Advantages Of A Hybrid Model With Daniel Laboe & Prabhakar “KP” Karri Of Nymbl Ventures

Nymbl Ventures, a venture capital firm focusing on built technology, has a unique hybrid model that brings corporations and financial investors together towards success. Scott Kelly is joined by Daniel Laboe and Prabhakar “KP” Karri to share how this approach allows corporations to invest in a venture capital fund while maintaining the flexibility of their own corporate venture capital arm. They also explain how this hybrid model works best in the construction industry, which results in a good mix of entrepreneurs who get not only great investment capital but also great opportunities to grow and scale.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Advantages Of A Hybrid Model With Daniel Laboe & Prabhakar “KP” Karri Of Nymbl Ventures

I’m really excited to introduce you to Dan Laboe and KP, the team at Nymbl Ventures. I got to meet them at the Blueprint Conference in Las Vegas, as I mentioned in a prior episode. A great conference and summit focusing on the PropTech construction, tech and related industries. In this interview, they’re talking about the built environment. Nymbl is raising their first fund, an alpha fund of $50 million, and they’re going to focus on technology-related construction, including advanced materials, robotics, advanced manufacturing techniques and automation.

They invest in companies beyond the prototype stage, preferably revenue positive, with about $500,000 in revenue. They’re tipping and looking for Series A or later investments. The firm has a unique hybrid model, which brings corporations and financial investors together, enabling these corporations to invest in a venture capital fund while maintaining the flexibility of their own corporate venture capital arm.

What this does in the construction industry is provide not only the opportunity to get good investors from a financial standpoint, but get strategic corporate investors from the construction and property and real estate business. It really provides a really good mix for entrepreneurs to get not only great investment capital, but also great opportunities to grow and scale their business through strategic partnerships and strategic investors. Read on and I’ll share some key takeaways at the end.

I’m excited to introduce the team. This is actually only the second time I’ve had two guests simultaneously on the show. I’ve got the team from Nymbl Ventures. Dan, Karri, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Scott.

Thanks for having us.

Introducing Daniel Laboe And Prabhakar “KP” Karri

I’ll let you gentlemen pick who does what, or you can both jump in. Maybe both of you can share a bit about your backgrounds prior to the fund, and then we’ll jump into the fund itself.

I’ll go first if you don’t mind. I’m Karri. I go by KP. Those are my initials. Everybody’s called me KP ever since I was in kindergarten, so feel free to call me KP. Dan and I started Nymbl Ventures in 2024. Prior to Nymbl Ventures, I started and led Andersen Corporation Ventures, which is the CVC arm of the Andersen Corporation based here in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis.

Prior to that, I ran a small startup called Nymbl Technologies, no relation to Nymbl Ventures, which was a fitness analytics software company, which unfortunately died of miserable death during COVID because all our clients were personal fitness trainers and their business evaporated, unfortunately. Prior to that, I ran a CVC called Prime Therapeutics Ventures. Prime Therapeutics is a wholly owned subsidiary of several Blue Cross Blue Shields. I was focused on emerging healthcare technologies during that. Going back even from there, I was an investment banker with Lazard, focused on mergers and acquisitions, and I have a background in technology and physics. That’s me.

Fantastic. Thanks, KP. Dave, share a bit about yourself.

Yeah, so I’ve had a unique background. I can start from the beginning starting with moving to Chicago, doing prop trading. I traded derivatives of interest rates, Euro dollars, if anybody’s familiar with it. I started there. I did that for a bit. Unfortunately, the company exploded within, I think it was a year of me joining. It gave me good knowledge of really what the drivers of the economy are. Interest rates, obviously underlying. A lot of different asset classes and understanding where that market is really headed in the long-term is where the economy’s at.

Coming from that, I ended up going to corporate finance for a bit with a Fortune 50 company, showing me the inefficiencies of a large corporation and where some of those opportunities are, which led me to my next role, which is at Zacks Investment Research, where I was a sell site analyst. I focused on the industrial space, looking at industry 4.0, everything from semiconductors, advanced manufacturing to IoT and AI-enabled solutions.

From there, I wanted to go to the private sector, look a little more towards VC. I worked at a company called BuiltWorlds and established their venture and investment team. What I did there is built a consortium, over 30 different CVCs, innovation teams within the built environment, helping them out with deal flow, understanding the market trends, and ultimately where the investment dollars were going and where those investments can help some of their pain points. Working with them closely, that’s where I met KP, who was at Andersen at the time. We came up with an idea of maybe a better model for investing in this space that leverages corporates. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment, but that’s my background in a nutshell.

A Brief Overview Of Nymbl Ventures

Let’s jump into the fund Nymbl Ventures. Talk a little bit about your fund’s thesis, where are you investing, how investing, what stage, check size. Just give us an overview of the fund itself.

We are raising our first fund called the Alpha Fund. It’s going to be a $50 million fund. We are focused on the built environment. By that, we mean anything and everything technology related to construction, whether it’s residential, commercial, or industrial, from the planning stage to breaking ground execution, development and maintenance and managing facilities.

We like to focus on technologies that play in the space, including advanced materials, robotics, advanced manufacturing techniques and automation. There’s a lot of automation that’s going on in this field. In terms of investment stage, the built environment is pretty unique. Traditionally, the players in the industry are very conservative. Lead times are very long. Development cycles are pretty long. Any average starts that tries to break into the space has a pretty long initial ramp-up period.

We like to invest in companies that are beyond the prototype stage, preferably revenue positive. In fact, we’d like to look for some revenues like about $500,000 or so. We like to invest in companies that are in trying to raise Series A or thereabouts. We recently talked with the company in the very doing due diligence on that’s never raised money, but they don’t know what to call it, but it’s going to be a Series A. They have lots of traction. We like Series A, plus or minus.

In terms of our model, we like to bring corporations and financial investors together. There are lots of reasons for that. The primary one being that success in this space for startups is predicated on support from incumbents, and that’s larger corporations at play in this space, plus the financial input that comes from VCs.

We have a very interesting and a unique investment model called the hybrid investment model that’s geared towards corporations, which enables them to invest in a VC fund, but at the same time have the full flexibility of having their own CVC that they would normally typically have. That’s our model. We can talk about a little bit more. In terms of check size, we also realize that companies in this space, especially those focused on hard tech need a lot of capital and a lot of runway.

Our check sales typically between $1 million and $3 million, a sweet spot will be like $2 million to $2.5 million. We prefer not to lead rounds, but we are happy to lead rounds. The reason for that being, we like to match every startup that we invest in with the corporate captain. We’d like so that the corporation brings a lot of know-how and expertise to the table. Anything else? That covered everything.

Navigating The Huge Move Towards AI

No, I appreciate that, KP. Dan, you and I got the chance to meet at Blueprint and honestly, it was the first time I’ve gone to that conference. Quite frankly, I went there because I had two portfolio companies that were less than a month old that I wanted to bring with me and I found out about it. Dan, maybe you could share, specifically Blueprint, but where you see where the growth has been in this PropTech, construction tech industry over the last several years.

Looking back at the data, I guess I’ll highlight this. We track over 1,600 startups actively in the build environment across over 3,500 deals. We’re looking at over 5,000 investors, probably more than 500 M&A deals. What I’ve seen recently is obviously a big move towards AI. In 2025, we’ve had over 60% of the investments in the build environment go towards this. Robotics is another one. This is probably making up about 40%.

I think a lot of this has to do with the fact, robotics, specifically, there are a lot of manual, simple tasks that have been easily replaced by something like a robot such as loading, unloading a truck, maybe a safety precaution as such as placing a window onto a high-rise or a number of other solutions that are applicable in that sense.

We obviously saw things like field AI come out the robotic dog that’s taking the whole layout of a building and progress tracking different construction sites. That’s an interesting solution. I think it’s a little bit complicated for right now, I will say that, just because of the fact that job sites are still dirty. Having a robot that’s fully metaled running around the job site while people are on it can technically be a little bit more dangerous and cause that apprehension that a lot of these GCs and business unit leads are having about technology.

Ultimately, we’re seeing a lot of investment into IoT. Getting that data tracked, getting that data in the right place, so data management systems as well, in order to fully leverage the capabilities of AI. I think we’re really seeing it from the beginning life cycle of the project all the way through. Understanding the data from the planning origination and takeoff phase and pre-construction phase all the way through to construction will allow an AI technology to fully understand the decision-making process throughout the life cycle and come up with more effective decision-making in a real-time scenario.

I think ERP systems are going to be big. We’re seeing more and more point solutions slowly but surely come into a full suite of solutions that really make up a company’s ERP and a lot of GCs out there do not have ERP systems in place. I think having new ERPs that are AI-ready are going to be critical to really implementing AI into this space in the next five years. AI is going to continue to see a lot of investment in the next few years, but it’s going to have to be paired with a lot of these IoT and data management solutions in order for these to effectively provide those predictive solutions and predictive outcomes, if you will.

How To Invest And Win Big In The Built Environment

KP, obviously, Dan mentioned AI and that’s very prevalent. It is the vast majority of investments in venture capital now. Let’s talk about outside of AI. What are some of the attributes of the founders that you’re potentially investing in? Who are these people or who should these people be?

When you’re looking at investing in the built environment. As Dan alluded to, there are a lot of solutions that are software-based. The founders of software companies are typically what we’ve seen in the past, like young, maybe first-time entrepreneurs, maybe second-time successful and second-time entrepreneurs who have built a solution, taken them into market, exited and are looking at a different solution.

Beyond that, the traditional built environment is more gray hair than anything. Some of the larger corporations that we’ve experienced and we worked with and we worked at have very deep R&D teams that have very long institutional knowledge. Many of the innovations in the built environment are not likely to be over successes. They can be like, “I just came up with this new formula,” especially when it comes to advanced materials or robotics or things like that. These are incremental, long lead cycle development technologies.

An attribute that we like to see is somebody who has obviously basic education in sciences, understand some other stuff that goes into this, but also has been around for longer than maybe 5 or 7 years. We’re seeing the ups and downs of the cycles. Construction, as you know, can be a start to stop in environment where projects can get out to a great start and then slow down and not pick up again, so somebody who’s been through those cycles.

I’d say an idea of entrepreneur in this would be somebody in their early late 20s, early 30s versus like a teenager or young. I’m not saying that you can be a teenager, but it’s somebody who’s been around the industry for a little while, who understands ups and downs and also has the long-term perspective and understands that it can’t be startup, Series A in six months, Series B in 12 months and exiting in 26. That’s probably not going to happen.

Some Success Stories At Nymbl Ventures

Let’s talk a little bit about more feedback on the current makeup of what you’ve done before. Maybe share some success stories of some companies doing some great things in the industry that you’ve been involved in, or great companies that you’re looking at. Dan or KP, either you take that one.

From a Nymbl alpha fund, we haven’t invested and we don’t have any. Going back into the history books, I can talk about some of the materials companies that we’ve invested in. This is also within the US. By the way, part of our thesis is we are North America-focused primarily because our team is all based here, our experiences here. We are definitely open to invest. We are co-investing with European startups, but that’s our sweet spot.

In the United States, North America, there’s lots of materials. Technology companies have been coming up, especially machine state has lots of innovation-accelerated programs, the state itself. We looked at some very interesting glass technologies for construction. Windows and doors tend to be the highest carbon components of any building, whether it’s an industrial construction or a commercial residential. We are seeing some really good technologies out there.

We’re seeing a lot of good technologies. For instance, traditionally, most residential construction in some light commercial construction, has been wood framing. As more and more people are getting sensitive about the carbon footprints and impact of those cutting down trees, there’s been an emphasis on alternative materials. We’ve seen some really good alternative materials. I don’t want to name names. That’s the second thing.

The third thing is Cleantech. Cleantech is big. I think you’ve probably heard of Greenville. They have this conference a couple of times a year. It’s been on for a long time, but right now, it’s catching the cadence in terms of good materials, good technologies to the front. That’s basically where I think we’re seeing a lot of beyond AI. Going back to our success stories, what I’d like to is one of the differentiators we have is our data, like Dan mentioned. Maybe, Dan, you want to give some highlights about what insights we have from our data that actually are very useful for investors?

From our data set, like I said earlier, we’re tracking over 1,600 startups across over 3,500 deals. We’re really finding that corporates coming in at the right time and the right level provides a boost for a lot of these companies. I think CVCs came in a little bit too early in the past pre-seed and pushed a lot of these solutions onto their business units and GCs. Obviously, with 3% margins being a good project that’s a plus project, you don’t have much margin to flip that.

A solution that comes in and causes more problems than it solves could easily shift that to negative quickly. I think that was a problem we saw in the early 2020s. As these CVCs just started popping up, a lot of these players came from the innovation side and they didn’t qualify and quantify the benefits and risks these solutions early on.

Right now, we’re seeing this us this shift in the built environment, and this data backs this, 80% of the investments made this past quarter in Q3 were towards Series B and later. I think this is a broader shift in where the emerging call it setup this emerging ecosystem is headed. Prior years, 2024, we only saw 60%, 2023 was only 50%, and that’s just because these technologies were not ready.

Going back to what I was talking about, putting these solutions on the job site too early, it caused a little bit of trepidation among the broader ecosystem to even adopt anything. If these were identified as commercial-ready by the CVC and they didn’t actually provide that commercial-ready benefit, I think that is causing some of the legacy players to be apprehensive to adopt this technology.

Being able to quantify and qualify this to the end user is going to be really beneficial moving forward. I think these startups are finally coming out with solutions that can immediately provide value. That’s where we’re focusing in. We’re focusing on solutions, like I said. Arbitrarily, Series A. We want companies that are substantially part of the broader industry that have been on many projects that aren’t being customized for these different singular companies.

I think we’re seeing more and more CVCs realize this, mostly focused now in the Series A segment and later. I think that’s coming more and more. We’re seeing that bootstrapping has been successful coming or has created more successful startups in the long run, bootstrapping your late seed or Series A, because this obviously instills a sense of lean operations, which is critical for this space.

You back the data, you see that instruction tech space, compared to PropTech and infrastructure tech, has about 2 to 4 months additional runway for each fundraising round. It’s obviously project based taking more time and lean operations, I think, are going to be key for a lot of these startups to not only remain buoyant, but to really drive success. We want to invest in companies that don’t need capital, but would like it to scale. Obviously, a pathway towards free cashflow positivity or free cashflow neutrality in the next 12 to 18 months is something that I think is unique to this space because that’s almost a necessity for these players to really survive.

Managing Both Strategic Investors And Financial Investors

Let’s talk to readers that are potential investors, LPs, wealth managers managing money and investing their clients’ money and alternatives. What’s the makeup of the current investors that you’ve approached or you have in the fund now and the investment partners that you’re going to be partnering with? KP?

Very early on, when we sat down and made our investment thesis, we’d like our fund to consist of half strategic investors and half financial investors. We say strategic investors leading corporations that span the entire environment spectrum. The reason for that is, like I mentioned earlier, startups in this space can have a pretty good core technology, but construction and built environment has other challenges to solve, such as codes and logistics and things like that that, that startups shouldn’t be spending in our belief spending too much time on. Having that corporate support, somebody who’s been there, done that and knows in maybe plays in 50 states or maybe 30 states or whatever it is, Southeast, Southwest who has domain expertise beyond just the technology in the lab, that’s very important.

Taking the product to the market is very important skill and it’s very expensive, and so that’s why we like LPs who have both the experience and the capital. On the financial investor side, we like lps who have some investments in real estate, and most of financial investors tend to invest in real estate and who appreciate the, like Dan mentioned, 50 basis points of incremental margin improvement from technologies. It can be pretty big to the bottom line.

We like a financial piece who have exposure and knowledge of environment and who likely invest in emerging technologies, but we also understand some of the long lead climb and the time to profitability that comes through this environment. That’s our goal. Our goal is to have 50% of our capital come from corporations and 50% from a financial piece.

Why Choose Nymbl Ventures Right Now

Dan and KP, both of you can answer this question. I always like to ask this question for readers who are considering making an investment in a fund and specifically your fund. Of course, I’d love to ask every everybody on this show. Why your fund, why now?

Dan, do you want to pick that?

Yeah, I could take this one. We are first time fund. We have had CVC experience, but we are going to be very active in working with our LPs. Over the phone, we will provide you with not only a deal flow, but have those conversations about what deals you are interested in. Ultimately, we want our corporate LPs, like KP said earlier, to be the captains of our deals. Our corporate LPs will not only lower the risk for the financial investors, but we’ll provide these startups with a platform to not only be a customer, but really grow and get into these channels. We want our active LPs, whether it’s corporate or financial, depending on how active they want to be, to have a seat at our advisory table. We want them to be discussing ideas, discussing the investments that they’re looking at, and they’re interested in.

Obviously, we’re providing that deal flow, but ultimately, we want our corporates to be the ones driving those decisions. Our proprietary database really, I think, allows us to stand out in the sense that we’re quantifying the unquantifiable of the build environment, specifically the VC side of it, and synthesizing the data into something that can be valuable.

Really understanding the drivers of success in this space and ultimately what’s going to result in a strong exit. We talked about the hybrid investment model. I think it’s really attractive for our corporate investors and gives them a little bit more oomph in the sense of we can get our hands dirty and get involved in this investment vehicle.

I got one more thing I would add is the space. As I said earlier, we’re seeing a shift in the space towards layer stage investments, seed and seed, like this space starting in 2015 to the last two years. I think right now we’re seeing this next boost in investment and it’s being driven by adoption. The adoption’s going beyond ENR 400 right now. It’s going to smaller players. We’re seeing a big jump in trades and subcontractor solutions. I think it’s really hitting every part of the built environment and a lot of opportunity for upside potential here. I think the ROI is really the strongest it’s ever been for this space right now.

KP, anything to add?

Yeah, that’s a great segue. This built environment as a VC investment class is coming of age. That’s what we believe in. We’ve seen this for the last ten years or so. People who got in pre-COVID or just after COVID, there was actually a gold rush and you know how that ended up. 2022 was a pretty bad year for VCs, ‘22, ‘23. We believe it’s a confluence of the underlying technologies, internet connectivity, AI, cloud, whatever you want to call it.

Some of those earlier technologies that have attracted VC investments and are mature beyond the FinTech. Payment processing for small contractors is a big deal now. All those problems have been solved. Obviously, healthcare is separate, complete beast and AI and contract servicing. Beyond all that, the built environment is coming of age.

This is a good time. Some of the circular trends Dan alluded to, I think, after ‘22, ’23, people have been sitting on the sidelines and not making a lot of investments. The exit environment is improving right now. In 2025, we’ll have more IPOs than we’ve had in 2024. Investors are waiting for that. We’re now at what I would say up and down cycle. We’re pretty much at the bottom of the down cycle from a VC perspective. I comment on the broader economy, and we also look like the maximum internally if the market is down by low. Even if the market goes down, this is it.

It’ll only be to the VCs and investors’ benefit because you know better terms and getting at the right time. About Nymbl Ventures, one other thing that we need to mention is our team. There are four of us. You met Dan and me. There are two other folks. Between the 4 of us, we have over 30 years of VC, CVC experience. We have hands-on industry experience in the built environment, building out different technologies, and we have lots of deep financial management and analysis and investment experience.

A couple of us have wall Street experience and we work on Wall Street, and two of us have advanced technology degrees. When we look at startups, we are looking at it not just from just the technology perspective or just the market potential, or just the industry we’re looking. This team got it from all the angles.

I’m the oldest guy on the team. The team is pretty young, pretty energetic. We pick up the phone. As we said, we like to keep our base small. We like to keep our number of investments small. We’d like to make more higher convection investments than like a spray and pray an approach. We don’t like that approach. We will pick up the phone and we’ll answer the calls.

We like active investors. I’m not saying we won’t take money from passive investors. We will. We’d be happy to help them and invest on their behalf. Active investors, we like to have a dialogue, understand what’s going on in industry, share with them our insights, share with what we are hearing on the street and collectively make good investment decisions.

Get In Touch With Daniel And KP

KP, just real quick, from a fellow person who’s been the industry for decades like yourself, I tell everybody gray hairs come with experience and perspective, and those are both valuable tools. Where can folks learn more about Nymbl Ventures and get in contact with you, gentlemen?

The website is the obvious spot. It’s pretty sparse. We have a section that’s sectioned out for our LPs that’s off limits for most of the normal folks. We actually publish a lot of pretty insightful publications. We do a quarterly industry report. We do an annual report. As you probably surmise, we are pretty data geeks. We go deep into the data and try to look for insights that are second-degree, third-degree level. If you’d like to get on our distribution list, reach out to us. Go to the website, our contact information is right there, and we are happy to have a chat with you in terms of how we can help you along in your investment journey.

Dan, how can I get in contact with you? You seem to have a lot of data, a lot of insight. What is the exact URL of Nymbl Ventures?

NymblVentures.com. My email is PKarri@NymblVentures.com. Dan’s email is DLaboe@NymblVentures.com.

On feature episodes, we’re going to be spending some more time in this space. I’ve had a couple of interviews and I got a chance to meet Martin at Blueprint. He’s going to be on our show very soon. I encourage everyone to keep track of what Nymbl Ventures up to, like, comment and share this show. Dan and KP, thanks for being on the show.

Awesome, Scott. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Scott.

—

When I was speaking to Dan and KP of Nymbl Ventures, I was really intrigued by their hybrid investment model that I mentioned in the beginning, where they’re attracting corporate investors and financial investors, leveraging corporate expertise and financial capital. This provides a unique opportunity to get some of these large corporations that might be in the industry in construction or real estate or architecture-related industries, the opportunity to invest in the technology that they may want to use in the future.

This provides founders a unique opportunity to get involved with investors and strategic partners to help accelerate growth in the investments. The thing the founders need to understand is that success in this space requires support from these incumbent corporations. Do the challenges like codes and logistics, which Nymbl Ventures’ hybrid model aims to facilitate. Their experience provides them the ability to get these founders involved and not only get the money they need, but also get the expertise and the connections they require.

Both KP and Dan believe that bootstrapping in the early stages in the late seed seen as beneficial. It’s stills a sense of lean operations, which are critical for survival and success in this space. Nymbl has a unique ability to help these companies get that scalability, allow them to be more bootstrap-oriented with less capital early on, and then additional capital as they succeed.

What I’d encourage you to do is take a look at what’s happening in this space. I was really intrigued, as I mentioned before, when I was at the Blueprint conference in Las Vegas, and it was really intriguing to me, Dan and KP because they have not only great financial experience and a great model to invest in these companies, they have great relationships and connections in the industry that provides these companies that are being invested in the opportunity to get the connections they need and these corporate investors to get access to leading technology to help their core companies. I encourage you to read this again, like, comment and share, and I’ll see you soon.

Important Links

• Nymbl Ventures
• Prabhakar “KP” Karri Email
• Daniel Laboe Email
• Daniel Laboe on LinkedIn
• Prabhakar “KP” Karri on LinkedIn