AI Venture Program
Built with INSEAD's AI Venture Lab. For AI companies whose hard problem is no longer the model but its deployment inside a large organisation.
What it is
A programme for AI companies whose hard problem is no longer the model. Built with INSEAD's AI Venture Lab, it addresses what happens after a working product meets a large organisation: procurement, data governance, model risk review, and finding the business unit whose budget the deployment lands in.
With INSEAD AI Venture Lab
A collaboration on AI entrepreneurship with INSEAD's AI Venture Lab. The academic side contributes the research and the cohort; we contribute the corporate relationships and the investment discipline.
Cohort and sessions
- Event
What Europe's Private Capital Actually Thinks Right Now
A debrief of the 22nd INSEAD PE & VC Conference, run by the INSEAD Private Equity Club under the Chatham House rule, with eight sessions across a Plenary room and parallel PE/VC breakouts. The read of the room is recalibration: LPs asking for distributions rather than markups, Europe gaining allocation share against North America, and differentiation rather than beta driving outperformance.
17 min read - Event
Mandalore Partners at the 22nd INSEAD PE & VC Conference — Paris, June 3, 2026
Mandalore Partners will be attending the 22nd INSEAD PE & VC Conference, taking place on Wednesday, June 3, 2026 at Le Cnam in Paris. The 2026 programme features nine dedicated panels across private markets, each with an open Q&A segment, and ends with a cocktail reception for informal networking.
4 min read
Who it is for
- AI companies with a working product and a first customer, stuck in the gap between a pilot and a contract.
- Founders selling into regulated industries, where the blocking question is model governance rather than model quality.
- Corporates that want structured exposure to AI companies they could realistically deploy.
The process, in phases
Selection
Assessed on deployability as much as on technology: which system it touches, whose budget it lands in, and which internal function can say no late in the process.
Deployment design
Working sessions on the constraints founders usually treat as bureaucracy to be endured, and which are in fact design constraints that decide whether the product ships.
Corporate introductions
Named counterparts at the corporates we operate for, with the internal follow-up that turns an introduction into a pilot.
Investment decision
Commercial, technical and legal diligence, an investment memo, and a committee decision: the same process as any other Mandalore investment.
What participants get
- Introductions to corporate partners with a real deployment budget.
- Sessions with INSEAD's AI Venture Lab on the research side of the problem.
- A diligence process that tells you no quickly if it is going to be no.
Selection criteria
- A working product with at least one customer using it in production.
- A plausible path into a large organisation, not only into other startups.
- A founding team that can answer what the system does when a third-party API is down.
Apply
One line on what you are building and why now.