Expa

Expa

Garrett Camp launched Expa in 2013, shortly after Travis Kalanick took over as Uber's CEO and the ride-hailing giant began its global ascent. Camp seeded the studio with his own capital, drawing on liquidity from Uber's secondary sales. The founding thesis was straightforward: instead of writing checks to other founders, Camp would incubate his own ideas and recruit experienced operators to run them. Naveen Selvadurai, who had co-founded Foursquare with Dennis Crowley, joined as a partner in the early years but later exited the day-to-day management. The studio's model spans mobility, real estate, fintech, and AI. Expa's most visible creation is Haus, a rent-to-own home-financing platform that emerged from the studio in 2016 and raised separate venture funding from investors including Homebrew and 8VC. Another known portfolio company is Commute, a corporate shuttle-booking system that addressed the enterprise side of the mobility market Camp understood from Uber. Expa typically builds a minimum viable product internally, installs a full-time CEO, and then syndicates a priced seed round from external VCs. The firm operates from San Francisco and New York, reflecting Camp's bi-coastal network across both tech and design communities. Expa's scale is deliberately opaque—the studio never reports aggregate assets under management, and Camp's personal Uber wealth management is handled through a separate family office structure. The team size fluctuates as companies spin out. In May 2024, Expa-backed Haus was acquired by Divvy Homes, recirculating capital back into the studio for new concept generation (per the firm's official communications, 2024). The studio has also explored AI-driven enterprise tools, with Camp publicly discussing the intersection of large language models and workplace productivity. Expa functions as a hybrid of a venture studio, an operating company, and a single-family office's direct-investment arm—a structure that gives it perpetual capital without LP pressures. That permanence lets Camp and his operators ignore fundraising cycles and focus on product-market fit over multiple years. Unlike conventional VC firms that answer to institutional limited partners, Expa's governance rests entirely with Camp, creating a succession model tied to his personal technical vision and the studio's ability to recruit entrepreneurial executives willing to run Garrett Camp-funded startups.