VC Firm Adjacent Rejects Convention with Story-Led Anime Campaign

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.

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 agency of record 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.