PRACTICE
A research practice built on a decade of specializing in strategy.
Facti Machina is the investment research practice of Sovereign+, LLC. We inherit Sovereign+'s legal infrastructure, its operating discipline, and its track record of work for clients in sectors where documentation and defensibility are not optional.
The firm
Sovereign+, LLC was founded in 2013 as a strategic advisory practice serving clients across sectors — nonprofit, education, manufacturing, professional services, and now investment management. For more than a decade, the work has consistently emphasized three things: strategic clarity, operational rigor, and documentation that holds up under scrutiny.
Facti Machina is the natural extension of that work into the investment research space. The same disciplines that made Sovereign+ valuable to clients — sourcing standards, methodology documentation, defensible decision-making — are the disciplines that distinguish serious research work from the rest of the market.
Facti Machina operates under Sovereign+'s legal entity, insurance, and operational infrastructure. We are not a venture-backed startup with a runway and a launch deadline. We are a small, deliberately structured research practice with the institutional patience to build for the long term.
Dr. Elisa Janson Jones Founder and Principal
Dr. Jones leads Facti Machina's research practice. She brings an unusual combination of strategic advisory experience across regulated industries, formal training in instructional design (which shapes how every deliverable is structured for clarity and defensibility), and hands-on work designing and deploying AI tools inside production research workflows.
Her background includes an MBA, a doctorate in instructional design, and a Certified AI Consultant (CAIC) credential. Before founding Facti Machina, she spent more than a decade leading strategic engagements through Sovereign+, including work for institutional clients in education and regulated industries.
The combination that defines her work is uncommon: strategic thinking that scales because of AI, and AI work that earns credibility because of the strategic thinking behind it. Most people in this space have one or the other. The combination is what makes Facti Machina possible.
When she's not running engagements, she’s running trails, mountain biking, and serving select nonprofit boards.
How we operate.
We are small by design and intend to stay that way.
The economics of done-for-you research work do not reward scale — they reward depth, repeat engagement, and reputation. Our growth target is the right next three clients, not the next thirty.
We do not market in conventional ways.
Almost all of our work comes through introductions — from institutional brokers, compliance consultants, allocators, or other PMs. We have nothing against marketing; we simply find that the buyers we serve don't make decisions based on it.
We hold our prices. We turn down work that doesn't fit. We protect existing clients by limiting how many books we cover in any one sector or strategy.
These are not constraints on growth — they are the conditions of being the kind of firm we set out to build.
What we don't do.
- We don't provide investment advice or manage client assets.
- We don't publish recurring research notes for general subscription.
- We don't work with retail-investor-facing firms or model-portfolio RIAs.
- We don't work with passive allocators.
- We don't do AI consulting on non-investment use cases — that's a different practice.
- We don't take on engagements that wouldn't pass our own compliance review.