§ 00
Opening
We don't back pitches. We back people who can't stop figuring it out.
In the age of AI, where anyone can ship an MVP in a weekend, the ability to build is no longer rare. What's rare is the founder who can do all of it — build the product, find the customer, close the deal, and iterate faster than everyone else in the market.
We back founders who can't stop building, can't stop selling and can't stop marketing.
Natal exists because we believe the following three things to be self-evident…
§ 01
Thesis I / Talent
Talent is everything. And the best of it is where nobody's looking.
Ideas, markets and pitch decks might be important. The potential of the founder is 100x more important. The drive, tenacity, hunger and resourcefulness of a founder will ultimately determine the success of the company.
We've seen great markets destroyed by mediocre founders, and impossible markets conquered by extraordinary ones. 95% of outcomes come from 5% of people. We select 8 founders per cohort. If we can't find 8 who clear the bar, we may decide not to run the cohort. We'd rather return every cent to our partners than continue with weak founders.
Consensus on whether a founder is great is not needed from all Natal Ventures partners. Why? Full consensus can kill outliers. We don't seek it, instead we try to get as close to the objective truth about a founder as we can. We need most Natal Ventures partners to say "hell, yes" and then we go all in.
The popular narrative says the best AI companies will come from San Francisco, London, maybe China. We think that's a narrative violation waiting to happen and an opportunity to find the best talent in overlooked markets.
Serbia has world-class engineering talent at incredible value for money. South Africa is full of ambition and offers a lifestyle that San Francisco can't match at a tenth of the burn rate. Italy has deep technical universities and a generation of builders who've never had a real launchpad.
The next Nubank wasn't supposed to come from Brazil. The next Canva wasn't supposed to come from Sydney. The next hundred AI companies won't come from where everyone expects either.
We run cohorts where conviction is high and competition for talent is lower. That's not a limitation — it's the entire strategy.
§ 02
Thesis II / Moats
We build companies that can't be rebuilt overnight.
In the age of AI, any software product can be replicated in weeks. The model, the UI, the features — none of it is a moat anymore. A coding agent can rebuild your front-end in an afternoon. The question every founder must answer when building their product is: what makes this business defensible?
We fund and build companies with real moats:
Proprietary data.
Data that customers upload from their private workflows — information that doesn't exist on the public internet. Every interaction makes the product smarter, creating a compounding loop that competitors cannot replicate.
Distribution.
A founder with a black book of industry contacts, an existing customer relationship, or a massive social following has an advantage no amount of funding can buy. If you can distribute faster than you can be copied, you win.
Hard integrations.
Connections to non-public APIs, SDKs, and datasets that take months to negotiate and build. Not plug-and-play public APIs — the kind of integrations that create real switching costs and lock-in.
Local and domain knowledge.
Deep understanding of a vertical, a region, or a workflow that outsiders cannot Google their way into. Domain credibility shortens sales cycles and makes the product harder to replace.
We don't fund AI wrappers. We don't fund thin layers on top of someone else's API. We fund companies where the AI is the engine but the moat is everything around it.
§ 03
Thesis III / AI-Native
AI-native means AI-native from day zero.
Every founder who enters Natal gets an agentic toolbox — not a slide deck about AI trends.
We provide the actual infrastructure: AI agents, development environments, state-of-the-art models, and workflows that let a team of two operate like a team of twenty. Other programmes teach founders about AI. We make founders build with AI from their first hour.
The companies that come out of Natal won't need to "adopt AI" later. They'll have been born in it. Their DNA will be agentic from the first line of code, the first customer conversation, the first hire.
This extends to how the company itself operates. We expect Natal companies to run at extremely high margins by leveraging automation and AI internally. Every person in the company should be full-stack — building, selling, and marketing with a team of AI agents beside them. High ARR per head isn't a nice-to-have. It's the operating model.
A 2-person team with the right tools and the right velocity can outship a 20-person team running last decade's playbook. We give our founders that leverage on day one.
§ 04
Why you will succeed
Why you will succeed with us as a founder.
We focus on quality, not quantity. An elite cohort of eight 10x founders per programme — selected from thousands. Twelve weeks of undiluted focus.
Value / 01
Your own team of AI agents
Supercharge customer interviews, product research, design, engineering, sales and marketing. A two-person team moving at the velocity of twenty — from day zero.
Value / 02
Monthly stipend
Covers your full living expenses so you focus on the company, not the runway.
Value / 03
Dedicated office space
A full workspace in the cohort city, alongside the other seven founders in the room.
Value / 04
Cloud, AI credits and the full toolbox
State-of-the-art models, development environments and the same agentic stack we use to build our own companies.
Value / 05
World-class mentors
Direct access to the Natal managing partners — entrepreneurs who have raised over $100M and built multiple companies across three continents — plus a curated bench of operators who have built and sold.
The terms
In return, we take 20% equity via a post-money SAFE. Clean, simple, aligned.
Upcoming cohorts
Cohort 1
Belgrade, Serbia
May – Jul 2026
Opening SoonCohort 2
South Africa
Oct – Dec 2026
Opening SoonCohort 3
Italy
Jan – Mar 2027
Opening SoonOne studio. Three continents. One hundred AI companies in five years.
§ 05
Timing
Why now?
Every decade produces a handful of platform shifts that create entirely new categories of company. The 2000s saw internet companies dominate, mobile exploded in the 2010s, and the 2020s is about AI. The opportunity and window to create world-defining companies is the next four to five years.
AI is that shift now — except it's bigger, faster, and more accessible than anything before it.
The window to build foundational and applied AI companies is open right now. In five years, the infrastructure layer will have settled, the incumbents will have caught up, and the cost of competing will be 100x what it is today.
The founders who start building today — with AI agents as co-workers, not features — will own the next decade.
We want to find those founders. Wherever they are.
§ 06
Careers
Join the team.
We're hiring a small, senior team to run Natal across Serbia, South Africa, and Italy. High-ownership roles for people who want to build a studio from scratch.
Lead Programme Coordinator
Cohort 1 · May – Jul 2026 · 145,000 RSD / month · Immediate start
Own operations for our first 12-week cohort in Belgrade. You'll coordinate the founder recruitment pipeline, run the day-to-day, and keep eight hand-picked founders focused entirely on building. Hands-on, high-ownership, on the ground.