No burying the lede this month. We have closed a funding round and welcomed new investors to our cap table, including Concentric, Bifrost Studios and Pardon Ventures, the last of whom are deepening a commitment they had already made. We are glad to have them.
It has been a good week to do it in Copenhagen. The team gathered onsite to prep our launches, and TechBBQ pulled a strong crowd of thinkers and investors into town. At their LP Forum I ran a rapid-fire session with four family offices who were refreshingly blunt about how they actually invest, as opposed to how the panel format usually pretends they do.
The industrialisation of intelligence
AI gets talked about like a crystal ball. Friendlier interfaces, finer control, context windows big enough to swallow a full report or an entire family history, and the output starts to feel like foresight.
What is actually happening is duller, and bigger. Call it the industrialisation of intelligence. This is no longer a lab curiosity. It sits inside data centres, energy grids and supply chains, on the scale of the early internet. Which moves the real question along, from what AI can do to who builds, funds and governs the machinery it runs on.
The 95% that "failed"
Now the awkward part. A recent MIT study found that 95% of enterprise AI projects deliver no measurable value, undone by poor integration and no clear purpose. A grim number, until you look next to it and notice that shadow AI is thriving. Employees quietly using their own tools are often getting more done than the sanctioned, top-down programme two floors up.
For a family office the lesson is not that AI predicts the future. It reframes the present. It sharpens a decision under uncertainty and surfaces a pattern you would otherwise miss. The value is in helping you decide what matters, not in pretending to tell you what happens next.
To balance all that venture energy, we spent the weekend at the CHART and Enter art fairs. Art has always been part of Simple's DNA, shaping our spaces and, more than we usually admit, the way we think.