Grid Capital is an investment firm for architects of the new industrial era.

Construction on Santa Maria del Fiore, the city of Florence’s colossal Gothic cathedral, began in 1296. More than a century later, the structure stood unfinished, a 140-foot void where its dome should have been. Every large dome since antiquity relied on wooden centering to support masonry installation during construction. But no forest in Tuscany could frame the sprawling site.

Out of answers, Opera del Duomo, the works committee run by the wool guild, announced a public competition with a 200-florin prize for a viable plan to vault the dome. A local architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, answered the call, claiming he could span the opening without centering.

Brunelleschi had spent years among the ruins of Rome, surveying the Pantheon stone by stone and tracing how the ancients laid brick. While the ruins offered no ready-made blueprint for Florence, they revealed principles he could adapt. What followed were novel techniques without living precedent: nested shells, tensioning chains, and self-locking brickwork.

And yet the committee struggled with Brunelleschi. The architect was famously guarded with his methods, fearing a rival might claim them as his own. Despite pleas for detail, he gave nothing away. Countless public assemblies gave way to skepticism and hostility.

Unmoved by the derision and certain of his code, Brunelleschi chose to make his case by painstakingly constructing scale models of his design. These were the betas of the fifteenth century, showing enough to persuade without revealing the underlying mechanics. After two years, the committee relented, entrusting him with the cathedral’s construction in 1420.

Sixteen years and four million bricks later, the largest masonry dome in the world was complete.

In search of architects

Today’s venture ecosystem has no patience for Brunelleschis. Founders who have earned the right to pursue grand, nonobvious plans for entrenched problems are passed over in favor of speed and legibility, pushing capital and attention toward increasingly shallow pursuits and marginal outcomes. This is a profound misuse of the great technological leap of our lifetime.

We are in pursuit of founders using this leap to attack problems at their root, redesigning how industries execute work, manage labor and capital, and coordinate across networked actors. We believe the great companies of this cycle won't simply make work more efficient. They will change the nature of the work itself and capture the value of the rebuild.

No markets are more ready for redesign than physical ones. Everything made, moved, built, and powered carries complexity and consequence bits do not. Decades of managing that complexity have layered these industries with intermediaries, procedure, and bloat. Managing and navigating the system has become the work.

The founders best suited to rebuild these markets are Brunelleschian: architects of grand plans whose hard-earned insight reveals novel methods for solving seemingly intractable problems.

Grid was built for them.