The simplest description of BVS is the one our accountant uses. We are a small Australian holding company called Blue Venture Studios. Three people own it. It holds four operating companies, and what those four earn pays for the fifth. No outside capital. No fund. No limited partners. When a business throws off a surplus, we reinvest it, take it out, or use it to start the next one. That is the entire machine.
We started it in 2019. The first company was Bitcompare, in crypto. To make it work we had to build something the public data did not give us: a clean, continuously updated record of who in the crypto economy paid what to whom, and on what terms. The database turned out to be the asset. Today Bitcompare sells access to it two ways: an API used by exchanges, wallets and asset managers, and a proprietary ad network that pays publishers to send qualified buyers in their direction. The original consumer site is still there. It is now the smallest piece.
The pattern stuck. Make yourself the canonical reference for an industry by collecting and verifying data nobody else has, then build a business on top of it. It is the only thing the companies in this holding company have in common, and we have now built three more on the same principle. Movingto is a lawyer-led residence-and-citizenship advisory; funds.movingto is the verified index of Golden Visa funds that makes the advisory defensible. The two are one machine, run as two companies, and they are the clearest illustration we have of how the model works: the database is the moat, the consulting business pays for the moat. Robozaps applies the same idea to humanoid robotics: a database of buyers and hardware, packaged as a sourcing marketplace. None of the four has ever taken a dollar from outside. We do not plan to start.
We are operators who happen to own the things we build, not investors who happen to operate them.
The order of those words matters. We do the work first, every day, the way the people who answer support tickets and write shipping copy and reply to customer emails do the work. The ownership is downstream of that. We are not advising founders from a board seat; we are the founders. We are not allocating capital across a portfolio; we are deciding which feature ships this week. The companies we own are not bets in a basket. They are places we work, and one of us is always inside one of them at any given hour. The model only stays honest because of this.
The distinction also changes nearly everything about how we work. We do not optimise for a fund's clock. We do not have to raise a Series A in eighteen months. We do not treat a profitable seven-figure business as disappointing because it is not a billion-dollar one. A company can grow at the rate it actually grows. We can hold it as long as it earns its keep, and sell it only when someone offers a number we would rather have than the business itself. We have sold none so far. We will probably sell one or two eventually. We are in no hurry.
The three of us are Dean Fankhauser, in Sydney, and Dan Sutherland and Ersel Aydin, both in Melbourne. We worked together for years before we owned anything together. We have spent seven of those years learning which decisions we are right about and which ones we are not. We agree often enough that the company functions, and we disagree often enough that the businesses are better for it. Most days, that is the entire job.
We have a method, not a category. Bitcompare runs an API and an ad network on top of a yield database. Robozaps runs a marketplace on top of a hardware-and-buyer database. Movingto and funds.movingto are the same idea split visibly in half: the database lives at funds.movingto; the consulting business that uses it lives at Movingto. Crypto, mobility, robotics: three industries with nothing to do with each other, all built the same way. If the next one is in shipping, insurance, or commercial property, the sentence describing it will rhyme with these.
The market shape we look for is always the same: an industry where the participants cannot see one another clearly, where the data sits in PDFs and spreadsheets and people's heads, and where someone willing to actually collect and clean that data can become the authority on it. Crypto yield was that in 2019. Golden Visa funds were that in 2023. Humanoid robotics is that now. There are plenty more.
Every one of these companies came to exist the same way. One of us spends six to twelve months convinced that a particular industry has a database missing from the middle of it. We argue about it on Slack. If the argument survives a few months, we register a domain and one of us moves into the role of founding operator. The first eighteen months come out of cashflow from the other businesses. The founding operator becomes CEO. The other two stay on as partners and back away gradually as the company learns to stand on its own. By the time it is profitable and hiring, we are mostly out of the way.
This is a slow tempo by the standards of how venture studios describe themselves on the internet. We build somewhere between half and one new company a year. We are not a factory. We are three people with a method that produces a new business every twelve to eighteen months, and we are content with that rate.
Build the canonical database for an industry. Make it unique and trustworthy with data nobody else has. Put a business on top, then repeat in an industry that has nothing to do with the last.
We are aware of the alternate version. In it, we pick one of the four companies, declare it the main event, raise outside money against it, and let the others quietly die or get sold off. We think about it occasionally. We have not done it. The reason is not financial; the financial argument for doing it is fairly strong. The reason is that running four small profitable companies we own ourselves is, on balance, the working week we want. We are not certain that will still be true in five years. It has been true for the last seven.
If you are here because you are thinking about buying one of the companies, we are usually willing to have the conversation. If you are here because you want to work at one of them, the careers page lives at the relevant company's site. If you are here because someone forwarded this to you as evidence that a small holding company is a reasonable thing to spend a working life on: yes, it is. That is the entire argument.
The holdings are listed below. We update this letter once or twice a year, whenever something material changes; the dateline at the top tells you when it was last revised. The numbers in the list are real. We do not publish valuations, partly because they are not knowable in any useful sense at our scale, and partly because the only valuation that matters is one a real buyer eventually offers.
That is what we are. The rest of the website is just the list.