What changes when an investor encounters a founder who expands their sense of what is possible?

Krishna Visvanathan, Co-Founder and Partner at Crane Venture Partners, reflects on meeting James Dacombe in 2019.

At 19, James was proposing a non-invasive brain sensor inspired by the experiences of two grandparents with dementia.

Krishna could not yet know whether the technology behind CoMind would work, but he believed James had the qualities to build more than one consequential company.

Crane backed that potential. Several years later, the firm became the only institutional investor in the first round of James’s second company, now OLIX.

In this conversation, recorded during the EUVC Summit & Awards Show in April 2026, Krishna shares how working with James sharpened Crane’s approach to identifying outlier founders.

He explains why the firm considers whether every investment could return half or all of a fund and why a founder’s humility, self-awareness and capacity to learn can matter as much as the initial idea.

The discussion also explores how exceptional founders attract people with deeper specialist expertise, why Crane continues to increase its appetite for ambitious technical bets and what investors should search for when the next outlier will not resemble the last one.

Highlights

Why Krishna backed James before he could assess whether CoMind’s technology was achievable
How James changed Crane’s expectations of founders and potential outcomes
Why Crane underwrites investments for fund-returning potential
The qualities that suggest a founder can keep learning and developing
Why searching for another version of a past success can obscure the next outlier
How founders without conventional credentials can assemble world-class technical teams
What gave Crane the conviction to back James’s second company

Summit | Krishna Visvanathan (Crane): From contrarian view to a consensus bet, twice and counting

EUVC

Summit | Krishna Visvanathan (Crane): From contrarian view to a consensus bet, twice and counting