Large studios carry large fixed costs, which forces them to launch whatever is on the calendar. A micro studio carries almost none, so it can kill freely and concentrate on the few opportunities that clear a high bar.

We think of it as a small operating team with a large capacity for experiments: a handful of partners, a rotating bench of Founders-in-Residence, and engineering that scales up and down with each venture's stage.

The expensive parts of company formation used to be research, synthesis, prototyping and outreach. Each of those is now a task an AI system can do most of, under human judgement.

Ignite and Lattice exist to make that leverage repeatable. They don't replace the operators. They let a small team run the workload of a much larger one, and they leave a record of every decision.

• Ignite: idea generation and venture formation
• Lattice: opportunity evaluation, validation and diligence
• Human decision gates at every stage transition

Studio systems sit at the centre. Venture leads pull from them, validation loops feed back into them, external engineering builds against them, and the spinout structure is the only exit.

Founders join a validated opportunity rather than a blank page. They shape the company with the studio, own a meaningful stake, and become CEO or venture lead at spinout. The programme is small and selective; we'd rather run three great residencies than ten average ones.

The studio takes a concentrated ownership position early, in exchange for the concept, the validation, the first build and the operating support. Founders and early team take meaningful equity at spinout. Later rounds dilute everyone normally.

This is an operating framework, not investment advice. Terms are agreed per venture and documented before a residency begins.

We keep product and venture leadership in Melbourne and build with vetted engineering partners across three time zones. Prototypes ship in weeks, the cost base stays variable, and the studio is never stuck with a bench it can't use.

Published data on the studio model, for orientation. These are industry figures, not Manuka's results; the studio has no track record to report yet and won't publish one until it does.

Methodologies differ across these sources and the studio sector has no standard benchmark yet. We cite them as directional context for why the model attracts operators, not as a forecast.

Three things changed at once. Frontier models made research, synthesis and prototyping cheap. Enterprises started buying AI seriously and needing partners who can move. And the cost of running a small, high-leverage team fell below the cost of any comparable programme inside a large organisation.

A micro studio with real systems is the natural shape for this moment.

AI changes how ideas are generated, how markets are evaluated, how products are built and how ventures are launched. Yet most company creation still runs on the old process: slow, manual, fragmented, and dependent on whoever happened to be in the room.

Instead of accepting that, Manuka is building a tighter operating system for venture formation. Ignite and Lattice are the first two components. The studio is where they are tested against reality.

Melbourne has world-class universities, a deep enterprise market and engineering talent priced well below the coastal US. Berwick sits in the city's south-east growth corridor, an hour from the CBD and a world away from the trend cycle.

We think that distance is an asset. The studio is close to the founders and customers we work with, and far enough from the usual centres to keep its own counsel.

A studio's fixed costs determine its honesty. If the team is large, ventures get launched to keep it busy. If the team is small and the systems are strong, ventures get launched because they cleared the bar.

Research, synthesis, scoring, prototyping and outreach used to consume most of a founder's first year. Today a small team with the right systems can run those loops in weeks, and run them many times. The scarce inputs become judgement, taste and access to customers. That is where we spend our time.

Companies that make a measurable difference to how a specific kind of work gets done, in sectors with real budgets: health, industrial operations, professional services and the enterprise back office. We prefer boring problems with paying customers to exciting problems without them.