The Silicon Forest Framework: A Public Investment Plan to Fund the Caribbean's Next Tech Wave

Every founder building technology in the Caribbean eventually runs into the same wall: there's almost nowhere to raise real money. Not because the ideas aren't good enough, and not because the founders aren't capable, but because the region has never built the financial infrastructure that early-stage technology companies actually need to survive their first eighteen months.

That's the problem addressed in a new research paper, Designing a Caribbean SBIRD Technology Investment Framework, which proposes what it calls the Silicon Forest Framework — a public co-investment model designed to fund Caribbean startups the way the U.S. government has funded American ones for decades, adapted to fit small island economies. Here's what the framework proposes, why it matters, and what it would take to build it.

The Problem: A Financing Gap That Founders Can't Out-Hustle

Ambition alone doesn't close a funding gap, no matter how much grit a founding team brings to the table. The paper lays out the economics plainly: a three-founder tech team in Saint Lucia needs somewhere between $85,000 and $129,000 just to survive eighteen months and reach $100,000 in annual recurring revenue covering founder living costs, cloud infrastructure, legal fees, and customer acquisition. That's before a single dollar goes toward actually scaling the business.

Caribbean private venture capital markets simply aren't built to supply that kind of early-stage capital at scale. Founders are left with two options: self-finance off personal savings until it runs out, or seek international capital under terms that often require relocating or incorporating abroad - effectively exporting the company, and the jobs it might create, out of the region entirely.

Two Constraints, Compounding Each Other

The paper identifies two structural problems that reinforce one another, and argues that fixing just one won't work.

There's no systematic public funding mechanism. The U.S. has run its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program for decades, distributing billions in early-stage grants to de-risk exactly this kind of investment. The Caribbean has no regional equivalent - no consistent, institutionalized way for governments to direct public capital toward early-stage technology firms.

Even a funded startup has nowhere credible to exit. Say a Caribbean tech company does manage to raise money and grow.. where do investors eventually cash out? Regional stock exchanges are small, thinly traded, and largely absent of technology listings. A startup that hits real commercial scale in Saint Lucia currently has no credible path to a public listing within the Caribbean at all.

The Proposed Fix: A Three-Phase Public Co-Investment Model

The Silicon Forest Framework borrows its structure from the U.S. SBIR program but rebuilds it around Caribbean fiscal realities and cost structures. It works in three stages:

1. Phase I — Feasibility. Non-dilutive grants of up to $75,000, funding six months of technical feasibility work. No equity taken - the goal is simply to reduce the information gap between an applicant and the fund before larger capital gets involved.
2. Phase II — Development. A combined package of up to $300,000 (a $50,000 grant plus a $250,000 equity co-investment), designed to take a company from early revenue traction to the point where private investors are ready to take over.
3. Phase III — Private capital mobilization. The fund steps back and lets private investors lead, while retaining pro-rata rights and a structured buyout option so government capital doesn't become a permanent, dead-weight stakeholder.

Governments across the five largest CARICOM economies could fund this at a modest 0.10% of GDP annually  roughly $155 million a year in total, comparable in scale to Israel's Yozma fund, which is widely credited with helping catalyze that country's venture ecosystem in the 1990s.

The Missing Piece: Somewhere to Actually Exit

Funding startups solves half the problem. The paper is candid about the other half: without a credible way for investors to eventually cash out, public co-investment risks becoming a revolving door of grants that never generates a return - for the fund or the founders.

That's why the framework pairs its investment model with the case for deeper Caribbean capital market integration up to and including a unified regional stock exchange, and a proposed index product (the "SF50") tracking the Caribbean's top 50 technology companies, giving global investors a way to access the region's best startups even before full exchange unification happens.

The Case Study: Proving the Model With a Real Company

Rather than modeling this in the abstract, the paper applies the framework to a live company: Orbtronics Ltd., a Saint Lucia-based technology conglomerate behind Rifbid (agentic AI solutions for financial institutions) and Opay (a digital payment gateway for Caribbean merchants). Orbtronics' audited revenue grew from roughly $152,000 in 2024 to $456,000 in 2025 — a company that, under the Silicon Forest model, could have accessed structured, earlier-stage public capital instead of relying entirely on the grant support and government funding it secured through IDB and the Government of Saint Lucia.

The point of using a real company isn't to prove the framework will always work the paper is explicit that this is one illustrative case, not a validation of guaranteed returns. It's to show, concretely, that the kind of company this framework is designed for already exists in the region right now. The capital gap is real. The companies worth funding are real too.

Why This Connects to a Bigger Philosophy

Systems-thinking runs through everything Keeghan works on, whether that's a founder building a company or a government building the infrastructure that lets founders exist in the first place. It's the same logic laid out in the "Inevitability Loop" from Premature Millionaire: declare a future that isn't true yet, own the gap between where things stand and where they need to be, execute before every condition is perfect, and prove it with a track record rather than a pitch. The Silicon Forest Framework is that same loop applied at the level of an entire region's economic policy declaring that the Caribbean can build a real venture ecosystem, and then doing the unglamorous design work to make that declaration credible.

What Happens Next

The paper doesn't propose this as an all-or-nothing regional treaty. It's structured to launch with a founding coalition of five to seven CARICOM states, evaluated after an initial three-year pilot cycle before scaling further the same "start small, prove it, then scale" discipline that shows up in the book's own framework for building anything durable.

For founders, investors, and policymakers who want the full technical detail, the fiscal modeling, the valuation methodology, and the complete return simulations.... the full paper is available to read directly.

Read the full Silicon Forest Investment Framework paper →

The Bottom Line

The Caribbean doesn't have a shortage of ambition or ability, it has a shortage of financial architecture built to support both. The Silicon Forest Framework is a concrete proposal for closing that gap: fund early-stage companies systematically, build the exit markets that make those investments meaningful, and let a real regional tech ecosystem compound over time instead of leaking talent and capital out of the region every year.