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Amish Patel, left, and Susan Paley of Conduit Venture Labs. (Conduit Venture Labs Photos)
Conduit Venture Labs, a Seattle startup lab founded in 2022 to help incubate and launch hardware-focused companies, has expanded its reach with Conduit Beacon, a service offered to outside founders, companies, VCs and research entities to help them execute and scale.
Tech veterans Amish Patel and Susan Paley first launched Conduit Venture Labs with the goal of creating a portfolio of what it calls “hard-tech” businesses that create products with a blend of hardware and software.
Patel told GeekWire that Conduit Beacon was initially built as an internal organization to offer the lab’s spun-out portfolio companies continued support after studio creation.
“Beacon is a ‘scaler’ or ‘post-raise accelerator’ that is specifically focused on ‘de-risking’ hard-tech ventures’ riskiest elements — hardware, talent, manufacturing, scale, supply chain,” Patel said.
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Since its start, Conduit Venture Labs has formed three companies in stealth mode that are raising or raised funds, with another six in the early incubation pipeline, according to Patel. They have also conducted eight Conduit Beacon support projects.
Patel began his career at Microsoft, spending eight years working on projects including Xbox Kinect and Microsoft Band. He later jumped into the startup world with tech roles at fitness wearables maker Katalyst and high-tech helmet manufacturer Vicis before landing an entrepreneur-in-residence role in 2020 at Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs.
Paley was the first CEO of Beats by Dre, the headphone company acquired by Apple in 2014, and the founder of DropLabs, a startup that built immersive sensory experiences. She has also worked in a bevy of advisory and investing roles in the consumer-hardware industry.
“Beacon is designed to be the support system we wished we had while navigating the challenges of building hardware products over the past 25 years,” Paley said in a LinkedIn post, adding that the service offers experiential wisdom, proprietary playbooks, tech stacks and a global network of strategic partners.
