[Thesis name] Venture Capital

Wearables are the proof case for consumer hardware acting on the physical world. Oura's $875m Series E at a $10.9bn valuation tracked almost 1:1 with unit sales — 5.5m rings sold to date, 3m in the last year alone — while Whoop doubled down on athletes with medical-grade ECG and blood pressure features. The real story is where differentiation goes next: on-device AI for private, real-time health coaching, XR interfaces that make biometrics glanceable, and longevity tech that extends devices from tracking into prevention. The risk Konvoy flags: much of the growth runs through corporate wellness contracts, and it's unclear how much of that reflects genuine user stickiness versus employer-mandated adoption.

Hardware is only as valuable as the software ecosystem that runs on it. Apple pre-sold 200k Vision Pro headsets ($700m in revenue), yet launched with just 150+ apps versus 1.8m on iPhone, held back by high development costs, fee frustrations, and high-profile platform opt-outs. Konvoy frames it as a literal prisoner's dilemma: developers collectively have leverage to force friendlier terms, but the moment some capitulate and build, the rest must follow or miss the market. With ~$20b invested and 5k+ patents filed, Apple needs developers more than developers need Apple — for now.

Touch is the missing sense in spatial computing. As headset makers like Apple and Meta abandon physical controllers for hand and eye tracking, they strip out the haptic feedback that made digital interaction feel real — creating an opening for a new device category. Konvoy's bar for a winning haptic solution is mobile, transparent, and universal, which is the thesis behind their pre-seed lead in Afference, a wearable neural interface that uses electrical signals rather than pressure to communicate sensation directly through the skin, connecting to any spatial computing platform.

Robotics is scaling on gaming's rails. Just as Unreal and Unity gave digital-world builders pre-packaged tooling, the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS) has streamlined robotics development enough to allow innovation at scale — and the crossover runs deeper: game engines generate the synthetic training data robots learn from (Figure.ai uses this approach to train robots to walk). With NVIDIA projecting a $38bn humanoid market by 2035, Konvoy is looking at robotics in all its forms, from simulation software to physical robots serving industries well beyond games.

Affective computing — sensors that measure human emotion — has the measurement problem largely solved but the distribution problem wide open. Games are an ideal lab because biomarkers can be linked to gameplay in a controlled environment, but no killer application has emerged: emotion-reactive content risks landing as a novelty or a gimmick, and startups face incumbents' distribution advantages and data troves. The nearer-term path to consumer scale is fusing emotional data with other health metrics — effectively making it a feature of the wearables stack above rather than a standalone product.