Development already pays for a huge amount of R&D. Almost none of it is set up to produce companies.
Every year, governments, foundations, multilaterals, universities and NGOs spend large sums testing new ways to deliver farming, health, education, finance and other public services. Most of those projects should stay projects. But some produce technology, data, ways of working or systems that are valuable well beyond the original grant.
Very few people are looking for them in a systematic way. That is where Commonhold sits.
We don’t start with a blank page and ask what startup to build. We look for work where much of the early risk is already paid for. Someone has spent years understanding the problem, testing approaches, building relationships and collecting data. By then, the question is no longer whether the idea works. It is whether there is something inside it that governments or large institutions will keep paying for.
Answering that means working out what the real product is, what was specific to one grant or one country, what can be standardised, where the same problem shows up elsewhere, and whether there are enough repeat buyers to support a real company.
This matters in public services because many of the systems underneath are still weak. Farm extension, frontline health, social protection and climate adaptation often run on patchy software, one-off consulting, spreadsheets and donor-funded tools that disappear when a programme ends. Yet the same problems show up again and again across countries.
That repetition is what makes a company possible. If ten governments have the same problem, the answer may not be ten separate projects. It may be one company that gets very good at solving it.
That is why we built a studio. It gives us a repeatable way to find the strongest grant-funded work, identify the real buyer, build the technology for a wider set of uses, win the first long-term contracts, and build standalone companies around the ones with a real market.
We don’t see this as rescuing good projects after the grant ends. A meaningful number of future companies are already sitting inside public and philanthropic R&D. They just aren’t being treated that way. Commonhold is how we find them and turn the best into companies that last.