The story of corporate venture building begins not in Silicon Valley, but in late 18th-century Britain with an entrepreneur named John Letts. In 1796, John launched what is recognised as the world's first corporate incubator, a revolutionary business model that would take two centuries to truly evolve into its modern form.
John Letts' original venture studio was ingeniously simple yet remarkably effective. His operation comprised a large storefront that sold products and prototypes directly to customers, with venture studio space in the back rooms where new prototypes were developed and products manufactured. Letts himself bridged these two worlds, moving between the retail front and the development back, selling products while simultaneously gathering crucial customer feedback to inform the next iteration of innovation.
This integrated approach proved extraordinarily productive. Within the first twenty years, John Letts' incubator launched an impressive array of products that we now take for granted: the commercial diary in 1812, journals, calendars, address books, and parliamentary ledgers. His methodology - combining direct customer interaction with rapid prototyping and product development - contained insights that remain valuable to this day. His ethos of making products with customers, not for customers was groundbreaking.
It would take approximately 200 years for the concept of Corporate Incubator 2.0 to emerge. The late 20th and early 21st centuries saw the rise of accelerators, venture studios, and operational venture capital as the latest iteration of organised venture building. However, despite their proliferation, most of these models have operated as what critics describe as "body shops" or "classroom models", lacking the full end-to-end methodology and integrated systems that characterised even the original John Letts model.
The fundamental problem has remained consistent across centuries: innovation delivery and financing have been too ad hoc. The traditional venture building approach has been artisanal, dependent on analogue processes and individual heroes rather than systematic methodology. The statistics are sobering, venture capitalists typically deliver one successful venture out of ten investments, while corporate venture success rates are even lower, hovering around one in fifteen or twenty.
This ad hoc approach to venture building and what entrepreneur Paul Graham termed "founder mode" has lacked the standard methodology and systematic approach that other industries have long employed to improve outcomes and reduce risk.
Philip Letts, a descendant of John Letts, has spent decades working to systematise and modernise his ancestor's insights. After building his first incubator in the Web1 era and his second in Web2, Philip founded LettsGroup's VentureFactory five years ago. His track record speaks to the power of systematic approaches - his first two incubators achieved a venture success rate of one in four, dramatically outperforming industry averages.
Now, with the AI VentureFactory, LettsGroup has created what they describe as the world's first AI-native venture building platform. This represents not just an incremental improvement but a fundamental reimagining of how startups can be built and scaled in an artificial intelligence-enabled world.
The AI VentureFactory's approach centres on scaling startups with technology rather than people. The platform delivers what LettsGroup calls "startup intelligence" - an AI agent combined with chat functionality and a personal AI startup team that handles the operational heavy lifting. This is complemented by over fifteen core applications providing scale-up infrastructure from day one, allowing founders to focus 80% or more of their time on product development and customer relationships while the VentureFactory handles the rest. Added to this they have recently launched a vetted, 3rd party Agent Store.
The vision extends beyond simple automation. LettsGroup positions the VentureFactory as evolving from a "sat nav" for startups to enabling truly "self-driving" companies. The platform is supported by experienced hybrid player-coach teams across LettsGroup who understand how to build and co-pilot startups through various growth stages, augmented by the VentureFactory's personal AI startup team.
This combination of human expertise and AI automation aims to make possible what they call the "one man/woman unicorn" - companies that can achieve massive scale without proportionally massive teams.
The power of the AI VentureFactory lies not just in its technology but in the proprietary venture building system that underpins it, a methodology proven over decades and multiple incubators. LettsGroup's venture building process has been developed and refined over fifteen years across more than twenty startups, taking tech and digital ventures from initial idea through to exit.
The current iteration of the system extends to seven stages, forty-nine steps, and hundreds of sub-steps, each AI-enabled. Critically, the system improves with the advancement of each venture through an integrated rating system, creating a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.
The platform doesn't simply provide advice or guidance - it actively executes tasks . The VentureFactory builds products, creates websites, generates analyst notes, connects ventures to customers, and will soon facilitate investor connections. This active execution is what LettsGroup describes as "the magic" that sets it apart from traditional advisory or consulting models.
The economic impact of this approach has been dramatic. LettsGroup claims the AI VentureFactory reduces the cost of building startups by up to 90%. While the average cost of building tech startups to seed stage is approximately $2 million, the average cost of building the AI VentureFactory's first six tech startups to seed stage was less than $200,000.
The first six ventures powered by the platform have now reached seed stage, demonstrating new model economics across multiple metrics. Funding stages are collapsing with faster cycles encouraging earlier investment. The traditional metric of full-time employees (FTE) is being replaced by what LettsGroup calls FTB (full time bots), measuring how much AI a company employs rather than how many people.
Under this model, teams need not grow beyond five people even through scaling beyond Series A. Ventures can progress from idea to market launch in less than twelve months with less than $200,000 in capital burn. Business plans that once took six weeks now take six minutes. First websites launch in under two days. Draft forecasts generate in minutes. The platform can produce equity analyst-grade reports and advertising agency-quality brand narratives for startups - capabilities previously accessible only to well-funded, mature companies.
The fastest startup powered by the VentureFactory to date exemplifies these capabilities. Jot , an AI-powered digital diary that consolidates multiple productivity tools into a single platform, progressed from idea to market launch in just five months and began its private beta six weeks before that milestone. The venture operates with a team of five - none full-time - and has already begun acquiring paying customers.
Jot represents what LettsGroup believes may be the pure AI startup model, where virtually everything is accomplished through AI assistance, dramatically reducing the need for traditional full-time headcount during early growth stages.
Following a private beta period with internal ventures and core applications, the AI VentureFactory launched to market in July 2025. The platform now offers four subscription plans , starting at just £105 per month, catering to different customer segments: Startup Lite for new ventures, Startup Ultra for scale-ups beyond Seed stage, Enterprise for corporate incubators, and a newly launched Investor plan.
Since market launch, the platform has been adding one new customer per month, with plans to scale to one new startup per week by the end of 2026. External startups can now subscribe to access the platform, with some Startup Lite customers, after 6 months on the platform, can become eligible to pay cash-and-equity models where LettsGroup takes a stake in particularly promising ventures.
LettsGroup's vision extends beyond the current platform capabilities. Future development will expand the system's steps, AI outputs, and agent connectors to enable even deeper automation across the entire venture building lifecycle: Create, Build, Shape, Finance, Scale, and Exit. The company plans to connect the platform to pools of capital at each stage of the venture building lifecycle, creating an integrated ecosystem for venture formation and growth.
As Rob Wirszycz, Advisory Board lead, notes in the presentation materials, "The way startups are built and financed is changing thanks to AI, blockchain and crypto. LettsGroup is part of that change."
Two hundred years after John Letts opened the first corporate incubator, his descendant has created a platform that realises the full potential of that original integrated model, combining customer proximity with rapid development cycles, but now amplified by artificial intelligence to achieve scale and efficiency that would have seemed magical even a decade ago. In doing so, LettsGroup may be charting the course for how the next generation of ventures will be built, financed, and scaled.
If you're building a tech or digital startup - build smarter with LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory .
