The team

Operators who became investors, investors who stayed operators.

A lean operating team — thirteen people, one shared platform across five active verticals, built and run in-house, every day: capital allocation and vertical strategy, design, engineering, testing, customer operations and growth.

Managing Partners

Co-leads.
Strategy, capital, vertical entry.

The studio is co-led from the operating desk — not from a deck.

Stayko D. Staykov
Stayko D. Staykov
Managing Partner · Operations · Finance · Co-Lead

Author of the NXT operating thesis. Co-founded the studio in 2017 and led the build of the platform workflows. Drives capital allocation, vertical entry and the operating arc from Era 1 to Era 3 across the portfolio. Works on strategic partnerships and M&A activities for the ecosystem and verticals.

Brad Edmonson
Brad Edmonson
Managing Partner · Technology · Marketing · Co-Lead

Co-Founder of the studio. Owns technology strategy across the portfolio — the agentic roadmap on NXTOrder™, the AI Studio control plane and the marketing infrastructure that compounds across verticals.

Directors

Three function leads.
Five verticals. One platform.

Function leads for the shared layer the whole team builds — engineering, customer operations and growth — across every active vertical.

Stuart Young
Stuart Young
Director of Software Engineering

Owns the NXTOrder™ platform: multi-tenant, cloud-native architecture and the API integrations that connect every vertical. Oversees the agentic build inside AI Studio, shaping much of its architecture, as production AI features ship across the portfolio today.

Aneal Joseph
Aneal Joseph
Director, Customer Operations · Vendors · Logistics

Customer relations, vendor management, fulfillment and the 3PL relationships that touch every shipped order across the consumable and B2B marketplaces.

Zander Jones
Zander Jones
Director of Marketing · Growth · Brand

Paid acquisition, content, brand strategy and the cross-vertical marketing infrastructure that lets new verticals launch on proven channels. Steward of how NXT and its portfolio companies talk in market.

Team

Team of Eight.
Five verticals. One platform.

Engineering, AI, QA, sales, support, marketing and finance — the people who connect, build and ship across every vertical, every day.

Alex Morgan
Audrey Phillips
Manager QA/Testing
Jordan Blake
Vivek Patel
Senior AI Engineer
Casey Rivera
Alexis Katina
Senior Sales Development - Verticals
Taylor Kim
David Ferguson
Sales Development - Verticals
Morgan Ellis
Polina Gaydamachenko
Multi-Brand Marketing Manager
Riley Nguyen
Ross Stovenour
Technical Customer Support - Onboarding
Avery Chen
Neelam Parmar
QA/Testing - Automation Scripting
Sam Okafor
Randall Damron
Finance Operations & Accounting
13
Employees · including founding partners
3.2 yrs
Average tenure
3
Founding-era staff · 8+ year tenures
9 yrs
Longest tenure · Since 2017
Operating model
One operating team supports five verticals. Shared engineering, finance, marketing, QA, customer ops and logistics — eliminating rebuild costs, compounding intelligence across every vertical.
NXT operations overview · 2026