For more than four decades, the Kuelbs family has built companies from a blank page, acquired businesses worth carrying forward, and invested behind founders pursuing something exceptional.
The industries have changed — motorcycles, media, banking, hospitality, spirits, apparel, industrial technology. The principles have not. Find good people. Build something customers genuinely value. Allocate capital carefully. Stay close enough to the work to know what is actually happening. And leave the company stronger than you found it.
We start businesses.
Companies founded around a product, an idea or an opportunity we believed should exist — and then the much harder part of turning it into an operating business.
We acquire businesses we believe still have somewhere to go.
Companies with real customers, good people and another chapter ahead of them. Sometimes the need is growth capital. Sometimes it is liquidity. Sometimes an owner wants to take money off the table without walking away from the company that has defined much of his or her life. We understand that conversation because we have been on the other side of it ourselves.
We invest behind people building something we believe in.
When we find exceptional operators pursuing an ambitious idea with a product that can matter at scale, we are happy to own a piece, support the work and let the builders build.
Across the family's operating companies, more than $4 billion of products have been sold at retail through retailers, distributors, platforms and partners around the world.
Where our products have been sold.
At the beginning of the modern custom-motorcycle boom, John and his brother built a business around giving riders the parts to make a Harley their own. More than 12,000 products, a 900-page catalog and 3,500 retailers worldwide.
Explore the company →Anime was still making the journey from devoted American fandom into mainstream culture when John joined Gen Fukunaga and a group of Dallas investors to buy Funimation back in 2011. It grew to more than $100 million in annual sales before its sale to Sony.
Explore the company →Built to commercialize Ozonix, a patented chemical-free water treatment technology, and to point it at one of the hardest water problems in American industry. More than four billion gallons treated and recycled across more than nine hundred wells.
Explore the company →We invest behind exceptional operators working on problems that can matter at scale. The industries are less important than the combination we look for: an ambitious problem, a product that changes what is possible, and a team capable of turning both into a durable company.
Making life multiplanetary by changing the economics and engineering of access to space.
Building Claude at the frontier of artificial intelligence, and studying how capable AI stays safe and understandable.
Rebuilding defense around autonomous systems, software and modern manufacturing.
Family offices are usually built around capital. Ours grew out of operating companies. For more than forty years, members of the Kuelbs family have started businesses, bought them, sold them, chaired them, rebuilt them and occasionally watched ideas fail. That experience shapes the way we look at a company today.