FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is venture building and how is it different from an accelerator?
Venture building is the systematic creation of new businesses from scratch, typically for corporations, institutions, or by dedicated venture studios. Unlike accelerators, which work with existing startups that apply to a programme, venture builders start before a business exists: they identify opportunities, design business models, validate assumptions, and build the founding team. The output is an investable new venture, not a cohort of partially-developed startups.
Why do large corporations use external venture builders?
Large corporations have assets, like distribution, data, IP and regulatory relationships, but often lack the speed, risk appetite, and methodological rigour needed to launch new businesses. External venture builders bring startup methodology and impartiality: they can challenge assumptions, move fast, and operate outside the corporate immune system. This combination of internal resources and external execution capability is why corporate ventures built this way have a higher survival rate than purely internal innovation projects.
How long does a venture building engagement typically take?
A full engagement, from opportunity identification to an investable business ready for external capital, typically takes 9 to 18 months. The first phase (discovery and validation) usually takes 6 to 10 weeks. MVP build and go-to-market preparation takes another 3 to 6 months. The final phase (investor readiness and first round preparation) adds 2 to 4 months. Ipernovation can engage at any stage: for some clients the work starts at validation; for others, at full 0-to-1 build.
What makes a venture idea worth building?
Three conditions make a venture worth building: a real, recurring, and sizeable problem (not a nice-to-have); a defensible value proposition that can be validated with low upfront investment; and a founding team or organisation with a genuine unfair advantage, such as proprietary data, distribution, technology, or domain expertise. The ventures with the best outcomes are not the ones with the most original ideas, but the ones where the builder has an asymmetric information or execution advantage.
What is the difference between a venture builder and a venture studio?
The terms venture builder and venture studio are often used interchangeably, and both create new companies from scratch rather than investing in existing ones. The usual distinction is ownership: a venture studio typically builds and owns its own portfolio of ventures, taking significant equity and running them like a parent company, while venture builder is the broader term that also covers building ventures for or alongside a partner, such as a corporation, an institution, or a founding team that keeps ownership. Ipernovation works as a venture builder in that second sense, a co-founder who builds with you rather than a studio that builds for itself.
What does corporate venture building involve?
Corporate venture building means creating new, standalone businesses from a corporation's assets, such as distribution, data, brand, or technology, while applying startup speed and methodology. A typical corporate venture building engagement runs from opportunity mapping and business model design through MVP, validation, and a go-to-market plan, with a governance structure that keeps the venture fast enough to compete. The goal is a venture that can stand on its own and attract external capital, not another internal innovation project that stalls after the pilot.
How much does it cost to work with a venture builder?
Venture building is priced by scope, not by retainer. A short discovery and validation sprint is a small fixed engagement, while a full 0-to-1 build is a larger one, sometimes combined with an equity component when Ipernovation co-founds the venture. Every engagement starts with a fixed scope and a fixed fee agreed up front, with no open-ended retainers, and typical engagements run from 6 weeks to 6 months. The discovery call is free, and that is where the right scope and budget are defined.