V_labs becomes Trinsik: Letter from the partners

Dear Clients, Partners, and Friends,

In 2026, corporates wishing to unlock new growth and revenue streams are not looking for new moonshot ideas, fancy innovation setups, or methodological help. What they need is intelligent, hands-on execution of what is already on their table in the form of ideas or aspirations: core business growth, adjacent business models, and AI-powered market expansion. V_labs becomes Trinsik today to reflect this new reality. Let us outline what brought us here and where we go next.

Venture Building was the medicine corporates needed 10 years ago

Ten years ago, corporate innovation was stuck. The innovator’s dilemma was well known, yet there was a lack of methods, the wrong mindset, and a resulting lack of impact in many corporates. Innovation was in dire need of new impulses. Corporate Venture Building (CVB) was the perfect medicine. It brought in startup methods, questioned old assumptions, and increased speed.

In many cases, Venture Building showed its potential—whether it was in entirely new businesses or in running ahead and kickstarting a more general transformation across the entire corporate group.

Corporate venture building proved to be a highly effective framework for driving necessary corporate initiatives. However, it fell short of its grand promise: the successful spin-off of independent ventures in series. Part of that was due to initiatives being decoupled from core strategies, misaligned time horizons, and a never-fully-clarified question of whether CVB was actually strategic or financial in nature. As a result, the past two years have seen many Venture Building units dismantled or severely stripped of their mandate, with innovation agendas getting spread out across core business units again.

The reasons for this shift are comprehensible: more strategic alignment, greater leveraging of corporate “unfair advantages,” a stronger focus on scaling potential through established channels, and a renewed focus on growth in core business services as compared to wide diversification efforts. In a way, corporates have decided that their innovation efforts need to be more intrinsically motivated again.

Need for corporate innovation is unchanged - execution is still the major bottleneck

The necessity, however, for corporates to engage in strategic renewal has not changed at all. Without decisive innovation efforts, competitiveness erodes and companies cease to exist. It is other factors that have changed. In 2015, the methods, approaches, and mindset were lacking in corporate teams; today, these are widely commoditized. In 2015, corporates were often looking for ideas on what to do in order to stay relevant; today, AI has dramatically decreased the effort required to execute many of the steps in early-stage innovation, meaning backlogs are long and there is no shortage of ideas. In 2015, companies were often guided by a “home-turf bias”; today, many are thinking more globally.

What remains stubbornly persistent, however, is the challenge associated with running a core business and advancing it at the same time. The return of innovation to existing business unit structures actually reinforces this problem for all the known reasons. And while AI does empower BU teams with many (particularly early-stage) innovation activities, distributed corporate innovation and product teams still lack the key ingredients required to get beyond ideas and pilots: dedicated execution and commercialization power. Having multiple “new business task forces” waiting on the bench for deployment is simply inefficient. Thus, more than ever, large organizations struggle to turn ambition into action.

In the light of these developments, V_labs changed into an execution powerhouse

Recognizing this shift years ago, we knew that corporates needed a renewed extrinsic element to address these shortcomings. We introduced new products and services, emphasizing our focus on commercialization and growth. Along the whole spectrum of our work, we meticulously reorganized our routines to be AI-first—not just for ventures, but also for new products, services, and the very core products that generate corporate revenue today.

To fit this new reality, we built entirely new functions, optimized our internal structure, and doubled down on our senior execution power to maximize the impact of powerful AI assistance. Today, our company is more than 40 people strong and includes business developers, marketers, data engineers, designers, and IT developers—all accompanied by a set of proprietary AI agents. We also invested in new offices and became more international, with our teams currently working with clients in Europe, the US, and the Middle East.

Our setup, approach, and ambition have evolved, but one key ingredient was missing. Today we are completing the transformation by aligning our brand with this new reality.

Welcome to Trinsik.

Trinsik is a business creation studio for organizations that want to move decisively into what’s next. We uncover new opportunities, define what it takes to make them work, and build the businesses that bring them to life—irrespective of whether their best “home” is in an existing business unit, a newly set up department, or a spin-off.

With an unchanged shareholder structure, our mission is to help you build the bold ideas you can’t afford to leave on paper. With clarity, rigor, and executional precision, we turn ambitious concepts into tangible outcomes - in complex markets, under real constraints, and at pace. We bring the essential extrinsic element to strategically aligned, intrinsically motivated innovation and growth efforts. All of this is delivered AI-first, directed by deep executive expertise.

Why should this matter to you? We believe that now is the time to release the brakes and go. Firms are full of great ideas, technologies, and potential products that just need to be unlocked. We are not arguing for separation, innovation workshops, or startup methods. We are urging you to think big and international, leverage available technologies fully, and execute seriously on a global scale. We can help you do that. That’s what we bring to the table. This is Trinsik.

Yours,

the Trinsik Partners

Manuel Hörl, Marcel Grosskopff, Georg Frick and Lukas Meusburger