Dallas- and Fort Worth-based Vibrant Capital announced its launch today as an operator-led investment and company-building platform focused on turning artificial intelligence into “measurable results in the real economy.”

While much of the market focuses on model benchmarks, Vibrant Capital said, most leaders are focusing on the metrics that actually run a business: “cycle time, quality, safety, cash, and customer experience.”

“Benchmarks are interesting, but they aren’t the business scoreboard,” CEO Shadman Zafar said in a statement. “If the claim still takes weeks and the trucks still leave late, the AI value is still stuck in presentation slides and circular deals. Real value shows up when Monday morning friction fades, and work moves faster, cleaner, and safer. That is what we are here to build and scale.”

Targeting workflow

Vibrant Capital said it is founded on changing what’s wrong with AI implementation: “AI rarely fails because the model isn’t smart enough—it fails because the work around it doesn’t change.”

The value doesn’t come from optimizing the algorithm, the firm said. Instead, value is hampered by the workflow, such as data that arrives late, slow approvals for deployment, and in the reality that a pilot isn’t a business process.

Zafar is a prolific inventor and tech leader who has held executive roles at Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, and Verizon. He is named as an inventor on more than 100 patents and patent applications across finance, telecommunications, entertainment, technology, and design, the firm said.

He will lead Vibrant Capital as it focuses on workflow-embedded AI spanning financial services and insurance, healthcare and life sciences, industrial and manufacturing, transportation and logistics, and business and IT services, with initial markets in the U.S., Europe, and the Gulf Cooperation Council.

With its launch, Vibrant Capital is introducing three initiatives designed to connect “enterprise demand, founder creation, and responsible leadership.”

Growth Partners Network

The Growth Partners Network is Vibrant Capital’s partnership platform for AI-native companies already providing enterprise value. Experienced CIO operators in the Vibrant network select companies that are built for real outcomes, then help them scale adoption across Main Street industries through repeatable deployment playbooks and operator-led go-to-market execution, the company said.

As part of the network’s launch, Vibrant Capital is announcing partnerships with two market-leading companies:

Couchbase, the operational data platform for AI, helps organizations bring data to life by delivering the performance, flexibility, and global scale required for mission-critical applications. Led by CEO BJ Schaknowski, Couchbase replaces legacy infrastructure and fragmented data services with a unified platform that supports operational, analytical, mobile, and AI workloads. With leading Fortune 100 companies relying on its platform, Couchbase enables enterprises to provide always-on digital experiences with sub-millisecond latency, operational resilience, and lower total cost of ownership across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments.

Skan.ai, led by CEO and co-founder Avinash Misra, helps enterprises target the areas where AI can create the most value, optimize operations, and build AI agents grounded in real work. Using an organization-wide AI telemetry grid, Skan observes every human and system interaction, then combines the information with domain ontologies to construct a living enterprise Context Graph. This Context Graph becomes the enterprise “Digital Brain,” capturing intent, state, and cause-and-effect across operations, guiding humans in real time and powering reliable agentic execution at scale, the company said. Trusted by one in three Fortune 100 companies, Skan boosts AI adoption across financial services, healthcare, telecom, and BPOs.

Vibrant Studio

Vibrant Studio is launching as an incubator for the AI age built for founders who want to move into real operations, not just pitch the next idea, Vibrant Capital said. The studio seeks resourceful builders who have uncovered pent-up demand and can turn it into a durable business. Vibrant Capital said it’s not a passive investor, but “an active co-builder,” working alongside entrepreneurs on enterprise readiness, early traction, and scaling beyond pilots. 

HaiIntel, Vibrant Capital’s first studio launch, introduces an AI-driven Outcome-as-a-Service model that transforms primary business workflows by embedding intelligence at the point of execution, paving the way for sustained ownership of measurable outcomes, Vibrant said. HaiIntel’s model combines AI platforms, production-grade systems, and integrated execution guidance to deliver intelligence at scale.

CIO Fellows Society

Vibrant Capital’s CIO Fellows Society is a nonprofit, give-back initiative that brings together global technology executives to mentor the next generation of CIOs and share practical paths for scaling AI responsibly in complex environments. It’s designed to promote the craft of execution and transform the conversation from excitement about tools to accountability for outcomes in the real economy, the firm said.

“The next wave of AI won’t be won with louder hype,” Zafar added. “It will be won with quiet results that compound every week: fewer handoffs, fewer exceptions, fewer surprises. When the workflow improves, everything else starts to follow.”