Adjacent is forever exploring
VC firm Adjacent rejects convention with a story-led anime campaign created by American Haiku.
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When most venture capital firms have a milestone to announce, they lead with a manifesto, a LinkedIn post or a founder letter about disruption.
American Haiku is taking a different approach for Adjacent, a NYC-based VC firm celebrating its five-year anniversary (since the close of the first fund): a grassroots campaign and anime film that pictures Adjacent’s founders as mutants, explorers charting unknown territory, building things that don’t exist yet.
Adjacent was founded by venture capitalist Nico Wittenborn around the concept of the “adjacent possible,” a theory from evolutionary biology suggesting innovation emerges not from sudden disruption, but from the next step enabled by what already exists. As an investment strategy, it means identifying moments when existing technologies combine to unlock something newly viable, often before the hype begins. Rather than explain this philosophy through charts or jargon, American Haiku translated it into narrative.
Forever Exploring, draws on classic anime and mythic storytelling, avoiding the visual and tonal conventions of both venture capital and B2B marketing. Targeting both existing Adjacent portfolio founders and prospective founders, the goal is to activate what the firm calls the Adjacent Cascade, that is, to create such a distinctive founder experience that recipients become ambassadors, sharing it with their networks and attracting the next generation of builders
Credits
View on- Agency American Haiku
- Production Company Love Song
- Director Christian Stone
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Credits
View on- Agency American Haiku
- Production Company Love Song
- Director Christian Stone
- Creative Director Dan Williams
- Animation Stray
- Music Citizen Music
- Chief Creative Officer Thom Glover
- Creative Director Ben Muckensturm
- Executive Producer Mateo Suarez
- Head of Operations Christine DiStasio
- Executive Producer Daniel Wolfe
- Sound Designer Jack Goodman
- Executive Creative Director Theo de Gunzburg
- Head of Production Molly Young
- Producer Bomin Weon
Explore full credits, grab hi-res stills and more on shots Vault
Credits
powered by- Agency American Haiku
- Production Company Love Song
- Director Christian Stone
- Creative Director Dan Williams
- Animation Stray
- Music Citizen Music
- Chief Creative Officer Thom Glover
- Creative Director Ben Muckensturm
- Executive Producer Mateo Suarez
- Head of Operations Christine DiStasio
- Executive Producer Daniel Wolfe
- Sound Designer Jack Goodman
- Executive Creative Director Theo de Gunzburg
- Head of Production Molly Young
- Producer Bomin Weon
In the film, two wild-born young explorers, Alma and Benji, discover a mysterious crater marked with a glowing symbol. Alma explains the legend of The Adjacent, a shadowy order searching for outliers representing real Adjacent investments. By the film’s end, the explorers leap into the crater, choosing to join the Adjacent Cascade.
The campaign marks the first major work American Haiku has created for Adjacent since being named AOR earlier this year. While this marks the first major campaign for the firm, Adjacent and American Haiku view it as “Chapter 1” of a longer-running narrative universe.
“For us, the adjacent possible isn’t a metaphor. It’s how innovation actually happens,” said Nico Wittenborn, founder of Adjacent. “The best companies aren’t pulled from thin air. They emerge when existing technologies, ideas and people combine in ways that suddenly make something new viable. We wanted a launch that expressed that belief system, not just described it.”
“Anime became the structural backbone because it gave us a way to dramatise abstract ideas like emergence and collective progress,” said Christian Stone, Director at Love Song. “It let us sidestep the minimalist, corporate visual language typical of finance marketing and build something that felt expansive, emotional and addictive.”
“We started with Nico’s investment philosophy. The challenge was a translation exercise: how do you take something like that and turn it into a story world founders can immediately grasp, remember and repeat,” said Thom Glover, Founder and CCO at American Haiku. “This assignment was a great opportunity to build a compelling world for a company in a sector that normally limits itself to the purely explanatory.”
