Cyril Acheson
General Partner · Co-Founder
Founded the firm in 2017. Previously head of new business at an independent media holding company. Serves on the boards of Salient House and Threadwell.
Lampblack Partners invests at the intersection of consumer, media, and applied artificial intelligence — in companies whose products customers expect to live with, not pass through.
Lampblack is the deep-black pigment ground from carbon residue and used since antiquity to make ink. It is the substance that allowed people to make a record — to fix a story in place so that it could outlast the person who wrote it. Our name is a deliberate one. The companies we are interested in are the ones whose products, like ink on a page, are meant to last.
The firm was founded in 2017 by three partners whose careers had been spent at the seam of media and consumer technology. We invest at the seed and Series A stages. We make a small number of investments per year — typically six to eight — and we expect to be in each position for the better part of a decade.
We do not invest in marketplaces, gig platforms, or short-cycle commerce. We invest in companies that, if they succeed, will be in their customers' lives in twenty years. That subset is smaller than it sounds.
A selection. The firm does not maintain a public list of every position.
Durable AI companionship. We participated in the Series A led by Cross Axle Ventures in September 2024 and retained a minority position following the company's recapitalization in March 2026.
An independent media studio building a single-subject subscription product across long-form audio and editorial. A canonical Lampblack investment.
A small interactive-fiction studio whose product is a series of stories a reader can return to over years, not a single play-through.
A subscription apparel business whose unit economics are designed around customer tenure of seven years and longer. New York based.
A small studio building heirloom-class objects on top of a digital design and provenance platform.
A vision-care subscription service. A long-tenure consumer-health investment that fits our retention thesis.
Founded the firm in 2017. Previously head of new business at an independent media holding company. Serves on the boards of Salient House and Threadwell.
Founded the firm in 2017. Previously an investor at a generalist seed firm and an operator at two media-technology companies. Serves on the boards of Bellweather Studios and Daybreak Optics.
Joined in 2021. Leads the firm's applied-AI practice. Previously a research engineer at two foundation-model companies.