Every time the cost of a fundamental input collapses, the systems built on top of it reorganize. Print collapsed the cost of literacy. Steam collapsed the cost of motion. Microprocessors collapsed the cost of computation. We are at another such moment.
Generative and agentic AI are doing to expertise what printing did to literacy. Foundation models compress decades of know-how into accessible APIs; agentic systems then compress entire workflows. Cost-of-expertise is the input price falling fastest.
The US, EU, and China together direct more than 60% of global R&D. CHIPS, the IRA, the EU Chips Act, and parallel programs in Japan, Korea, and India represent the most coordinated state push into deep-tech capability since the early Cold War.
AI inference, electrification, and onshoring are driving a structural demand surge for power and advanced compute. Datacenter electricity demand is on track to double by 2030. Compute and energy are the binding constraints of the deployment phase.
Picks-and-shovels at scale. The companies that become the new infrastructure of an era are the ones that produce outsized, durable returns. Most venture funds organize around sectors, which forces founders into a category. We organize around substrates — which lets the most ambitious founders compose across them.
We have mapped the substrate surface into six tech families. Each is independently a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity. The most defensible companies of the next decade will sit at the intersections.
Verticalized, high-value deployments solving mission-critical problems with defensible data moats. The agent layer for regulated and physical-world workflows.
Next-gen architecture and hardware enabling massive-scale inference, agentic workloads, and energy-efficient compute. The substrate underneath everything else.
Programmable money, instant rails, hardware-rooted identity, post-quantum cryptography. The financial layer of the Evernet.
Low-carbon, reliable infrastructure powering the knowledge economy and surging electrification demands. The largest allocation because it powers everything else.
Frictionless, high-bandwidth collaboration between people and intelligent systems. Where the Evernet renders for the user.
Breakthroughs in materials science, bio-engineering, and manufacturing inputs enabling next-gen energy, compute, and the food systems that physically sustain society.
For 167 years, futures price discovery happened in open-outcry pits — raucous, hand-signaling, paper-ticket trading floors in Chicago and New York. Each trade carried high friction. Spreads were wide because liquidity was rationed by the physical capacity of the pit.
Then the input cost collapsed. CME Globex launched in 1992 as the world's first global electronic futures platform. By 2004, it had recorded its one-billionth transaction. By 2015, after a 167-year run, CME closed open outcry on almost all of its futures pits. The marginal cost of a trade fell from dollars to fractions of a cent, and the system reorganized around the new economics.
Volume did not just shift — it expanded by orders of magnitude. New participants entered who could not previously justify the friction. And the structurally largest winners were not the floor traders who adapted or the firms that built on top — they were the exchange and infrastructure operators. The picks-and-shovels won.
The forces driving the present moment — collapsing cost of knowledge under AI, industrial-policy alignment, and surging energy and compute demand — are doing to the broader economy what electronic trading did to the futures market. Faster, larger, more participants, captured by the infrastructure layer.
We have seen this movie. We know how it ends. Evernet Capital is built to back the picks-and-shovels companies of the next reorganization.
Evernet Capital is built to back them.