A Venture Builder (VB), also called startup studio, startup factory, or venture studio — is an organisation who builds startups using their own ideas and resources. Essentially, a startup that builds startups.

Venture builders develop many systems, models, or projects at once and then build separate companies around the most promising ones by assigning operational resources and capital to those portfolio companies.

In its most basic form, the venture-building company is a holding company that owns equity in the various corporate entities it helped create. The most successful venture builders are, however, much more operational and hands-on than holding companies: They raise capital, staff resources, host internal coding sessions, design business models, work with legal teams, build MVPs (minimum viable products), hire business development managers, and run very effective marketing campaigns during their ventures’ pre- and post-launch phases.

Instead, they pull business ideas from within their own network of resources and assign internal teams ground up to develop them (engineers, advisors, business developers, sales managers, etc.). A Venture Builder’s relationship with its ventures is long term; it’s deeply involved with the startups it produces up until they exit.They hire founders and pay to run the startup. The promising new model responsible for startups like Twitter, Medium, Lazada, Food Panda and Zalora,

Applying Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Design Sprint, Agile principles as process management, validated learning, iteration, and innovation accounting to the venture building process. Leverages extensive network and ecosystem reaching out seasoned entrepreneurs for share resources (capital, skills, and market expertise).

Those resources then joint-ventures and operate in areas where the venture partners have a significant competitive advantage (an existing business, traction, superior market knowledge, dedicated operational resources, etc.) — As a result, a successful business matching at the end for a new venture to begin.

There are five core activities in which Venture Builders engage: identifying business ideas, building teams, finding capital, helping govern or manage the ventures and providing shared services.