ll know when one of these intersections is truly successful when we stop talking about it as “tech + x,” and its own first-class concept emerges.

What is an archetype who brings art, philosophy, culture, and spirituality to the process of building? Personally, I idealize the notion of a renaissance man. What might be a modern Leibniz—the deviser of calculus, theologian of unqualified optimism, and inventor of the calculator? At risk of relying on overused reference points myself: one of the best entrepreneurs of all time was a person whose ideas and interests spanned calligraphy, Eastern philosophy, human-computer interaction, and Bay Area countercultures. We don't call him a "tech + design guy."

The next renaissance person to stand at this intersection won’t be a Steve Jobs clone, like so many tried to be. But we all remember how Steve used to end keynotes with the image of an intersection signpost. And like any good signpost, it points the way to go.

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Bay Area Creative Technology Happenings

Zoë Conference | Speaking of the spirituality-technology intersection, this weekend I (Toby) was at the Zoë conference put on by Cluny Institute. As a technologist and a virtue ethics enthusiast myself, I have been curious about how Cluny seems to be trying to reconcile Catholic humanism with techno-optimism. Zoë turned out to be one of the better conferences I’ve been to in the last few years, with a very wide range of talks: Bryan Johnson and Patrick Collison made appearances, while we also heard from fertility experts and Orthodox priests. I actually got called in at the last minute to be part of a panel about new social forms of gathering. There were a few journalists there, so expect some interesting articles to come out about Cluny in the coming months.

Gray Area | San Francisco’s long-running accelerator for interdisciplinary creators, the Cultural Incubator at Gray Area, is hosting its 2026 Showcase on August 5th. Over the last several months, eleven Bay Area artists, technologists, and designers have developed projects and prototypes spanning algorithmic and AI-driven artworks, game engine experiences, and new platforms for collective creative production. Go greet the residents and playtest their ideas on August 5.

SF Art Book Fair Haul | SF Art Book Fair was last weekend. It’s always an annual highlight for printed matter and people watching. I went twice, and picked up a few things. I’ve wanted to buy the Avocado Ibuprofen book for a long time, and had the chance to snag it there. I also picked up a ring-bound zine with a great title: Blog Posts I Still Think About by Amy Burek. In a time when personal websites and blogs in particular are disappearing, I really appreciated this lovely riso-printed booklet with the full text of blog posts (and comments) that left an impact on the author.

Robin Sloan | Author, “creative industrialist,” and New Aesthetics grantee Robin Sloan is a prolific experimenter with hybrid print and digital publications. He’s done it again with a new project called Magic Postcard: a post card you can attach a photo or video to when you send it to your friends. The risograph print is even more colorful and poppy in person than in this photo. Order some while you still can or sign up for his very good newsletter to find out when new postcard designs arrive.

Baukunst Updates

Estes Announces High-Performance EV Battery Design Based on Groundbreaking Magnesium Manufacturing Process

Estes Energy came out of stealth last week with a new battery platform for commercial EVs. Domestically designed, sourced, and built, Estes’ unibody magnesium alloy battery packs are significantly lighter and higher energy density than traditional battery systems.

With experience leading battery technology Tesla and building gigafactories, the founding team of Estes is one of the few groups in the world with the expertise to bring new, large-scale battery manufacturing capacity to America. Baukunst led Estes’ pre-seed round in 2024, and we’re proud to back them alongside BMW i Ventures, Fortescue Ventures, and DCVC as they scale up production.

If you’re looking for some light evening reading on magnesium material science, check out Estes’ just-released whitepaper on their battery system architecture.

GNucleus CAD evaluation tasks featured in Anthropic’s announcement of Claude Opus 5

Baukunst portfolio company GNucleus recently released Parametric CAD Bench, a tool for benchmarking AI systems and agents on all kinds of design and 3D modeling tasks. Which models and harnesses perform best at generating multi-part assemblies and creating part designs that are accurate to spec? CAD Bench is the most advanced tool to date, testing models across harnesses and full agent-based loops instead of single-shot prompts.

One of their CAD evaluation tasks was featured in Anthropic’s announcement of Claude Opus 5. The benchmark, contributed by gNucleus to Frontier-Bench, challenged the model to reconstruct a 3D FreeCAD model from a machine part drawing, without ever being able to directly view the drawing.

Events

Baukunst First Fridays will be back in September with a solo exhibition by protocol artist Duncan Wilson. Entitled Strange Loops and Knots, the show features large-format computational textiles, drawing inspiration from Afghani war rugs and digital hypercollage. With works designed between 2022 and 2026, this is the first solo exhibition of Duncan’s body of work.

Strange Loops and Knots opens at Baukunst on Friday, September 4th at 5pm.

Jonathan likes to describe himself as an artist, designer, inventor, programmer, and activist—a combination truly deserving of the creative technologist title.

BK: What’s the first device you took apart and put back together?

JB: Most of the things I took apart I didn’t put back together! The one that stands out most in my memory from childhood was taking apart a Teddy Ruxpin, an animatronic teddy bear with a tape recorder in the back. I still maintain the habit, and I’m a sucker for things that assemble elegantly. I love seeing how somebody made something press-fit together without requiring screws. So I always have a spudger handy.

BK: You started a playful device company, Move38. What is your relationship with play like these days?

JB: A lot of people are surprised to find out that I’m not really a gamer. But With Move38, I was helping people that make games, and building a community that made games.

The things that stick out to me about play are the kinds of things it allows, the way it lets your mind occupy a space. Play is special because there’s freedom from failure.

BK: In your TED Talk you mentioned that there are four freedoms in play: the freedom of experiment, of failure, of identity, and of effort. Which is most important in building products?

JB: I think experimentation, and being curious, never too certain of anything, is a healthy place to be when building. When I was building my company, I surrounded myself with people who were better at things than me, who’d challenge my preconceived ideas about what I wanted to build.

The identity one is probably also healthy. Sometimes in the process of building a company you just need to show up to events and be someone that maybe doesn’t feel like you — “I’m not a full extrovert” — getting out there, giving the presentation, getting up on stage. It’s good to be able to enter that space playfully, and ask “how do I show up to this?”

BK: How do you get new ideas?

JB: I constantly notice things. I love paying attention, getting lost in the details of the things around me in the physical world, and I approach my digital life quite similarly. From an early point, one of the most exciting things about the internet was right-click > view source.

An example: I was in Taiwan, and there’s an art museum whose roofing uses a special geometric shape to cast shade on the building. The shape is called a tetrix, or a Sierpinski tetrahedron, and it has two interesting properties. As you iterate it, punching triangles out of a triangular volume, the volume gets smaller and smaller, so over time it would eventually go to zero. But the surprising fact is that the surface area stays exactly the same as you iterate it. I thought this is a really surprising property. What would it look like to make an object that starts flat, like a piece of paper, that you cut and fold so you can actually witness a proof of it?

BK: Your two biggest devices, Troxes and Blinks, are interlocking systems of a kind. What is cool to you about these modular systems for you?

JB: The interlocking aspect for me is almost more social than mechanical. There’s something nice about thinking of physical systems and social systems together, objects coming together, imbuing a kind of politeness in how things greet. When teaching kids how to make their first Trox, I’d say, “When two Troxes meet, they’re friendly, they hug.”

The first interlocking system I played with as a kid was the metal balls with the little connector chains, the ones you find in every bank, holding the pen on. You could wear them as necklaces, dog tags, key chains. So simple, but it has all these emergent properties.

I play with modularity a lot. There’s something exciting about endless expandability—for Troxes, once you build a volume, you can stick volumes together. I think that’s what drew me to coding, too. it feels endless.

BK: What’s the proudest moment you’ve had with one of your games or devices?

JB: One in five of our customers bought developer kits to make their own games, partly because they’d seen other people making games on the platform. One community member wanted to build more complicated map-building games, so he forked our language and built a custom Blink library. His code let every Blink model the arrangement of every other Blink, with addresses, so you could send things from one to the other. We published one of his games, Hexenwood, on two separate Blinks. The first had Hexenwood itself, playable up to four players, but it’s a strategy game — to play with one player you need a second player. And we even shipped Hexenwood AI, which he designed to play the game. You attach it to the board, watch it think, and it makes its move — plays at a high level, like having a chess master.

BK: You’ve also worked on high technology products at places like Nanotronics. What kind of questions about technology are you drawn to right now?

JB: The biggest questions for me, when I’m not focused on playful interactions, are about what context is available that wasn’t available previously, and how a tool can behave differently given that context. When I worked on museum installations, you have context because you’re placing somebody in an environment. Now the devices we interact with — phones, earbuds, glasses — all have context based on a plethora of sensors. There’s so much possibility in that space to do nice things, to be mindful about how our devices interact with us. A small example: I built a widget so I don’t have to open an app every time I commute to know when the train is coming. I just look at my wrist and see the train I take every morning, what time it’s coming, whether I have time to grab a matcha. It’s context-aware, but it’s not using AI.

BK: Is there anyone else in the Baukunst Collective working on projects you admire or find interesting?

JB: I’m quite close with one of the other members, Greg Leppert, who runs a data initiative at Harvard. He’s doing something quite wonderful, getting large institutions to commit their really coveted datasets to be made model-friendly. The goal is to have a rich corpus, and to not have those voices lost to the mass of things freely and easily available for training. It doesn’t feel like shiny work. It’s cultural infrastructure.

BK: You’re thinking about starting a family, you’ve made toys for kids, you’ve worked in AI. At Baukunst we are very critical about how AI interacts with family life. How do those things overlap? What form factor do you think makes sense for AI kids toys, if any?

JB: From somebody who’s not a parent, my closest analogy would be teaching — my approach to teaching is lead by example, model the behavior you’d like to imbue. You don’t have to know everything. Just model a behavior you’re trying to foster or incubate.

I actually think exposure to AI tools is good for kids — modeling that behavior and interaction, and even the questions around it: whether you’re uncomfortable with certain aspects of a product, how it’s gathered its information, the ethical questions, the uncertainty of originality, or whether something is “slop.” Humans generate slop all the time. For kids, you want to encourage that — that’s part of play, making things that aren’t legible or valuable yet, that are in the process of arriving at something valuable.

BK: What does “the art of building” mean to you?

JB: When I paint, the brush is moving and responding. The feedback loop is so tight, I’m doing something and learning from it at the same time. I want to use tools and objects that let me do something, react to it, iterate.

The art of building speaks to a messiness that’s required to build considered, beautiful things. A lot of builders look for structure, for tried-and-true paths. The art of building is a slightly different approach. It’s messy, iterative… there’s heart in it. As a maker, when you’re making something, it’s you. It’s your DNA. So put it all in.

BK: What is your “move 38?”

JB: Wow. I want to remind myself what I meant by Move38 when I started it… what does it feel like to have an intuition? How does intuition change as our systems change?

Have you ever played a board game where you realize you’ve lost? What you do is try to find your next way to make the losing fun. How can you start perceiving the game differently? Are there new games to play?

Nick Bentley, who started Move38 with me, told me that when he’s playing games with somebody who’s less good than him, his game becomes how do I win by the smallest margin possible? That makes it more interesting for him — it’s a challenge, in the same way the demo scene has a culture of building with the least bits possible.

In some senses, AI is freeing up mental bandwidth and space for things that have gone less explored, that people either didn’t have time to experiment with or play around in.

What is a Creative Technologist?

By Tyler Mincey, Co-founder & General Partner at Baukunst

For as long as I’ve been working in tech, I’ve felt the most at home in small rooms where the line between “designer” and “engineer” is blurry. Some of my most cherished memories of Apple are of working with incredibly talented industrial designers who could rattle off LED wavelengths, aluminum alloys, and machining techniques; working with engineering colleagues who thought deeply about affordances and moved technical mountains to fight for design intent.

In some workplaces, there are technical experts without vision, and visionary thinkers whose aspirations are unmoored from reality. I’ve always considered the people who put both of those skills together to be wizards of a kind.

These wizards belong to a different archetype than the purely technical engineer or the craftsperson, and also differ from the idea guy, futurist, or prima donna designer. Instead they marry craft and vision, “what’s possible” with “what we want.” These are the people I call creative technologists.

—

Creative technologists draw on deeply interdisciplinary backgrounds. We bristle at “jack of all trades, master of none.” Our breadth of expertise is a creative superpower that sows the seeds of insight, creates the sparkgaps between fields.

Our work begins with empathy for need and a vision for the future. We bend technology in service of those.

We have a rebellious disregard for authority, but a deep respect for those who have blazed new trails.

We work in demos more than specs.

We know how to shelter the spark of an idea and fan the flames.

We defend play against extreme efficiency.

We know aesthetics and elegance matter, but design is how it works.

We defer to intuition, and we relentlessly ask why, expecting others to do the same.

We embrace business considerations as part of the design space. We seek business model innovation alongside product innovation as a means of achieving sustainable impact.

We obsess over details but have an insatiable desire to ship.

Being part of the magic composition of humans that shipped the first iPhone and many generations of iPods, I know small teams of people working in this way can be a white hot nucleus of change in the world. I’ve seen it.

—

Design, as well as the notion of “creativity” at large, have always been undervalued in technical contexts. The excesses of big tech, such as “creative technologist” job titles for roles that mainly make tech demos, have only worsened this misvaluation. But creative technologists’ historical track record of building some of the most respected companies in the world tells an entirely different story, one in which we play the leading role.

We claim inspiration from groundbreaking research and educational institutions like Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and MIT Media Lab. This chain of organizations, led by people like Josef and Annie Albert and Doug Englebart, exemplify the creative technologist’s instinct to begin with a human-centric aspiration worthy of actualization.

We claim heritage from interdisciplinary creative studios like the Eames Office, IDEO, frog, Pentagram, and Miyake Design Studio. Greats like Ray and Charles Eames, masters of high design in commercial settings, teach us that the most generative opportunities are where business, design, and societal interests overlap.

We claim the global impact of companies like Atari, Apple, Pixar, Sony, Olivetti, Dyson, Nintendo, SGI, Adobe, Autodesk, and Airbnb. All founded by creative technologists or embodying the creative technologist DNA collectively in their organizations. Steve Wozniak is perhaps the creative technologist in purest form, an engineer whose designs were admired for their elegance and economy. His Apple I and Apple II designs balanced computer architecture, manufacturability, cost, software, user experience, and most importantly delight, laying the foundation of the most successful personal computer company of all time.

I invoke this pantheon not to engage in hero worship, but to underscore the heritage of impact that creative technologists pass from generation to generation.

—

I consider the influence of creative technologists to be the secret story of tech’s most positive impacts, one that could be the subject of a book or movie. Recently, though, it feels to me that people are coming around to appreciating the role. In the age of AI, when the cost of building is plummeting, we hear about the importance of “taste” and see design engineering roles on hiring boards.

But it also feels that some of these “taste” champions have downright anti-technical attitudes. Gleeful that they don’t have to think about implementation—that they can just prompt what they want and “one-shot” it—they seem to be saying “finally we idea guys can be technologists, without engaging with technology!” As if all craft could be encoded in an embedding, all outcomes compressed in a prompt.

The way we’re now awash in slop demonstrates this anti-technical tendency. When it’s so easy to prompt something into reality, you’re not forced to design something that’s worthy of being built in the first place. You’re sidestepping the crucible of evaluating tradeoffs, a crucible that ultimately makes the product better. As a result, bad designs are what AI is scaling.

But there is a more urgent risk: that our lives will simply be dictated by technology’s most obvious dynamics. It feels like we’re racing toward a sci-fi future that I don’t know if I want to be a part of: eliminating beautiful inefficiencies for short term economic gains, removing frictions and participation we find meaningful, and eating resources without asking whether it’s all worth it.

Technological accelerationists are means-maxers. The thing they’re accelerating is capabilities and tech tree advancement, without considering what ends are worth accelerating towards. And if this state of affairs is left to fester, we will end up living inside powerful systems that are undesigned. We will end up down a path of technological change without a vision of where we want to go.

If people neither understand the technology, nor how to create a designed vision, then both sides of the “creative technologist” venn diagram collapse.

As creative technologists, our goal is to find what is human and beautiful: to propose, prototype, and scale forms of living that support those essential qualities.

We don’t just want capable systems. We want emotionally resonant, aspirational visions of the future that include us—visions that not only move us, but are backed by what’s possible, so that these visions deserve our belief.

Now more than ever, we need builders who deeply understand and appreciate positive human experiences of love, joy, excitement, warmth. Who know the pain of loss and suffering, loneliness and dejection. Who understand inherently that valuable human experiences are part of what makes them so good as designers, leaders, and founders.

—

At Baukunst, we are a collective of creative technologists building companies at the frontiers of technology and design. Our founder Kishan Chalumuri is an industrial engineer with a vision for revitalized manufacturing built on powerful + elegant software. Lauryn Menard is a world-class industrial designer working on personal care products that point towards a regenerative future. In all our work as investors, community-builders, storytellers, we strive to advance this “art of building.” We back founders and support thinkers in the lineage of Walt and Woz, Bowerman and Buckminster, Engelbart and Eno, Koolhaas and Kay.

We’re in our fourth year of thoughtfully building this collective, and with each year our imperative to rally kindred spirits grows.

We started Baukunst because we believed that creative technologists needed a supportive group and a dedicated fund to back the work that they do. And we think it’s high time to strengthen the conversation around this work. For all those in pursuit of the art of building.

— Tyler Mincey, Co-founder & General Partner at Baukunst

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San Francisco Creative Technology Happenings

This section of our newsletter covers news and upcoming events.

Audium | Audium is a legendary sound space in San Francisco. Every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in June, artist Barba Nerness is in residency at Audium, creating interactive, participatory sound sculpture with audience members’ heartbeats. Get tickets to BIOMETRICKS.

TIAT | TIAT has an open call out to participate in their next exhibition, Epistemologies of Slop. “We are looking for works that engage slop not only as an aesthetic, but as a social, technical, economic, and psychological condition. We welcome critiques of slop. We are also looking for works that embody it, aestheticize it, weaponize it, surrender to it, or reveal the strange new forms of culture emerging from within it.”

Gray Area | Gray Area has so many amazing performances and workshops coming up, but one you shouldn’t miss is a course on making mini-games for the PICO-8 virtual console.

Baukunst Updates

YouPop Raises $1M Pre-Seed to Build AI Infrastructure for Creators

Solo founder Sarina Virk Torrendell is one of tech’s secret weapons for launching and scaling new consumer experiences. From launching Postmates markets as employee twelve to scaling consumer adoption at Apple Pay, she’s built enormous businesses across categories.

Over her career, Sarina has seen and leveraged every trend in influencer marketing. Now Sarina’s building a company to help usher knowledge creators into the AI era. YouPop brings together all an influencer’s expertise—across courses, podcasts, newsletters, and posts—and makes it searchable and shoppable for audiences.

YouPop just launched into private alpha with top knowledge creators. Join the waitlist at youpop.ai.

DannijoPro Featured in New York Times

Baukunst founders Danielle and Jodie Snyder headline a new New York Times feature about their women’s sports apparel business, DannijoPro. Second-time entrepreneurs Danielle and Jodie have intrepidly entered the sports merchandise market with their creative take on luxury bombers and cropped jackets, knitwear, and hand-stitched items. In a world where most women’s sports merch falls victim to the “shrink it and pink it,” trope, their visually striking designs constantly provoke the question: “where did you get that?!” DannijoPro is the go to brand for NBA WAGs (wives and girlfriends) and fueled the fashion side of Knicks fever in their championship run. It’s the hottest merch we’ve ever seen, and we’re so thrilled to be investors where fashion, fandom and culture intersect.

Bindery Book Hits USA Today Bestseller List

Bindery’s latest book, Our Sister’s Keeper, just debuted on the USA Today Bestselling Booklist. That makes it Bindery’s fourth book to hit a major bestseller list!

Recess Expands to Houston and Dallas

Our final shoutout is to Recess, who this month expands from their first market in Austin to Houston and Dallas, two of Texas’ largest metro areas. Founders Amy Kiska and Molly Morse are marketplace expansion experts, previously having led new markets for companies like INFARM, Christian Louboutin, Block Renovation, and Bellhop. Congrats on this major milestone.

Events

First Fridays at the Baukunst Studio

On the first Friday of every month, we host an open studio party featuring art, music, and beverages from local vendors. Last Friday we had the pleasure of hosting engineer and musical instrument designer Chris Guichet.

Chris brought a bunch of instruments he’s created, including his latest device, Flexur, an expressive synth with two touch-sensitive bars that can be played like a cello or a pedal steel guitar. He played a bunch of songs for us, including a beautiful rendition of Niel Young’s Harvest Moon, and Black Hole Sun by Muse.

Chris just launched preorders for Flexur. If you’re a synth nerd and you’re in San Francisco, hit Chris up for a demo.

And to get notifications about our next First Fridays event, follow Baukunst on Partiful.

Collective News

• Noctrix Health was acquired by sleep health leader Resmed in a $340M deal last week, a satisfying conclusion to a 10 year journey. Baukunst GP Axel Bichara was their pre-seed lead investor.

• Baukunst GP Kate McAndrew was honored in the Create & Cultivate 100 list, and gave a great interview about the role of creativity in business and her relationship to money.

• Collective member Eric Silberstein has launched an awesome game called TongueTied, a sort of multi-lingual Scrabble where you can win points for bridging between languages.

• Collective member Kim Chappell was named one of the top 25 most creative CMOs by Business Insider.

• Hardware filesharing network USB Club, co-founded by collective members Norm O’Hagan and Yatu Espinosa, has been acquired by NYC-based creative holding company Garden3d. Congratulations!

Imagine you run a specialty machine shop in the American Southwest. You’ve just signed an agreement with a new customer, and you urgently need to expand your production capacity. You go to your usual distributor’s website, and start hunting for industrial equipment. Up comes a flood of search results, but without any specs you could use to compare parts. You start searching the manufacturing part numbers one by one, and pasting results into a spreadsheet for comparison. But some items don’t even have the same data listed. After 20 frustrating minutes of switching between tabs, PDFs, and spreadsheets, it’s finally time to manually fill out an order form.

What you’ve just experienced is how the bulk of B2B ecommerce works today. Even though B2B ecommerce is an order of magnitude larger than B2C—$42B across tens of thousands of technical sellers alone—the average customer experience is years behind consumer ecommerce experiences like Amazon and Shopify. The reason is that distributors import product information from thousands of sources, from PDFs to CSVs to bespoke supplier portals. Normalizing this data and enriching it is an enormous hurdle that distributors can’t keep up with.

That’s why we’re pleased to introduce Kaavio, a new AI company that is helping B2B distributors solve their product data problem and build world-class ecommerce experiences.

“Sam and I have spent most of our careers helping technical people buy the technical things, whether that's lab supplies, electronic components, or industrial parts. We knew this problem space, and we saw that AI represented an opportunity to rethink how you build this infrastructure.”

–Derek Gregg, Co-founder & CEO of Kaavio

Kaavio is founded by Derek Gregg and Sam Bobb, veterans of three industry-leading B2B ecommerce startups: Derek at life sciences distributor Quartzy, and Sam at B2B component search engines Octopart and Volition. They’ve spent years working on product information management systems and growing sales revenue at technical distributors, and understand the product data problem from the inside.

At Kaavio, Derek and Sam are using AI to give B2B ecommerce the experience layer it has been missing. Kaavio ingests product data in any format, supplements it with information from all over the web, and validates it to detect conflicts and ensure accuracy. With Kaavio, the long tail of products that never get enriched—up to 80% of catalogues—finally get complete, customer-relevant data filled in. Kaavio uses all of this enriched data to create useful product comparisons, content-rich product detail pages, and educational content for distributors’ ecommerce platforms.

Kaavio came out of stealth this month with a $2.9M pre-seed led by Baukunst. Its customers already include a Fortune 500 distributor, leading national lab technology suppliers, and one of the country’s top HVAC suppliers.

AI is quickly becoming the primary way buyers discover and purchase technical products. Kaavio is positioned to power how products get discovered, compared, and bought in the world’s biggest ecommerce market.

Read Kaavio's Announcement

Last year we invested in a new beverage company that we’ve been quietly excited about. This week, as they launch nationally in Target, we can finally share the story of how we partnered with Morgan Zanotti to back Waay.

Morgan is one of the most celebrated founders in natural foods. Her first major career milestone was leading marketing at the well-loved kombucha company KeVita. Then in 2015, she co-founded Primal Kitchen alongside Mark Sisson, the original voice of the paleo movement and one of the most influential figures in ancestral health. Their first product, avocado oil mayonnaise, sold out its first 18,000-unit run in a week, and only three years later with no outside capital, Kraft Heinz acquired Primal Kitchen for $200 million. Morgan stayed on as President of Primal for 5 years, stewarding the brand through a remarkably long and successful post-acquisition tenure.

Morgan brings the insights, operational excellence, and network she earned from these ventures to Waay. Primal Kitchen took two and a half years to commercialize its first product; Waay went from finalizing its formula to a national Whole Foods rollout in just six months.

Morgan is our first founder to reach out over TikTok, and we flew down to meet her in LA right away. Although she’s an experienced founder, this was her first time raising venture capital, so we settled in for a process of getting to know each other over a few months. In the meantime, we ordered every protein beverage we could find and hosted a protein-tasting day at our studio. They were all chalky and unappetizing—except for the samples from Waay, which had a light texture and reminded us of our favorite soft drinks as a kid.

Waay sits at the intersection of two important trends in women’s health. Protein is no longer just a bodybuilder's supplement, especially with GLP-1s putting protein top of mind for every-day Americans, and sparkling water has become the default drink of the millennial generation. Waay combines both trends, with 10 grams of protein, zero sugar, and a juicy sparkle. But how big could Waay get? We took a field trip to Erewhon to investigate.

Browsing the shelves, we saw colors, ingredients, and brand statements that seemed more at home in a medicine cabinet than a refrigerator. The drink aisle seems to be turning into a beauty aisle. Morgan saw that many of these brands aren’t positioned for the mass market. While the first samples of Waay we tasted came in unmarked aluminum cans, Morgan aims to capture the market with a friendlier brand—your fizzy little overachiever. It’s bright, it’s colorful, and it helps you hit your protein targets.

Clear whey protein has been dominant in Europe for years, but the category is just beginning to grow in the United States. In emerging categories, it’s all about backing the right founder. Through the process of getting to know Morgan we saw how deep her intuition for this category is, and how the reps she put in at KeVita and Primal Kitchen have turned her into one of the sharpest operators in the CPG.

By the time last summer rolled around, we had a great relationship with one another, and Baukunst led Waay’s $3.5M pre-seed round. It’s been a joy to get to know Morgan, and she’s already become a great contributor to the Baukunst collective, leading a discussion on founder-life balance at our last annual conference.

Waay is now available nationally at Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Target, and online at Amazon. We're proud to be backing Morgan as she builds the defining brand in a category that's just getting started. And we can't wait for you to try it.

Follow Waay on Instagram

A new article in Forbes highlights 4 women in the Baukunst Collective who are defining their own style of leadership, investment, and mentorship. Kate McAndrew of Baukunst, Laura Modi of Bobbie, and Amy Kiska and Molly Morse of Recess all feature in a story about a “reach-back” model of leadership, each building something that makes the next woman’s path a little less impossible.

The piece traces a lineage of investment and mentorship that runs through our community: Kate backed Laura's company Bobbie, which became one of the fastest-growing entrants into the U.S. formula market in decades; Laura in turn invested in Recess, Amy and Molly's startup building marketplace infrastructure for children's enrichment. Author Alli Kushner frames it as compounding leadership. For us, it’s part of the Baukunst Collective’s eco-centric approach to building. We’re honored to be part of a community recognized for its ethos of interdependence.

Read on Forbes

Baukunst’s latest study group report, Assembling the Future: Manufacturing + AI, is now available to read in full here.

Our first study group explored the market potential of mushrooms, and our second charted out how generative AI is changing CAD. Our most recent study group is a deep dive on one of this decade’s most important issues: how AI is shifting manufacturing, employment, and the shape of human work.

Members of the Baukunst collective, startup founders, and guest experts, including leaders from manufacturing giants like NVIDIA, Flex, Tesla, Rivian, and Apple, stepped up to share both questions and experiences working with AI. We explored how AI is being used by some of the world’s largest contract manufacturers and best startups, ranging from agentic procurement and negotiation to AI-assisted industrial engineering and humanoid robots.

READ THE FULL REPORT HERE

Assembling the Future looks at:

• 4 ways AI is already changing manufacturing work today and why they differ from historic waves of automation. We document an expanding scope of AI capabilities, from “AI as API” to a company’s context, to AI that augments human efficiency, to AI colleagues, to AI-native manufacturing.

• What AI-native manufacturing looks like: we talked to founders building vertically integrated factories where AI touches everything from design to procurement. What are they learning about machine-human collaboration?

• How AI will affect industrial labor and employment? These are the elephants in the room when it comes to this topic. We learned from contemporary labor experts and historical case studies to form our own perspective on how to anticipate AI’s effects.

For insights into the future of manufacturing, industrial engineering, and AI-driven innovation, get the full report.

Read the Full Report

Baukunst Study Groups are short, collaborative projects where the participants dive into new areas of inquiry at the frontiers of technology and society. Each Study Group is designed to inspire collective members to share domain knowledge and apply their brains, bodies, and spirits to wholly new directions. Learn more about Study Groups here.

Updates & Events

The first Friday of each month, we open our studio for art and performances curated by Bernal duo Coyote Town. This Friday March 6th, their textile themed show “High Fiber” will feature a performance with artist Evie Hidysmith and violinist Sophia Shu Wang.

Last Friday Tyler hosted his always popular Teardown Library, this time as a “chairdown” of the iconic Humanscale Freedom chair, famously used by Tim Cook. Follow Tyler’s new Instagram for more upcoming Teardown Library events and cuts from design history.

Hilary Coles and Emily Boschwitz, two co-founders who deeply understand consumer culture, are responding with POCA, a zero-calorie sweetener syrup for coffee and matcha drinks.

A portmanteau of “pocket café,” POCA is launching with squeezable sweetener satchets that can travel on the go. Starting with a direct-to-consumer website and subscription options, POCA plans to trial their healthier syrups with cafes later this year. POCA’s syrups are based on three natural sweeteners: allulose, found in figs and raisins; inulin, a sugar-like prebiotic fiber found in roots; and popular sugar alternative monkfruit. Together, they contribute the ideal base for syrups, with no aftertaste, no calorie content, no preservatives, no sugar crash, and a few grams of healthy fiber.

Hilary and Emily previously worked together at telehealth and wellness giant Hims & Hers, one of the most successful consumer brand stories of the last decade. Hilary co-founded Hims & Hers as a founder-in-residence at venture studio Atomic, and quickly brought on Emily, a veteran of Dropcam and Nest, as Director of Marketing. Together the two of them built a nationally recognized brand which changed the conversation around men’s sexual health. With POCA, they aim to do for coffee syrup what Poppi did for soda.

We were introduced to Hilary and Emily by Baukunst collective member Ruffin Mitchener, and participated in POCA’s pre-seed round. POCA exemplifies the kind of deep cultural insight we appreciate in founders, and it’s a joy to back Hilary and Emily on their new venture.

Read POCA's Launch Announcement

To try POCA yourself, use our discount code!
KATELOVESPOCA at pickpoca.com

Baukunst portfolio company Bindery Books is in Los Angeles Times headlines today with a dedicated feature on its industry-changing publishing model. As one book industry veteran quoted in the article says, Bindery is “an indicator of where the industry needs to go to stay fresh and relevant.”

The Times shares the story of Young Adult author Courtney Summers, whose book was enthusiastically picked up by a Bindery tastemaker, and is seeing renewed success many years after its initial publication. It’s a testament to Bindery’s bookfluencer-led model, where tastemakers run publishing imprints that cater to the interests of highly engaged communities.  

Bindery co-founder Matt Kaye says in the Times interview: “Part of what we’re trying to do is have that immediacy. You’re not many, many steps removed from the reader. . . You’re actually in conversation with them every day.” By integrating reader sentiment into the publishing process, Bindery builds engaged community around books and takes the burden of promotion off under-resourced authors.

Bindery is growing quickly and seeing great traction, recently landing books on several bestseller lists and end of year best-of lists. This new article shows how Bindery’s 21st century publishing model creates a great experience for authors and readers alike.

Read the LA Times Bindery Feature

How does the former co-CEO of a publicly traded company with a $60B market cap run a startup? Do you bring in seasoned experts or energetic young talent? What kind of company culture do you build?

In this episode of The Art of Building, Amar Hanspal, CEO of Motif, sits down with Baukunst GP Axel Bichara to answer these questions and more. Amar has been a pioneer in AEC for over thirty years, including an accomplished tenure at Autodesk, where he led the product organization and served as co-CEO.

Amar’s new company, Motif, is laying the foundation for a new generation of Building Information Modeling (BIM) software, bringing real-time collaboration, AI visualization tools, and cloud-based data management into one platform. In order to take on the massive technical challenge of redesigning BIM from first principles, Amar has assembled a generational team of CAD legends, cloud infrastructure experts, and AI researchers.

With both executive tenure and startup experience under his belt, Amar is a fountain of wisdom for founders building at the edge of massive industries.

“The closest metaphor to building a company I can use is the expedition. I grew up reading stories about Shackleton finding the South Pole… The parallel to companies is that you know your starting point, and you know your destination, but the path in between requires constant adjustment.”

–Amar Hanspal, CEO of Motif

This episode is a deep dive into:

• Reimagining BIM as a cloud-native, AI-first platform

• How Amar allocates his time as a CEO

• The difference between running a public company and a startup

• How AEC is changing as it digitizes and integrates AI, from waste prediction to Midjourney renders

• The decade it takes to reach an “overnight success”

Watch the latest episode of The Art of Building on YouTube, or tune in on Spotify.

Baukunst portfolio company Obello is launching to the public for the first time. Obello, which announced an $8.5M seed round led by Obvious Ventures in November, is an AI graphic design platform that learns brand rules and generates editable designs, emails, social media creatives, and more.

AI-enabled features like Obello’s generative layout model, automatic animations, and drag-and-drop email builder make it possible for anyone to create beautiful content that sticks to brand rules.

To date, Obello has worked exclusively with select design partners like eBay,Cotopaxi, Ritual, and REI, while accruing a waitlist of some of the world’s most impressive brands and agencies. Now they’re opening the doors to public signups.

Starting today, anyone can sign up for Obello.

Earlier this year we sat down with founders Ben Pham and Ollie Ralph to discuss their company-building journey, their creative partnership, and how they’ve taught AI to be a judge of good design.

Thanks to Ben and Ollie’s deep design background at leading agency Character, they’ve built Obello into a platform that designers and creative teams want to champion. Tune in to their Art of Building episode for a deep dive on how they’re bringing a next-generation design and marketing tool to market.

This year our portfolio company Eyebot had a huge booth, and it was great to see a long line of CES attendees curious to try it out and get a new prescription. Eyebot has been picking up a ton of traction recently and was even named Best Health Tech of CES by Engadget.

One thing we were eager to check out at CES is humanoid robots. In years past CES was a zoo of IoT devices; this year was a veritable army of robots. We had a great time walking around and giving them off-the-cuff ratings.

More seriously, we’ve been thinking a lot about AI colleagues, especially in a manufacturing context. We’ve been somewhat skeptical internally about robots in the shape of homo sapiens — is this the correct form factor for a bot that will mostly be doing repetitive tasks?

But there’s no doubt that the funding market for this category is large and growing. 2025 saw around $7B in funding into humanoid robotics companies and foundation models for general purpose AI like Physical Intelligence, not to mention untold R&D budgets from the likes of Tesla, Google, and NVIDIA. We expect that progress here will be rapid, and that next year’s CES will see more elaborate demos and faster physical movements.

One final thought. 2026 is shaping up to be the year of AI orchestration frameworks for agentic coding tools. In a manufacturing context, these same kinds of software tools will be important: orchestration, factory digital twins, robot fleet management, and AI training infrastructure. If you’re working on this, reach out.

Exploring the CES show floor is a great way to read the tea leaves of how people are thinking and relating to technology. Many of the AI-enabled devices we saw promised to deliver and act on information previously inaccessible to us. Here’s a little monologue about this aesthetic of knowability.

It wouldn’t be CES without a good party, and we hosted the Baukunst collective for a private party at Glitter Gulch tiki bar. We had a hundred collective members and friends come by to celebrate the week, compare notes on what we learned, and show off new projects.

This last one is a recap of our whole CES journey. Shout out to Camille, our newest team member, for all the amazing video documentation. See you next year, CES!

To kick off 2026, we were honored to find that Kate McAndrew made Venture Capital Journal’s list of 2026 Rising Stars. As reported by VCJ:

McAndrew co-founded and was instrumental in the closing of the San Francisco firm's debut $100 million fund in 2022. As a general partner, she has sourced and led many of its 30 investments and sits on eight company boards. "Over the past year, Kate has been the driving force behind building Baukunst into a leading brand in the early-stage venture space," says Baukunst co-founder and general partner Matt Thoms. Her accomplishments include launching a TikTok channel that generated more than 35 million impressions in 2025. McAndrew also recently published her first book, The Goddess Guide to Branding.

Read on VCJ

“If you can’t get to paradise, we’ll bring paradise to you.” - Trader Vic

Baukunst is back at CES. Escape the casino maze and head off the Strip to a Baukunst buyout of Glitter Gulch Tiki, downtown Vegas’ finest hideaway.

Enjoy an exotic selection of classic and modern tiki drinks amongst fellow founders, investors, collaborators and friends of Baukunst.

Stop by on your way to dinner, or consider us your perfect end-up.

Conveniently located in the heart of Downtown Las Vegas, a short Uber from the convention center / Eureka Park.

Join Baukunst Tiki Time

The partnership with Walmart and Sam’s Club represents a major step toward Eyebot’s mission of making vision care accessible to everyone. Rural Pennsylvania is just one region of many across the United States impacted by the nation’s eye doctor shortage. With Eyebot’s 90-second vision test, reviewed on-demand by a licensed eye doctor, patients in under-served areas can get a prescription in about 15 minutes.

“In areas where access might be limited, tools like this help our teams serve customers and members more efficiently,” said Jason Wong, Regional Health & Wellness Director for Walmart, covering Pennsylvania.

Read the full joint press release on the Eyebot site.

More Collective News

Sylvie founder Chelsea Macdonald featured in Architectural Digest

Sylvie founder Chelsea Macdonald was featured in this week’s Architectural Digest story about the next generation of antique and vintage dealers. Baukunst led the pre-seed round for the drop-based marketplace for antique tapestries, furniture, earthenware, and vintage home decor.

Read our story about how Sylvie built a beautiful, community-first brand for Millenials and Gen Z antique hunters.

Blockbuster year-end for Bindery

Bindery's books landed on two major bestseller lists (LA Times and Libro.FM) and ten end of year best-of lists (Goodreads, Elle, New York Times Gift Guide, Spotify, #2 debut at People, Powell’s, Waterstones, Audiofile, Libro.fm, Bookriot). To cap it all off, one of Bindery’s bestsellers just had a major production company come onboard to produce a TV show.

Estes Energy shouted out in New York Times

Portfolio company Estes was namedropped in the Times as one of several American companies working on making electric vehicles more affordable in the US. Estes is developing lighter, safer, and more affordable battery systems for the commercial vehicle market with an all-star team of battery experts.

Bobbie launches Hot-To-Go baby bottle

Bobbie has launched a cleverly designed infant formula bottle in time for the holidays. The bottle keeps water warm for up to 6 hours, and a specially-designed release mechanism keeps formula fresh until it’s time to mix. Check out the Hot-To-Go Bottle at Bobbie.

At our recent Creative Technologist Conference, Kate McAndrew sat down with Bobbie CEO Laura Modi to discuss how Bobbie is changing the face of the $87 billion infant formula industry and building a culture of confidence for parents. Bobbie has nourished over 600,000 babies, and has captured 4% of the non-WIC US market. It is the fastest growing formula brand since the 1980s, and Laura was named one of Times Magazine’s Women of the Year in 2025. Kate led Bobbie’s first round of funding and has been a partner to the company through each stage of its growth.

KATE MCANDREW: Laura, drop me into who you were and your mindset in 2018 when you started this company, and where you are today.

LAURA MODI: What actually was critical in this journey was the mindset I was in in 2016 when I had my first daughter. I was in the mindset of genuine curiosity about—why is it that the formula I am feeding my daughter is the same formula that existed when I was a baby? Why is it that I feel guilty and disappointed? Why is it that I'm lying to my pediatrician? Why is it that this should feel like a better experience and it doesn't? My mindset then was fueled by disappointment. Today it's fueled by gratitude, humility, and just the desire for more curiosity. I think about the entire journey, wondering how it should be different or who is that next customer I can serve? Or how can we fundamentally change more than just the product, but the industry at large?

KATE MCANDREW: You have led this company with a lot of curiosity and have let go of many assumptions about how things should be done. What's one thing that you were naive about?

LAURA MODI: Oh, this deserves its own conversation. I knew that I was getting into an FDA-regulated space. I was naive to how corrupt it was, how complex it was. I knew that we were getting into a space that was heavily concentrated by two major pharma companies. I was naive to why nobody else had done this, why there were not any other manufacturers in the industry.

On a personal note, the other thing we don't often talk about is that I was a little bit naive to the major personal tradeoffs to do something like this. I started when I had one kid, now I have four. And there's a lot of things I had to trade off along the journey. This is a hell of a journey. And yet I feel happier today than I did starting, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I would do it all over again.

KATE MCANDREW: When people think about Bobbie, the first thing that they often think about is the brand, right? I am obsessed with Bobbie swag. I wear it all over and I get stopped on the street by moms. Give us some secrets or things that you did that were different to build that kind of a wildfire brand.

LAURA MODI: Very early on when we were designing the brand, we asked what we want our brand to stand for. We thought we needed to be the company that people wanna wear on their chest. Often people look at formula as a toxic second best, not something you should be feeding your child, but if we can get past that stigma where someone's willing to put on a sweater in the morning with your brand on it, they are contributing to shaking the stigma, which is the bigger mission. The ultimate mission is—how do you change culture? How do you have a brand that people look at as confidence? What are we doing to have people feel proud about how they feed their baby?

KATE MCANDREW: One of the things that Bobbie has done again and again is punch above its weight. I saw it especially in the way that you recruited. You recruited Kim Chappel to be VP of marketing, and she’s now Chief Brand Officer. Kim was not the perfect VC job description, but she was exactly who should be VP of marketing. So tell me about how you got Kim on board, why you chose her, and then what she's meant for the brand.

LAURA MODI: Kim was a news anchor in Atlanta, Georgia, and she was incredible at that job. I believe she was an Emmy Award-winning news anchor. So not in marketing at all, but in the few times I had met Kim, you could tell that she just had that strategic gut instinct for how to build a brand and sell it. I felt she had to be in this company. I sat her down. I said, I want you to come in as the director of marketing. She said—that's not what I do! I'm not a marketer! I told her, you are a marketer, trust me. If you take this, I guarantee you'll be able to build one of the best brands out there.

The Kim story is reflective of so many other people that have been hired in the company. It's now part of our DNA to do this which is to hire the person who doesn't seem obvious for the position. We actually created what we called the Motherboard.

KATE MCANDREW: I love the Motherboard. I think this is totally genius for early stage startups.

LAURA MODI: We couldn't afford to just go hire a load of people in certain positions. So we said: let's find really strong talent out there, create a small pool of equity, and ask if these people could give us 5, 10 hours a month of their time. These were mothers who were not being invited to sit on boards. Strategic talent in companies who've never got the phone call. And we started pulling together a Motherboard of industry leaders and experts and disruptors giving them a little bit of equity. They all contributed to the business, and I want to say 50% ended up converting into full-time roles.

The one other thing I want to highlight with early folks whose resume doesn't match what they're doing is that they're also in a position constantly wanting to figure it out. So they come in with immediate curiosity and desire to take on that role that we've created for them.

Bobbie mothers and families at work

“We said: let's find really strong talent out there, create a small pool of equity, and ask if these people could give us 5 or  10 hours a month of their time. These were mothers who were not being invited to sit on boards. They all contributed to the business, and I want to say 50% ended up converting into full-time roles.”

KATE MCANDREW: You started out in the basement of your house. You, Sarah, Kim. In 2020, 100% of Bobbie employees at that point were moms. The pandemic hits when you're supposed to launch a physical product in a couple of quarters, and you decide to go fully remote, and you still are. What's one thing that's been amazing about it? And one that’s actually really hard?

LAURA MODI: Sarah, get up here! Sarah is our Chief People and Experience Officer and oversees so many parts of our culture. She can answer this question beautifully.

SARAH HARDY: Right now, we are 100% remote outside of the factory. We're in 26 different states now. We have a lot of people who are attracted to Bobbie because of our mission, and so we have access to talent anywhere, and we have a lot of diehard moms who wanna be with us. So about two thirds of our team today is sitting in a tier three market, and it’s incredible because our team reflects the community that we're serving. This is not about a bunch of moms sitting around San Francisco being like, what works for San Francisco moms? Our team reflects totally different experiences that American parents are having across the entire country.

We do an incredible job of engaging the team, internal comms, bringing folks along, reinforcing the North Star. We take those moments seriously to make sure that the team is staying on track and they can continue to deliver and all march in the same direction.

LAURA MODI: The only other downside I would add is that we're still building every day, and there are times where you actually need to get in a room. The collaboration in person is so desperately needed. We've had self-awareness around that, which you see in the way that we budget for more offsites, the permission that we give the teams to be able just go meet in person and get in a room.

KATE MCANDREW: You made a move to buy your own state-of-the-art manufacturing facility. You had to raise a lot of money to do it, and that was a huge shift. Can you talk about why you did it and what has the transition been like  from before owning your manufacturing to now running this org and this more complex organization?

LAURA MODI: Beforehand we were using a contract manufacturer. We didn't have the overhead and we didn't have a lot of the stress of having to take in supply, make the product and make sure it was safe. I remember being so vocal with investors about not needing manufacturing, that the brand is the differentiator. But that was a problem.

I woke up in the middle of the infant formula shortage and the President of the United States was on the news saying America can't feed babies. It felt like a finger being pointed at us as a company, and we weren't able to address what now was a crisis in this country. At that time, not only were we born as activists, but it was a radical pivot in our thinking of what the sustainability of our business needed to look like to weather extreme threats to the company. We were doing over a hundred million in revenue, but we had no control.

Everyone rallied to call up every investor and say: we were wrong, manufacturing is important. The environment has changed, and we need to act. And then we spent the next year doing the full assessment to ultimately land on a manufacturer that was nearing the end of completion, the first newly built facility in over 40 years. And now we are the proud owners of a beautiful 92,000 square foot stainless steel building that manufactures milk. It is so gorgeous. I'm not American, as you can hear. But there's nothing more patriotic than walking a manufacturing line and seeing your baby's food coming off. It's so beautiful.

KATE MCANDREW: That is beautiful. The Bobbie mission gets expressed in a lot of ways, including advocacy. You are well known for being a mission-driven company. Sarah, I believe you testified in front of Congress around parental leave, which you took up as a core piece of the Bobbie for Change banner. Lots of consumer companies want a cause; what are some things about being a mission-driven company that suck?

LAURA MODI: What’s challenging is that it’s purpose before profit, and yet you have to prioritize profit too. So I nurture the tension every day. Now the positive side of this is we have years of experience with this tension under our belt. We know that the ROI for doing mission-driven work is often not seen in the spreadsheet. And it has given us a lot more gumption and confidence to try things that are extremely nebulous. I'll give you an example. 

Recently, the LA wildfires hit, and it would've been very easy to just stay quiet and say it has nothing to do with us. But we woke up and thought, can you imagine going through that experience, losing your home? And can you imagine going through that experience if you have a newborn? So over the course of less than 12 hours, we built a tool to allow people to donate a can. We had a huge call to action that said: if you've lost your home and you need to feed your baby, I don't care if you're even a Bobbie customer, we will feed your baby for the rest of your journey, for the entire journey. Within 12 hours, it became one of the biggest support shares across social. And during that time, not only did we see that we were able to support this community and we were being recognized for it, the customer base grew as well.

KATE MCANDREW: This is my last question. If you guys could go back in time and tell yourselves one thing, 2018 Laura to 2018, about the business or the journey you're about to go on, what's the one thing you would tell yourselves?

LAURA MODI: I hate playing hindsight! But I think I would say: the battle scars through this journey will become chapters in your book. We’ve been shut down by the FDA, we had a national recall, we were told to pivot our business and change our name. We have one scar after another. At those times I just curled up and cringed, instead of just throwing my shoulders back, owning the moment and the hits. So I would just say, own the scars.

The contemporary brand is a paradox of huge expenditure with unchanging fundamentals. Brands today need ten times more content than ten years ago, across an ever-growing variety of touchpoints, from TikTok videos to LinkedIn carousels. Enterprise marketing budgets average millions of dollars annually, with the bulk of this spend going towards content production, brand compliance, and agency-led campaigns. In this relentless context, traditional brand guidelines have become beautiful but rigid artifacts, costly to create and difficult to execute against at speed.

Obello founders Ollie Ralph and Ben Pham know this reality better than any other. While building renowned brand agency Character, they lived the frustration of watching talented designers reduced to production work and large brands unable to meet the demands of our fast-changing media environment. After their agency was acquired by Dentsu, they started to think about how to help brands adapt to the demands of modern marketing. Obello, their new AI graphic design platform, is their solution.

Obello’s breakthrough is to turn brand guidelines into living, AI-powered design systems. Instead of static PDF-based guidelines, designers upload their assets and define rules like whitespace, color systems, and custom brand shapes. Obello’s generative layout assistant model, GLAM, delivers expertly designed, dynamically adjustable layouts, maintaining brand consistency across formats.

Obello has pioneered a “quantity over quality” approach to training their AI design model—building hundreds of proprietary brands specifically for training data—meaning they can deliver agency-level output at the speed of software. When rolled out across a company, anyone at an organization can create on-brand content instantly, unblocking design teams from being a marketing bottleneck.

“Brands today are expected to show up everywhere, all the time, across countless channels while staying true to strict brand guidelines. Design and marketing teams are being asked to do more than ever, and we’re building Obello to help them move faster without sacrificing quality or creativity.”

— Ben Pham, Co-founder of Obello

The co-founders’ deep design background makes them natural Baukunst partners and collective members. Ollie and Ben understand that cultural intelligence remains a fundamentally human skill, even as AI handles execution. With Obello, they envision the role of the designer shifts away from repetitive production tasks and toward strategic, high-value work.

After partnering with Baukunst to lead its pre-seed, Obello has raised an $8.5M seed round from Obvious Ventures with Baukunst participation. In a world where brands need to evolve at the speed of the internet, Obello makes it possible to keep up.

Read Obello's Announcement

Obello news on Axios and Tech Funding News

Baukunst Mystery School prototype workshop at the Creative Technology Conference.

Baukunst Mystery School is a new workshop series for people in the startup ecosystem to pursue meaningful inner work. Each workshop is an opportunity to grow alongside peers who recognize that the art of building requires the whole person.

The pressure and pace of building great companies demands all of our personhood. Leadership requires the emotional capacity to handle complexity, read what's needed in a room, and act from intention rather than reactivity. Yet professional culture often tells us to do our inner work outside of professional contexts, as if who we are and what we build could be separated.

At Baukunst, we believe that more integrated people make better decisions and create things that are better for the world. We invite you to come discover what’s possible when we do this work in the company of people we're already building alongside.

Shadow Play | December 16th, 2-5pm

Our first event with transformational coach Michael McDonald explores the realm of shadow work through connection and playful embodiment. It’s an opportunity to integrate the parts of you that feel conflicted, stuck, drained, or confused.

Our “shadow” is the parts of ourselves we ignore, hide, or disown. The conversations we’ve been avoiding at work, the feedback that we find most challenging to integrate, and the moments that cause us surprising emotional reactions are all signs of our shadow.

Uncovering and integrating your shadow can help you become a better leader, teammate, and human being. There is wisdom in our darkness, and leaning into our edges helps us reclaim gifts we didn’t even know we were hiding.

We’ve taken Michael’s Shadow Play workshop and found it to be both humorous and transformative. The experience includes connecting deeply with each other, bringing out playfulness, and collaborating to bring your shadows to life in a way that yields the nutrients they hide. Expect a mix of connection, vulnerability, movement, and laughter.

Attend Baukunst Mystery School

2-4pm: Workshop experience

4-5pm: Integration, conversation, and tea

This workshop costs $54. All fees go to the facilitator.

About the Facilitator

Michael McDonald is a transformational coach for visionary entrepreneurs and executives, and a mentor to other coaches. With a style that’s part Mr. Rogers, part Inception, he helps leaders shift from conceptual to actual, from empowered to awakened, and from complexity to simplicity. His life’s work is to raise the consciousness of humanity, one conversation at a time. He is the creator of Relational Alchemy–the art of transformation through intimacy–and has been facilitating experiences in the Bay Area, at festivals, and for teams since 2011. “Something awesome is trying to happen, and your job is to allow it.” His website is authenticintegrity.com.

Attend Baukunst Mystery School