About
The Capital Architecture Institute exists because a discipline was missing.
Capital architecture - the systematic design of layered capital structures - is practiced everywhere. It is taught nowhere. The CAI is the institution being built to change that.
WHERE THE CAF CAME FROM
The framework was not designed and then applied. It was extracted from practice and formalised.
Over twenty years of deploying capital across investment management, venture capital, private equity, and strategy consulting - across more than thirty ventures and over EUR 1.5 billion in fund structures and capital markets mandates - a pattern emerged.
The mandates that failed did not fail due to a lack of capital. They failed because the structure was wrong. The tranche architecture did not hold under stress. The intercreditor terms created irreconcilable conflicts among the LPs. The concessionality was too generous to replicate and too opaque to defend. The governance mechanisms were insufficient to adapt the structure to changing conditions.
The mandates that worked shared a common logic. They were built on explicit design decisions, not on inherited precedent. They allocated risk to the capital class best positioned to bear it. They were designed for replicability from the first tranche meeting. They produced governance documentation that institutional LPs could evaluate at the standard expected by ILPA DDQ 2.0.
The Capital Architecture Framework is the formalisation of that logic - extracted from practice, structured as a seven-stage lifecycle, documented with explicit outputs and quantitative gate requirements, and published for the practitioner community to challenge, extend, and apply.
The CAI is the institution built to carry that work forward beyond the boundaries of a single firm.
TOBIAS TEMMEN
Managing Director, wait, what. · Founding Practitioner, Capital Architecture Institute
Tobias Temmen has spent over twenty years deploying capital at the intersection of investment management, venture capital, private equity, and strategy consulting. He has launched and managed more than thirty ventures and deployed over EUR 1.5 billion across fund structures and capital markets mandates.
His current focus is on two parallel tracks: building the Capital Architecture Institute as a substantive intellectual and practitioner platform, and operating wait, what. - a capital architecture platform active across special situations, structured credit, and deep tech venture debt.
He holds a Kellogg-WHU EMBA and serves as an MIT REAP Ambassador, working at the intersection of innovation policy, capital formation, and the design of financing structures for deep technology.
His practice spans four active strategies: asset-based finance for timber supply chain mandates (ARC); a phased real estate capital architecture structured as a Luxembourg RAIF-SICAV (PIF); income sharing agreements for human capital finance (ACE); and venture debt for European defense and dual-use technology scale-ups (SDR).
The CAF was not written from a research desk. It was extracted from the pressure to structure mandates that required solutions that did not exist in the institutional toolkit - and that pressure is why it works.
MIT REAP Ambassador · Kellogg-WHU EMBA · Managing Director, wait, what. · Founding Practitioner, Capital Architecture Institute
WHAT THE CAI IS
A research and practitioner institution. Not a consultancy. Not a think tank. Something more specific.
The Capital Architecture Institute is structured around three activities:
Research. The CAI publishes the methodology. Working Paper 001 establishes the foundational framework. Domain working papers extend it to energy transition, defense and dual-use, social infrastructure, and deep tech venture lending. All publications are free under CC BY-NC 4.0. The research agenda is open - the CAI actively invites empirical challenge and co-authored extension of the framework.
Practitioner Network. The CAI convenes the community of people actively engaged in capital architecture - deal practitioners, DFI officers, institutional allocators, family offices, academic researchers. Not a mailing list. A working group. Roundtables quarterly. Research workshops biannually. Currently active across 14 countries and four continents.
Academy. The Certificate in Capital Architecture is a 12-week programme teaching the complete CAF methodology to practitioners already working in the field. Maximum 24 participants per cohort. Cohort-based, not self-paced. The CCA is not designed to introduce structured finance - it is designed to install a systematic methodology in people who are already structuring capital.
The CAI is Zurich-based, intellectually independent, and operationally connected to the practice of wait, what. AG. The relationship is the same as between an investment manager and its affiliated research institution: practice informs research, research strengthens practice, neither controls the other.
STRUCTURE AND INDEPENDENCE
The CAI is the research arm of wait, what.. Independent in publication. Connected in practice.
wait, what. is a capital architecture platform based in Zurich. The firm operates four active strategies across asset-based finance, real estate capital architecture, income-sharing agreements, and defense-technology venture debt. It deploys the CAF methodology in live mandates.
The Capital Architecture Institute was established to take that methodology beyond the boundaries of a single firm - publishing it, subjecting it to academic scrutiny, building the practitioner community that will extend and stress-test it, and training the next generation of practitioners through the CCA.
The analogy is a law firm and its associated research foundation, or an investment manager and its affiliated think tank. The practice generates the pressure that produces methodological insight. The research institution formalises, publishes, and distributes that insight. Neither controls the other.
The CAI publishes under CC BY-NC 4.0. The methodology is free to read, cite, teach, and apply in non-commercial practice. Commercial licensing for institutional deployment in fee-generating structuring mandates is available separately.
→ Visit wait-what.co
IN CONVERSATION WITH
The CAF is developed in active engagement with the institutional mainstream - not positioned against it.
The CAI does not position the Capital Architecture Framework as an alternative to institutional consensus. It is designed to operationalise that consensus at the practitioner level.
Where the OECD DAC identifies the architecture gap - blended finance as a cottage industry of bespoke, fragmented interventions - the CAF provides the systematic methodology to close it.
Where ILPA DDQ 2.0 requires governance documentation from fund managers, the CAF Post-Stage produces it, explicitly mapped to ILPA's seven due diligence areas.
Where the Bank of England identifies private credit stress testing as a structural priority, the CAF Stage 5 QGR-5 gate specifies the stress scenarios and pass/fail thresholds that satisfy that requirement.
Where SFDR 2.0 restructures the European sustainable finance product framework, the CAF regulatory appendix maps the structure design implications at each stage.
The institutional anchors are not endorsements. They are the reference standards against which the CAF is explicitly calibrated.
OECD DAC · Convergence · IFC / World Bank · ILPA · Bank of England · European Defence Fund · KfW
The methodology is published. The institution is open.
→ Download Working Paper 001
→ Join the Practitioner Network
→ Apply for the CCA
→ Contact the CAI
Capital Architecture Institute · wait, what. · Zurich
capital-architecture.institute · cai@wait-what.co
All CAI publications CC BY-NC 4.0 · Free for non-commercial use