Shegun Otulana already had his billion-dollar exit. Then he stayed in Birmingham to build a factory for the next ones.
In most of the country, the story of a startup begins with a founder, a slide deck, and a plane ticket to somewhere with more money. Harmony Venture Labs runs it in reverse. The Birmingham venture studio starts with a problem worth solving, tests whether anyone will pay to have it solved, and only then decides whether a company should exist at all. If the problem does not hold up, the company never gets built - and the studio treats that as the process working, not failing.
That inversion is the whole idea. A venture studio is not a fund that writes checks and waits, and it is not an accelerator that runs founders through a twelve-week cohort. It is closer to a workshop that co-builds the company itself - contributing the idea, the early product, the design, and the operating muscle alongside the founders it recruits. Harmony Venture Labs, known around Alabama simply as HVL, has been doing this since 2021. In 2025 the model got a public stamp of approval when the state's innovation agency picked HVL to run its first venture studio and fund.
Harmony Venture Labs exists because of one man's second act. Shegun Otulana built and led Therapy Brands, a software company serving mental and behavioral health providers, and sold it in a deal reported at roughly $1.25 billion - one of the largest exits in Alabama history. The conventional next move after a number like that is to move somewhere sunnier, join a coastal fund, and manage money. Otulana did something less expected. He stayed in Birmingham and started building again.
That line explains the studio better than any mission statement. Otulana's read on the South was not that it lacked talent or ideas. It lacked the machinery that turns an idea into a funded, scalable company - the validation frameworks, the early capital, the operators who have shipped B2B software before. HVL is his attempt to install that missing infrastructure, and its motto puts a fine point on the ambition: We Build. We Build Builders. The studio is not only trying to produce companies. It is trying to produce the people and the habits that produce companies.
HVL's core work is what it calls venture co-building, and it runs on a deliberately unglamorous process. A new venture moves through four stages, and each one is a gate it has to earn its way past.
The point of the sequence is discipline. Plenty of studios and accelerators talk about validation as a virtue; HVL structures its process so a venture cannot skip it. Early customer contact is not a milestone tucked into month six - it is the thing that decides whether month six ever happens. And crucially, HVL does not hand the keys over at launch. It stays active through early traction, which is the phase where most new products quietly stall.
If HVL only co-built startups, it would look like a lot of other studios. What rounds it out is a set of programs that feed the top of the funnel and extend the studio's reach beyond its own portfolio.
CoWello is the flagship in-house venture and a good tell about how HVL picks its shots. It is an all-in-one space and booking management platform for wellness centers - flexible scheduling, inventory, billing and payments, and multi-location support. Yoga studios and wellness practices are not typical venture turf, which is exactly the kind of overlooked, operationally real market the studio's process is designed to surface. The team behind it had already built B2B SaaS for behavioral health, so the pattern - unsexy vertical, real workflows, software that removes friction - was familiar.
Blueprint points the studio's expertise outward. It is a 90-day AI maturity assessment and activation program that helps enterprises figure out where artificial intelligence can actually move a number, rather than where it sounds good in a press release. AppThink is an entrepreneurship education program for incubators, accelerators, and institutions, and Venture Yards is the collaborative workspace where Birmingham founders can physically show up and build. Education and workspace are not side projects here - they are how a studio in a mid-size city keeps a pipeline of founders and ideas within arm's reach.
In 2025, HVL's model stopped being a private experiment and became public policy. Innovate Alabama, the state's innovation agency, reached an agreement to operate its own venture studio and fund out of Harmony Venture Labs, with a minimum $5 million commitment. The two publicly launched the Innovate Alabama Venture Studio and Fund in June - the first state-backed venture studio in Alabama - and discussed it on stage at Sloss Tech that same month.
The targets are specific: by 2028, the studio aims to launch 10 new companies, attract $10 million in venture capital, and generate measurable economic impact. The focus sectors read like a map of the state's real economy rather than a copy of Silicon Valley's - fintech, logistics, agtech, medical technology, industrial systems, and construction innovation, aligned with the Alabama Department of Commerce's Catalyst Plan.
That last phrase - grow in Alabama and stay in Alabama - is the strategic heart of the deal. Regional economies lose their best companies not because they cannot start them but because success pulls founders toward coastal capital. A studio that co-builds locally, with local money and local talent, is a bet that where a company is built can matter as much as how fast it grows.
Venture studios are a small and specific corner of the startup world. Nationally, the model is practiced by firms like High Alpha, Atomic, and Human Ventures; in Europe, by studios such as Hexa (formerly eFounders). What separates HVL is less the mechanics than the geography and the source of its conviction. It is operator-led by someone who built and sold a real B2B software company in the same city he is now trying to seed, and it is deliberately planted in a market that coastal studios overlook.
Its customers, then, are several groups at once: early-stage founders and entrepreneurs-in-residence who want to build with a partner rather than beg for a term sheet; corporate and institutional partners looking to spin up new ventures; enterprises that need help turning AI from a buzzword into a workflow; and the incubators and institutions that run AppThink. The team is small - roughly 15 to 16 people spread across North America and Europe - which is normal for a studio whose leverage comes from process and portfolio, not headcount.
The business model matches the structure. HVL contributes capital plus operating work - strategy, product, design, marketing - in exchange for equity in the ventures it co-builds, and it earns alongside through its enterprise and education programs. Its broader software orbit includes B2B SaaS and AI brands such as Copysmith AI, ListedKit, and RaveCapture, giving the studio a set of live products to learn from rather than a single bet.
None of this guarantees the 2028 numbers land. Building a startup ecosystem from a studio is a long, unglamorous project, and the honest version of HVL's pitch admits that most ideas will not survive the gates. But that honesty is also the most interesting thing about it. In a business that runs on optimism, Harmony Venture Labs has built its process around the willingness to say no early - and to build only what earns the yes.