Crucible — first cohort, Q3 2026

Bring the frontier to your scaleup

No fees No equity Four spots

Apply now

Apply by June 26 for Q3 2026

Go agent-native in one quarter

End-to-end support to rewire your scaleup's ways of working

  • 01 Align Leadership

    A unifying north star with a clear vision of the future model

  • 02 Upskill Teams

    Extraordinary development for your teams with frontier upskilling

  • 03 Scale Agents

    New levels of company velocity with key agent infrastructure

Expertise, credits and hands-on support

  • Office Hours
  • API credits
  • Frontier models
  • Agent infrastructure

  • Richard Ng

    Founder & CEO, Native

    • Workshops
    • Office Hours
    • Agent infrastructure
    • Team transformation

    Richard is founder & CEO of Native. He has built and delivered team training used by scaleups like Healf, Starling Bank, Beamery and Ocado. He was engineering coach #2 at Multiverse, the AI adoption platform.

  • James Kaplan

    CTO, McKinsey Technology

    • Office Hours
    • Agent infrastructure
    • Operating models

    James is McKinsey Technology CTO. He founded McKinsey's technology infrastructure practice, and is published in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the MIT Sloan Management Review.

  • Seb Agertoft

    Partner, Evolution

    • Workshops
    • Office Hours
    • Exec alignment
    • Operating models

    Seb is a Partner at Evolution, a leading coaching and advisory firm from Silicon Valley with clients like Slack, Notion and Dropbox. Previously, Seb was an operator at GoCardless and Pelago.

  • Laura Modiano

    Founder Experience, OpenAI

    • Frontier models
    • Agent infrastructure

    Laura leads Founder Experience at OpenAI. She's focused on helping founders move fast, be supported from Day 1 and through every stage of growth.

Results visible within 30 days

Our alpha pilot was a Q2 2026 rollout with a Series B scaleup.

  • Series B

    scaleup stage

  • 30 days

    from call to rollout

  • 81%

    activation rate

  • 61%

    W4 retention

The first cohort is even better — more programming, more expert speakers and more partner perks.

Apply

It takes 2 minutes to get started

We work with a maximum of 4 scaleups each quarter.

You're eligible if you're a ~Series A–C company willing to invest substantial leadership and company time in driving rapid wholescale transformation.

It takes 2 minutes to register your interest. We'll follow up within 24 hours.

Express interest by
June 26, midnight Anywhere on Earth
First cohort dates
June 29 – Sept 25 (Q3 2026)
Register your interest

FAQ

Questions

What is Crucible?

Crucible is a structured 3-month programme for up to four Series A–C companies each quarter.

We go deep with scaleups to bring the frontier of agents to their whole team and rewire their ways of working.

We plug into your team with expertise, credits and hands-on support, to:

  • Align your leadership team around a vision of what an agent-first future is for your company and wider team
  • Upskill your teams with the understanding and habits to effectively shift to agent-first work
  • Scale your agents with architecture, infrastructure and tooling for agent performance and velocity

There are no programme fees, and we don't take equity.

Crucible runs once a quarter. The first cohort is taking place over Q3 2026.

Who is Crucible for?

Crucible is a transformation for the whole of your scaleup, but we start by looking at leadership.

We're targeting ~Series A–C founders and execs who are ready to drive agent-first ways of working across their whole company.

We'll be looking for signs like:

  • You place a high value on velocity and are obsessed with maintaining it even as your company grows
  • You spike highly on decisiveness and have the conviction to set strong org-wide direction
  • You value long-term outcomes and recognise the limits of incrementalism in breakout innovation

If this is you, then Crucible will invest significantly in you as well as your wider team (both execs and ICs) to drive your company into an agent-native paradigm.

Why do I need Crucible?

Ambitious founders and execs have some common roadblocks to going agent-native. Crucible is built to clear them.

RoadblockHow Crucible clears it
Pace of AI change. You're focused on leading your own company, so you don't manage to keep up with the latest on agent-native work. We bring agent expertise to you with structured programming built for your scaleup.
Fuzzy understanding. You know that 'going agent-native' is important, but you can't articulate what that means in practice. We do the heavy lifting in co-creating a strategy, delivering workshops and revamping internal tools.
Internal alignment. You expect significant team friction before adoption is actually effectively taken up. We start with your exec team to ensure your transformation has credible leadership from the front.
Time constraints. There's too much going on, and it feels tough to carve out the space for proper company-wide transformation. We drive this at pace with a time-bound quarterly programme where we're financially aligned to outcomes on that timeline.
How long is the programme?

The first cohort runs over a single quarter, i.e. 3 months.

We use the time for exec alignment, wider team upskilling and rebuilding of work habits.

Where does the programme take place?

Crucible is a hybrid programme. The first cohort is UK-focused.

How many companies are accepted?

The cohort is capped at 4.

(Larger companies may eat up more than 1 space of capacity.)

How and why is this free?

The Crucible mission is to forge a new breed of agent-native scaleups.

It's important that we pick the right scaleups to go deep with, and so we're looking to cast the widest net by making it free for our earliest cohorts.

We invest significantly into our chosen scaleups. We're lucky to have the support of forward-thinking partners that make this possible.

Crucible, our partners and our scaleups have aligned interests in pushing the frontier of agent-native work.

What other costs are involved?

You should think about the programme as a six-figure investment of time and resources, even though there's no programme cost:

  • Leadership time. We'll partner with you strategically and operationally, and so we need weekly leadership time to stay aligned with you.
  • Team time. We'll get your team inspired and upskilled, and so we need cross-company calendar space at various points in the quarter.
  • Frontier model costs, both in team subscriptions and API pricing. (If you choose to build on OpenAI, they provide some credits for Crucible participants, but there may still be costs to bear here.)
  • Infrastructure and tool costs for other key platforms to run your company agent-native.

Since spots are limited, we use a refundable deposit to screen for this commitment. You are eligible for its return provided that you engage with the full programme.

Do I need to use OpenAI's products and APIs?

No. The 'hard part' of the programme is the vision, strategy and operating model execution. They can be powered by any strong frontier lab technology — and, in some cases, open-source models.

However, the API credits from OpenAI are a great way to offset one source of costs as you invest in the paradigm shift.

Ask your agent

Crucible

A 3-month programme to take your scaleup agent-native

Crucible takes your scaleup agent-native in one quarter.

We bring the frontier to you, with the expertise, credits and hands-on support needed to rewire your scaleup's ways of working.

We hand-pick four scaleups to go deep with. There are no programme fees, and we don't take equity.

Use the actions above to hand your agent the full brief and start a conversation.