Venture capital has a pattern problem. The same sectors attract the same capital in the same cycles, leaving entire categories of consequential technology chronically underfunded, not because the science isn’t there, but because the timelines, regulatory hurdles, and capital needs do not fit the standard venture playbook.
L.R. Fox, Founder and CEO of NEXT Global Capital, believes the most significant long-term returns, both financial and societal, will come from exactly those neglected categories.
Through NEXT Global Capital, Fox leads his family office that invests, buys, and builds high-impact companies and nonprofits across regulated and system-shaping sectors where complexity and long development timelines have kept most investors away.
Reading the Airspace Before Anyone Else Was Looking
One of the stories that Fox returns to most often begins when he was 19. By then, he had already founded an aerospace company at 17, initially building high-performance drones for research in e California’s redwoods. He sold that company two years later and then requested a meeting with the Secret Service to flag what he saw as an urgent threat. At a time when long-range autonomous drones were not yet widely understood as a security concern, Fox had already built many himself and understood the implications.
Looking back at that meeting, the conclusion was simple: “They laughed me out of the room.”
The agents told him they could track every bird near the White House; a drone, in their view, posed no meaningful risk. Fox interpreted the dismissal not as validation that he was wrong, but as evidence that the gap between technological reality and institutional awareness was wider than he’d assumed. Over time, the concern he was raising early, that low-cost autonomous drones would become a serious security issue, has become increasingly visible across conflict zones, critical infrastructure settings, and civilian airspace.
That early experience shaped the investment logic Fox now applies at NEXT Global Capital: the sectors most easily dismissed by conventional investors and stakeholders are often the ones where serious infrastructure is still missing.
Why Deep Tech Stays Underfunded
Fox’s critique of the venture capital ecosystem is specific and structural. The firms that dominate deal flow, he argues, tend to favor software-as-a-service businesses and other low-barrier categories where iteration cycles are short, and exits are legible, a bias reflected in the roughly $1.3 trillion that the top 400 SaaS-focused venture firms now manage. Deep tech is often hardware-intensive, highly regulated, and capital-heavy. For Fox, that mismatch is not a reason to stay away. It is often a sign the category is being undervalued.
“There’s been very little real innovation in defense since the Cold War,” he explains.
The same logic applies to healthcare. Fox notes that the largest healthcare companies in the world, collectively generating trillions in annual revenue, haven’t cured a single major disease. That outcome, in his reading, is not accidental. In his view, that incentive structure can favor recurring treatment models over more disruptive interventions.
Reproductive health sits at an even more neglected corner of the market. Fox points out that, despite being one of the most significant factors in a person’s long-term socioeconomic trajectory, the ability to choose when and whether to have children, reproductive and sexual healthcare receives less than 1% of all healthcare innovation capital. Meanwhile, categories with clearer commercial momentum, like obesity drugs, continue to attract far more investor attention.
This is part of what Fox seeks to solve. For example, NEXT Global Capital’s portfolio investment includes NEXT Life Sciences, which is developing Plan A™, the first long-acting, reversible on-demand male contraceptive in development. Fox does not frame it as a niche medical product, but as part of a category he believes will eventually be mainstream.
Fox often evaluates categories by asking not only whether they matter now, but whether they will one day feel inevitable. He uses Uber as a reference point: a service now so embedded in daily life that the pre-Uber airport experience has largely faded from memory. In his own words, “We’re building the things people will look back on and have a hard time remembering life before. Future generations will be shocked these things didn’t simply always exist, especially in 2026.”
Closing the Gap Between Research and Market
Across sectors, Fox points to what many founders and researchers call the ‘valley of death’: the gap between promising research and a product that can actually reach people. Researchers working at this boundary, he says, often accept the gap as an inherent feature of the process. Fox treats that gap not as an inevitability, but as infrastructure failure, and therefore an opportunity to create outsized value.
Through NEXT Global Capital, Fox looks specifically for technologies that show strong scientific foundations but currently lack a commercialization path. Rather than thinking only in terms of isolated products, NEXT looks for ways to build platforms and support structures that can extend across multiple applications and markets.
The goal is to reduce the appearance of speculation by grounding new bets in real science, real demand, and clearer regulatory pathways. It also reflects a broader belief that transformative potential is often already present in a new product; what’s missing is the infrastructure to help it reach the world.
This principle is consistent with how Fox approached his own early companies: he didn’t wait for a market to materialize before building for it. He identified the structural conditions that made a market’s emergence inevitable, then moved before the consensus did.
Building for the Next Wave
At the center of Fox’s investment framework is a simple question: where is real potential being left unreached, and what is missing to help it scale?
That question drives the investment thesis at NEXT Global Capital, but it also extends beyond technology. Through Fox Talent Agency, he applies the same logic to underrepresented talent across music, modeling, content creation, and acting. In his view, the barrier is rarely talent itself. It is access to the systems that allow talent to reach its audience.
Across every sector he operates in, the through-line is consistent: find the places where potential already exists but has no viable path forward, then build the path.
Whether the subject is a stalled university research program, an underfunded corner of healthcare, or an emerging artist without industry connections, Fox treats the absence of infrastructure as both the problem and the opportunity.
Ultimately, Fox wants to build the kinds of systems future generations may one day take for granted. Fox sees NEXT Global Capital’s current portfolio as the early architecture of that kind of shift, one he believes will prove as consequential as any of the industrial transformations that quietly reshaped daily life in prior decades, precisely because the problems being solved are ones most people have not yet recognized as problems at all.