We price the discount
The market underwrites governable, auditable AI as a cost centre. We think it is the precondition for enterprise adoption, and we buy that mispricing at formation — before it is consensus.
Capital as foundation.Partnership as catalyst.
We invest at the earliest stage in the agent economy — on a conviction the market still underwrites too cheaply: that machines transacting with machines will need rails, identity and accountability long before they need more intelligence.
02/ 06Investment Thesis
Where we deploy conviction.
A focused allocation across the agent stack — weighted toward the layers that have to exist before autonomy is worth buying.
40%
Machines paying machines: machine-payable APIs, agent-readable discovery, programmable escrow, stablecoin settlement, and the receipts that make a disputed transaction resolvable. The least crowded layer of the stack, and our signature position.
30%
The substrate agents actually run on: durable runtimes and memory, tool protocols like MCP, orchestration and hand-off, and the observability that can trace one decision back through every hop that produced it.
20%
Prompt-injection and tool-poisoning defence, agent identity and scoped authority, and the audit trail a regulated buyer asks for on day one. Autonomy is sold on capability and bought on accountability.
10%
Vertical agents that close a loop a human used to close — measured on the eval harness, not the demo. We look for teams who can show a regression suite rather than a highlight reel.
03/ 06The Agent Transaction
One transaction, seven places it breaks.
When software buys from software, the interesting problems are not in the model. They are in the seven hops between intent and proof. Select a hop.
Select a hop — arrow keys work
04/ 06Philosophy
How we actually work.
Evidence over narrative
We would rather read your eval harness than your deck. A team that can show what its system does on the inputs it fails is telling us more than any projection.
Few positions, held long
Concentration is a form of respect. We would rather be the investor who answers on a Sunday for a handful of companies than a name on fifty cap tables.
We read the code
Threat models, tool permissions, audit trails, and the blast radius when an agent is wrong. Technical diligence done by someone who has shipped, not outsourced to a checklist.
Security review, pre-round
Injection surface, credential scope, data egress paths, audit trail. Findings go to the founder first — never used as negotiating leverage.
Asia is a seat, not a slide
Regional distribution, regulatory reading, and buyers who are genuinely reachable — plus an honest read on when not to raise at all.
05/ 06Team
Small on purpose.
- Access
- Principals only
- Coverage
- NA · Asia timezones
- Horizon
- The whole arc
A concentrated partnership rather than a platform. The person who reads your repo is the person who stays with the company — there is no associate layer between a founder and a decision. Most of the work is not the investment itself but the shape of the table around it: who sits alongside you, what they are actually on the hook for, and how early that is set. We work from North America and Asia, which is a working constraint as much as a footprint — it means we are awake when your Asian customers are.
- TorontoNorth America43.65°N 79.38°W
- San FranciscoNorth America37.77°N 122.42°W
- Hong KongAsia22.32°N 114.17°E
06/ 06Contact
Send the repo.
No deck required for a first conversation. A README, a design doc, or a demo that fails honestly tells us more than twenty slides. Tell us what you are building, what breaks at scale, and who you wish were in the room. You will get a real answer either way — including a no, with the reason.
frontier@prospice-capital.comTorontoNorth America43.65°N 79.38°W
San FranciscoNorth America37.77°N 122.42°W
Hong KongAsia22.32°N 114.17°E