Est. 1775
Watt’s Steam Engine
Boulton & Watt is perhaps the world's slowest startup incubator. We build one company at a time with focused execution and high success rates.
We start one new company every year or so, and we do the work ourselves. We don't work with entrepeneurs-in-residence or invest in other companies.
We think product-market fit is a hard problem and that can't be industrialized or handed off. Most of the work of a scientist isn't generating hypotheses, it's running experiments to get the data. That's what we do.
Once we've created real traction, we partner with best-in-class operators to create a second founding moment to scale the company.
We aim for unreasonable speed with each portfolio company while making decisions at Boulton & Watt like we're going to be in business for decades. We go long: building networks of talented people we someday hope to work with, waiting patiently for businesses to compound, and preferring to make the pie bigger for everyone instead of owning all of a small pie of our own.
We're backed by leading investors, founders of public and large private companies, and executives across the gamut of startups and public companies.
We're focused on overlooked and underappreciated vertical markets, especially where we can unlock economic opportunities for others.