Est. 2020

GRAPES
FOUNDATION

The most valuable capital is a time

Russell Grapes

About

Russell Grapes

Engineer. Founder. Operator.

Russell is an engineer who runs companies, not the other way around. The fundraising, the partnerships, the org building — all of it grew out of the work of shipping real hardware and software.

Over two decades in tech, he has taken products from prototype to certified, manufacturable systems — and built the teams, patents, and partnerships that carry them there. First cash-flow-positive business at age 15. Named inventor on multiple U.S. patents. Five active projects today, each founded and operated through his venture studio, with its own dedicated team.

“You’re able giving birth to ideas. Your creativity and aspirations are limitless. Everything you need is to gather up the courage and find people who follow things through to the end.”

— Russell Grapes

The Work

Project Overview

A car that flies. Cameras that shipped. Chips that learn. Movies from a prompt. Video with real depth.

Roadable flying car

Est. 2023

Flight that feels
like driving

A compact personal flying car that takes off from small pads and existing infrastructure — no vertiport network required. Flight that feels as straightforward as driving.

One vehicle.
Road and air.

Four seats in the footprint of a standard car. A 100-liter luggage compartment. One interface for road and air: steering wheel and two pedals. The flight-control system enforces stability and safety envelopes by design.

Compact lift,
redundant by design.

Dual ring-wing geometry, a bicopter propulsion layout integrated into the fuselage, and proprietary cross-wind compensation. Rollout is deliberate: public-safety and B2G missions first, consumer use after real-world proof.

Smart home cameras

Est. 2017

Shipped. Certified.
Awarded.

Smart home cameras that are already in the market. The flagship Homam 64GB integrates an Apple-provided SoC and is listed on Apple's Home accessories page.

The camera 9to5mac
called “king”

Aluminum body, tinted glass, strong magnets, best-in-class picture and sound. Homam 64GB runs proprietary software inside the HomeKit ecosystem and was named the top HomeKit camera at launch. Red Dot Award. Cited as a CEE rising star by Dealroom, Google for Startups, and Atomico.

The foundation for
the Vision Pro era

Proprietary lenses, custom hardware architecture, and microelectronics manufacturing in Taiwan and China. Multiple U.S. patents across spherical cameras, media servers, and streaming protocols. R&D in stereo video and spatial computing since 2017.

SynaBrain Labs

Bio-silicon edge chips

Est. 2026

Real-time learning.
No cloud required.

An edge co-processor that combines living neural cells with silicon electronics. Local, on-device learning for robots and machines where cloud AI is too slow, too costly, or unavailable.

Biology and silicon.
On the same chip.

Neural cultures on a bio-electronic substrate. Silicon reads activity, stimulates the network, and closes the training loop. Memory and compute live in the same place — the way the brain does it, on roughly 20 watts.

Built for adaptation
in the field

First targets: terrain navigation, industrial cobots, drones, assistive devices — anything that rewards continuous adaptation. Frontier R&D, staged on reproducible results and third-party validation.

On-demand AI movies

Est. 2025

A movie tonight.
From a prompt.

A full-stack system that turns a prompt or short script into a watchable, shareable movie — not a loose bundle of clips. Built for the consumer moment when a family asks for a film in the evening and watches it the same night.

The Movie Launch Kit,
shipping now.

One click delivers a teaser, a promo page, and the core marketing assets — title, logline, synopsis, posters, stills — as a single playback and share link. Early studio pilot with Hollywood's Aldamisa Entertainment, supporting intros and packaging across several titles.

A pipeline.
Not a clip generator.

Multi-model planning across scenes, timing, and transitions. Orchestration over video, image, audio, and voice engines, with a production-state system that handles retries and failure modes. Pro use cases first — consumer once consistency hold up.

VR video streaming

Est. 2021

Real depth.
On any headset.

A cross-device streaming platform for immersive video — live and on-demand — with native stereo depth on dual-display headsets. Not flat 2D pasted inside a helmet.

Capture, stream, and watch
in true 3D.

Proprietary binocular cameras with Time-of-Flight sensors capture a true 3D map of the scene. The same pipeline carries it from camera to headset — including a world-first stereo stream of the Le Mans Cup in 2022, and a feature film shot for dual-display glasses with a Hollywood studio partner.

A platform.
Not a player.

Built on Zorachka's video pipeline and protocol stack — codec, streaming, and device work already in production, now pointed at the headset era. One creator-first stack: upload, stream, and monetize without building a separate app per device.

Grapes Vision
Fund I

Sponsor-led venture fund
and studio

Est. 2026

One operator.
Not a portfolio.

A sponsor-led, UAE-based fund that backs and builds deep-tech platform companies. Russell Grapes drives origination, diligence, and execution himself — not a spray-and-pray portfolio.

Capital plus
a build layer

Concentrated by design: few bets, larger ownership, deeper involvement. The fund pairs primary capital with a studio operating layer — product, engineering, growth, partnerships — to compress build cycles and turn technical edge into shipped systems.

Capital that moves
with proof

Milestone-gated deployment: technical validity, customer pilots, regulatory pathway. Anser Rossii, HoollyWoody, and SynaBrain Labs — three platform companies in the fund, built around a shared edge-intelligence thesis, each underwritten to stand on its own.

Contact

Direct to Russell