Laboratory notebook No. 1 · begun 2026 · unfinished

Maybe
something.

That's how the most honest line in any lab notebook ends - usually around two in the morning, after the third run. We're the fund that wants to read that line first. Small cheques, very early, for people doing their science in Russia and building there.

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Entry No. 01hypothesis

Ideas were never the problem here. What came after was.

Yablochkov's candle lit the boulevards of Paris while Edison was still fussing with filaments. Popov showed a radio receiver a year before Marconi's patent. Sikorsky flew the first multi-engine aeroplane in 1913. The list is long, and it isn't controversial. It's documented.

The historian Loren Graham called these lonely ideas: brilliant inventions with no early money, no first customer and nobody patient enough to wait for the result. The idea stayed alone and, as a rule, emigrated.

Our hypothesis is dull. If the only missing piece is the environment, you can build one. We turn up while the idea is still alone and stay until it's a company. Or until it's clear it won't be. A negative result is still a result.

Entry No. 02method

The method: earlier, smaller, longer.

Stage

Earlier than anyone

An idea in a notebook, a prototype on the bench, a preprint on arXiv. We arrive before anyone calls it an investment opportunity.

Cheque

Smaller than anyone

Small cheques, from 2 million roubles. Enough that the idea stops being lonely. Not so much that it stops being yours.

Horizon

Longer than anyone

Science doesn't run on quarters. We count time the way a lab does: in runs.

Company

Not alone

The Yellow Door, I8GL, mentors, studios. The cheque comes with people attached.

Entry No. 03for the reader abroad

The best argument is a result.

This fund is for the Russian market in its own right. Nobody has to move, export or go global to qualify.

To a reader anywhere, we'd suggest a historian's curiosity. Look at this scientific culture as one of the great human achievements: it did sums on paper that others did on machines, and proved theorems in communal kitchens. Then look at it as something the market keeps under-pricing, which is, forgive us, what an investment thesis is.

The olympiad results each year suggest the school hasn't stopped producing. We think there may be something here. That is, after all, the name.

Approved
for exchange
of ideas

Entry No. 04samples accepted all year

Is there a 'maybe something' in your notebook?

We don't need forty slides. We need three paragraphs: what you observed, why it might matter, and what you'd do with the first money. Post-docs, students and engineers write to us. So do the people willing to vouch for them.