What we do

Advisory, capital, and engineering — from people who share the downside.

Most founders assemble these three relationships separately, from three parties with three different incentives. Metacogni puts them in one room, which means the advice we give is advice we have to live with.

Advisory Funding & Investment Research & Development

Judgment, on call

Advisory

Senior operators in the room for the decisions that compound — pricing, sequencing, hiring, architecture, and the ones you have not thought to ask about yet.

Advisory at Metacogni is not a quarterly check-in with a partner who skimmed your deck on the way to the meeting. It is a standing working relationship with operators who have carried the same problems you are carrying now, in the same order.

We spend the first weeks understanding how decisions actually move through your company — who has context, who has authority, and where those two diverge. That map is usually more diagnostic than any metric on your dashboard.

From there the cadence is yours. Some founders want a weekly two-hour session on a single hard thing. Others want someone reachable at ten at night when a term sheet lands. We are set up for both.

What you get

A dedicated lead advisor who stays with you across the engagement
Weekly or biweekly founder working sessions
Product, pricing, and go-to-market strategy review
Technical architecture and build-versus-buy assessment
Fundraise positioning, narrative, and investor targeting
Written decision memos you can circulate to your board

Right fit when

You are making decisions faster than you can evaluate them, and the cost of getting the next three wrong is measured in quarters rather than weeks.

Typical engagement

Three or six month advisory terms, renewable. Structured as a fee, an equity allocation, or a blend — decided before we start, never renegotiated mid-flight.

Capital that arrives with context

Funding & Investment

We write the first check and help you earn the next one. Capital from pre-seed through bridge rounds, paired with the diligence discipline that makes the following round straightforward.

We invest our own capital, which means we are underwriting the same outcome you are. There is no fund clock forcing a decision on your company at an inconvenient moment, and no separate investment committee that has never met you.

Our checks range from pre-seed conviction bets to bridge rounds that buy a company the two quarters it needs to reach a real milestone. What matters more than the size is that the capital arrives with the operating support to spend it well — most companies do not fail from lack of money so much as from deploying it against the wrong sequence.

We also prepare you to not need us. A significant part of the work is making the next round straightforward: clean data rooms, defensible models, and a story that survives a partner meeting where someone is actively looking for the hole in it.

What you get

Pre-seed and seed investment from our own balance sheet
Bridge and follow-on participation for portfolio companies
Warm introductions to co-investors and syndicate partners
Data room construction and diligence rehearsal
Financial model review and scenario stress-testing
Cap table, SAFE, and priced-round structuring guidance

Right fit when

You have signal worth funding — traction, a defensible insight, or a team that has already shipped something hard — and you want an investor who will be in the weeks between board meetings.

Typical engagement

Standard instruments, founder-friendly terms, and a decision inside three weeks of the first meeting. We tell you no quickly and explain why.

An engineering bench you can borrow

Research & Development

An applied AI and software team that builds with you rather than for you — prototypes, evaluation harnesses, data pipelines, and the production hardening that follows.

Research and development is the piece most incubators outsource and most founders underestimate. We keep an in-house applied AI and software team precisely so we can put engineers next to you instead of handing you a vendor list.

In practice this looks like a small, senior team embedded with yours for a defined window: building the prototype that proves the thesis, standing up the evaluation harness that tells you whether a model is actually improving, or hardening the thing you shipped fast into something you can run at scale.

We are deliberate about the handoff. Everything we build is documented, tested, and transferred to your team — because an incubator that leaves you dependent on its engineers has not incubated anything.

What you get

Applied AI prototyping and model selection
Evaluation harnesses and offline benchmark suites
Data architecture, pipelines, and platform design
Prototype-to-production hardening and refactoring
Security, reliability, and cloud cost review
Documented handoff and pairing with your engineers

Right fit when

The technical risk in your company is real and unresolved, and hiring a full team before you have de-risked it would be the expensive way to find out.

Typical engagement

Six to sixteen week embedded sprints with a named team, fixed scope, and a written handoff plan agreed on day one.

How they combine

You decide how much of this you actually want.

We are structured as three services rather than one program on purpose. Founders arrive with different gaps, and the fastest way to be useful is to fill the one in front of us.

Take one

Plenty of companies only need the engineering bench, or only need the check. There is no bundle requirement and no obligation to take capital to get advice.

Take all three

When advisory, capital, and R&D run together, the feedback loop tightens dramatically. The people advising you have seen the code, and the people writing the code have heard the board conversation.

Start anywhere

Most relationships begin with a single narrow engagement and expand once both sides have evidence it works. We would rather earn the second conversation than sell you the whole thing today.

See the services available to portfolio companies

Tell us which of the three you are missing.

Or tell us you are not sure, which is a perfectly good place to start a conversation.

Get StartedHow it works

Prefer email? Write to hello@metacogni.com