Crucible II — Q3 2026
Bring the frontier to your scaleup
Crucible takes your scaleup agent-native in one quarter.
Apply by June 14 for Q3 2026
Frontier insights
Scaleup expertise
The programme
Go agent-native in one quarter
We shift your teams, people and infrastructure into an agent-first paradigm.
- 01
Align your leadership
team around a vision of what an agent-first future is for your company and wider team.
- 02
Level up your people
in every role with the understanding and habits to effectively shift to agent-first work.
- 03
Scale your agents
with architecture, infrastructure and tooling for agent performance and velocity.
The people
Expertise, credits and hands-on support
Best-in-class expertise for the transformation — across frontier intelligence, workforce upskilling and change management.
- Office Hours
- API credits
- Frontier models
- Agent infrastructure
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Richard is founder & CEO of Native. He has built and delivered team training used by scaleups like Healf, Starling Bank, Beamery and Ocado. He was engineering coach #2 at Multiverse, the AI adoption platform.
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James is McKinsey Technology CTO. He founded McKinsey's technology infrastructure practice, and is published in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the MIT Sloan Management Review.
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Seb is a Partner at Evolution, a leading coaching and advisory firm from Silicon Valley with clients like Slack, Notion and Dropbox. Previously, Seb was an operator at GoCardless and Pelago.
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Max is founder of Claude Code Curious. He runs community meetups to bring the magic of AI and agents to non-engineers, and is one of Anthropic's first 50 Community Ambassadors.
Crucible I
Results visible within 30 days
Our Q2 pilot with a Series B scaleup.
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Series B
scaleup stage
-
30 days
from call to rollout
-
81%
activation rate
-
61%
W4 retention
Crucible II is even better — more programming, more expert speakers and more partner perks.
Apply
It takes 2 minutes to get started
We work with a maximum of 4 scaleups each quarter.
You're eligible if you're a ~Series A–C company willing to invest substantial leadership and company time in driving rapid wholescale transformation.
It takes 2 minutes to register your interest. We'll follow up within 24 hours.
- Express interest by
- June 14, midnight Anywhere on Earth
- Crucible II dates
- June 29 – Sept 25 (Q3 2026)
FAQ
Questions
Who is Crucible for?
Crucible is a transformation for the whole of your scaleup, but we start by looking at leadership.
We're targeting ~Series A–C founders and execs who are ready to drive agent-first ways of working across their whole company.
We'll be looking for signs like:
- You place a high value on velocity and are obsessed with maintaining it even as your company grows
- You spike highly on decisiveness and have the conviction to set strong org-wide direction
- You value long-term outcomes and recognise the limits of incrementalism in breakout innovation
If this is you, then Crucible will invest significantly in you as well as your wider team (both execs and ICs) to drive your company into an agent-native paradigm.
Why do I need Crucible?
Ambitious founders and execs have some common roadblocks to going agent-native.
- Frontier time lag. You're focused on leading your own company, so you don't manage to keep up with the latest on agent-native work.
- Fuzzy understanding. You know that 'going agent-native' is important, but you can't articulate what that means in practice.
- Time poor. There's too much going on, and it feels tough to carve out the space for proper company-wide transformation.
- Internal alignment. You expect significant team friction before adoption is actually effectively taken up.
Crucible is built to take you agent-native and clear these roadblocks.
- We bring agent expertise to you with structured programming built for your scaleup
- We start with your exec team to ensure your transformation has credible leadership from the front
- We do the heavy lifting in co-creating a strategy, delivering workshops and revamping internal tools
- We drive this at pace with a time-bound quarterly programme where we're financially aligned to outcomes on that timeline
How long is the programme?
Crucible II runs over a single quarter, i.e. 3 months.
This gives us the time needed for exec alignment, wider team upskilling and rebuilding of work habits.
(Our experience also suggests that, at Series A–C scale, a quarter is the right unit of time for org-wide urgency, buy-in and results.)
How many companies are accepted?
The cohort is capped at 4, and may be smaller.
(Larger companies may eat up more than 1 space of capacity.)
How much does it cost?
Crucible II is a six-figure investment of time and resources:
- Leadership time. We'll partner with you strategically and operationally, and so we need weekly leadership time to stay aligned with you.
- Team time. We'll get your team inspired and upskilled, and so we need cross-company calendar space at various points in the quarter.
- Upfront deposit. We have a tight quarterly timeline for significant transformation, and so we charge a deposit to screen out teams who can't make this a top priority.
- Results-based agreement. We'll co-define success with you, and at the end of the quarter you'll only pay us if we've achieved the shared goals that we had.
The specific costs in time and fees vary depending on your company complexity, agent-readiness and team capabilities.