Introduction
To ensure you are not Late for the AI Train, please join Capria Managing Partner Will Poole and Capria’s AI dev team lead for a hands-on, as-technical-as-you-want workshop
Capria is the leading VC investor for applied AI focused exclusively on the Global South and at the same time has roots in one of the epicenters of AI development, Seattle. Looking to bridge the information and talent gap we see every day, Capria has built a dedicated AI and user-experience development team to assist present and potential portfolio founders accelerate their AI journey. In this workshop, Will shows you demos of Capria’s prototyping work from around the world, discusses the fundamentals of how to get your GenAI or Agentic AI project going quickly and efficiently, and introduces you to resources to support your journey.
Agenda
1. 5 minutes – Introductions and your survey results – who is on the train, who’s at the station, and who’s feeling a bit late?
2. 5 minutes – Putting AI into historical context of 50 years of tech disruptions, and pondering about the next 10…
3. 15 minutes – Demos of 2 internal-use applied ai solutions and 2 that have been put into production with customer-facing services
4. 10 minutes – Introduction of ways to think about and discuss AI strategies in your company – forming a red team to drive speed
5. 10 minutes – Overview of cloud credits and benefits offered by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and NVIDIA, and how to get them
6. 5 minutes – Talent – do you need an LLM engineer? Someone with deep learning model design experience? Less? More?
7. 15 minutes – Five AI tools you should be deploying internally now, including low-code/no-code agentic development systems
8. 10 minutes – How to get a rapid prototype going quickly; lessons learned from 8 such efforts
9. 15 minutes – Around the room – discuss how you will ensure you get your AI-enhanced products to market ahead of the competition
Workshop Leader: Will Poole, Managing Partner, Capria Ventures
Will Poole is a serial entrepreneur and three-decade participant in the global VC ecosystem. He and his partners added applied AI as a core element of their investing thesis about a week after OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT to the world in 2022. They’ve been paddling hard to keep themselves and their portfolio ahead of the waves emanating from groundbreaking advances announced weekly since then.
He is currently the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Capria Ventures. He has been directly investing in startups since 1997 and developed wisdom beyond his years as he navigated the downturns of 2000 and 2008. His first institutional venture fund was raised in 2012. He and his partners together manage over USD 200M in AUM in companies spanning the Global South, from São Paulo to Cairo to Bangalore to Jakarta, and soon in the GCC. Their latest fund, Capria India Fund III, launched in Q2 2025 with a target size of USD 100M. Anchor investors include Raj and Indra Nooyi (former Pepsi CEO), Bill Gates (via his family office), and Godrej Industries (a prominent Indian industrial family office).
A common reaction from investors and founders who learn of Capria’s captive AI development team accelerating their portfolio’s work is “…this is amazing — we’ve not seen any other VCs doing this anywhere.”
Will is also the co-author of a soon to be released book, Flourishing with AI, a pragmatic guide for early- to mid-career professionals and their leaders who are looking to “make AI their ally” and navigate the turbulent organizational transformation that’s spreading across the word at an increasingly dizzying pace.
In his big tech career, Will was a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, leading several business lines, including the $13 billion Windows desktop business, representing ⅔ of the company profits at the time. After that role, he led the company’s efforts to tailor products to the needs of mass-market customers in emerging markets.
Will’s career started by founding two startups at the dawn of the PC era, growing a USD 200M business line in the early days at Sun Microsystems, and pioneering e-commerce at eShop, which he co-founded in 1991 and was acquired by Microsoft in 1996.
Read recent leadership thinking from Will and his partners here.
Early Prototype Demo Showcase
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For more detailed information on the process click here
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