Who We Are
Strut Partners began in 2016 as Core Innovative and rebranded in 2023, evolving into a focused Data Center and Neocloud advisory firm serving growthāstage and investorābacked companies. We specialize in helping enterprises, operators, and infrastructureāheavy startups design, procure, and optimize data center, colocation, and neocloud strategies from early scale through major expansion. As founders and operators ourselves, we work closely with organizations backed by Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Family Offices that require both technical depth and boardālevel rigor.
Within your organization, we bring specialized expertise across power, cooling, capacity planning, connectivity, and GPU/AIādriven workloads, coupled with a commitment to excellence and measurable outcomes. Embedded alongside your team, our āassess, design, executeā approach ensures a tailored engagement from market and site strategy through vendor selection, commercial structuring, and ongoing optimization. Our mission at Strut Partners is clear: to help you make confident, dataādriven infrastructure decisions that support resilient growth, protect capital, and position your platform for longāterm success.
Leadership Team
Don Allen is the founder of Strut Partners and a senior advisor focused on GPU cloud and data center infrastructure. He has led revenue, goātoāmarket, and largeāscale colocation efforts for AI and cloud providers, most recently in executive roles at Applied Digital and other PEābacked technology companies, including six startups and three exits.
Don brings operatorālevel experience across data centers, neocloud platforms, and complex B2B sales, helping clients translate MW and GPU requirements into executable strategies, provider selections, and commercial structures that boards and investors can support. He also serves on the boards of multiple charitable nonprofits and advises a range of companies across diverse verticals.