At Two Small Fish Ventures, we invest in the next frontier of computing and its applications. We are especially drawn to companies that emerge when a foundational shift in technology changes not just what is possible, but how knowledge is created, shared, and advanced.

That is why we invested in Tiptree Systems.

Founded in Montreal by Mila researchers Dr. Martin Weiss and Dr. Nasim Rahaman, Tiptree is building what we believe is an AI-native researcher and knowledge network for AI itself. In our view, that makes it much more than another AI productivity tool. It is building infrastructure for how AI researchers share, exchange, and advance knowledge.

That matters because AI did not emerge from closed systems alone. It was built on a research commons. Papers, ideas, methods, and breakthroughs were shared, debated, extended, and improved by a global community of researchers. That culture of openness helped create the modern AI era.

But the landscape is changing. As the commercial stakes around AI rise, more of the frontier risks becoming concentrated inside a small number of powerful organizations. When that happens, the commons weakens. Knowledge becomes harder to navigate, harder to build on, and harder to extend across the broader research community.

We believe this is one of the defining tensions of the current AI moment. The technology is becoming more powerful just as the open exchange of knowledge that made it possible is coming under increasing pressure.

Tiptree’s approach is compelling because it does not try to recreate the past. It uses AI itself to extend the research commons into a new era.

Its two core components, Lacuna and Althea, are integral parts of the same vision. Lacuna is a living library of AI and machine learning knowledge, structured to surface conceptual connections, promising research directions, and gaps in collective understanding. Althea is the researcher working within that library, helping users navigate, synthesize, and collaborate across an increasingly large and fragmented body of work.

Together, they form an AI-native system for research itself.

This is exactly the kind of company that fits our thesis. At TSF, we invest in technologies that can reshape large-scale behaviour, enabled by foundational shifts in computing. The collapsing cost of intelligence is not only changing how software is built or how work gets automated. It is also changing how knowledge can be organized, explored, and shared.

That is what makes Tiptree so interesting to us.

Tiptree is a strong fit for TSF because it is not just helping individual researchers work better; it is strengthening the connective tissue of the AI research ecosystem itself. If successful, it will help researchers find ideas faster, connect knowledge more effectively, surface new questions, and contribute more meaningfully to collective scientific progress.

In other words, this is not just about individual productivity. It is about changing the way an entire research community interacts with knowledge and with one another.

We know this world well.

More than a decade ago, Wattpad was an early pioneer in using AI natively in a real product at scale. We saw firsthand how intelligent systems could shape discovery, participation, and connection across a global network. We also know what it takes to build systems that become more valuable as more people contribute to them. Building networks that connect people and knowledge is something we understand very well.

That is one reason Tiptree resonated with us so quickly.

Martin and Nasim are not only outstanding researchers. They are building around a question that feels native to this moment: how do we ensure that as AI becomes more powerful, the process of advancing AI knowledge also becomes more open, more connected, and more cumulative?

We believe Tiptree has the potential to play an important role in answering that question.

We are proud to support Tiptree Systems as they launch. The future of AI will not be shaped only by the largest labs. It will also be shaped by the broader community of researchers, students, and independent thinkers advancing the science itself. Tiptree is building for that community.

— Brandon Zhao and Allen Lau