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Why I sold Cherry Pulp to build an impact venture studio
As the CEO of Co-Labs and the former co-founder of Cherry Pulp, a successful digital agency that was sold to the group Collaboration Betters the World, I often encounter the question: isn’t a venture studio simply an incubator, an accelerator, or a venture capital fund with a design team?
The answer is no. A venture studio is a unique entity, and it was this very reason that led me to sell my agency, Cherry Pulp, to establish Co-Labs.
Here’s what I’ve learned and why I firmly believe in this model.
What a venture studio actually is
Incubators, accelerators and VCs all step in after the idea exists. A venture studio is there at the start. It co-creates the company, puts a team and capital behind it, and takes equity as a co-founder — not a mentor who waves from the sidelines, not a cheque that shows up at demo day.
That means the studio carries real risk early, when there's nothing to show yet. The trade is ownership: a studio holds a founding stake, not the thin slice an accelerator takes. Skin in the game, from day one.
Why the model works
A studio runs shared muscle — product, engineering, design, ops — across several ventures at once. That does a few concrete things:
- Building costs less. One senior team spread across a portfolio beats rebuilding every function, venture by venture.
- Founders can chase product-market fit while the studio carries the rest — the ops, the hiring, the build.
- Ideas get tested in parallel, so no single bet has to carry everything.
- Everyone shares a network of clients, advisors and operators who have done it before.
The industry data points the same way: studio-built startups have shown higher exit rates and faster paths to funding than the average startup. The model isn't a curiosity — it's why companies you already use got built this way.
Why I left my agency behind
Cherry Pulp was a good agency. We shipped strong work for clients. But an agency has a ceiling built into it: you bill for the work, you hand it over, and the value you created walks out the door with the client. You are always on the outside of the thing that matters.
I wanted to be on the inside — to build companies, not slides. To own a piece of what we made, and to point that at problems worth solving anywhere in the world, not just the next brief. So I sold Cherry Pulp and started Co-Labs: an impact venture studio.
What "impact" means when we say it
Impact isn't a mood word for us. Every venture we build has to create measurable value — someone is better off, and we can say who and how — not just a return. Building for impact is harder: the markets are less mapped, the users less served, the risk higher. The studio model is what makes that risk survivable — a portfolio, shared resources, and the discipline to kill an idea that isn't working before it drains a founder.
It's also why our work reaches into hard domains, including a dedicated cyber defense lane: resilience and sovereignty for the institutions and infrastructure that can't afford to fail.
How Co-Labs is built
We are the only actor in Belgium and Luxembourg combining a working venture studio with corporate venturing advisory. Two engines drive it:
- Paid services — Analyze, Build, Growth — that fund the studio today.
- Equity in the ventures we co-build — the long-term upside, and the proof behind the advice.
We embed, we build, and we put our own equity on the line.
The portfolio so far: Rebel, Drimt, Kookia, Call Up, Uptoolkit — with references that include European Commission, RTL-TVI, KBC, RTBF and Unicef.
The goal was never to do this alone. It's to build ventures that matter, prove the model, and pull others in.
If that's your kind of problem — whether you're a founder or a corporate — let's talk !
