Alignment on the future.

INVESTMENT PHILOSOPHY

We make highly-considered investments that align with where we think the world is heading- which is that companies built with AI at their core will outperform. We don’t need unanimous agreement, but we have high conviction in every founding team we back. This conviction means we often lead financings.

Our founders are ambitious gritty and ready to take on the highs and lows of company-building, knowing we are ready to dig in with them every step of the way. Read more about our specific, AI-informed, investment criteria below.

OUR FUNDS

Early-stage investors who can double down.

Next Wave

UP TO $250K CHECK SIZE

Independent funds focused on pre-seed companies in key thesis areas. One GP joins 12 investment partners who are operators and experts in their fields, each of whom can sponsor investments. This is often an institutional check alongside angel investors and other pre-seed VCs.

Seed

$1M+ CHECK SIZE

Focuses on seed-stage companies. We lead or co-lead rounds and are often a company’s first institutional check. We are high-conviction but not unanimous decision-makers.

Opportunities

$10M+ CHECK SIZE

Our later-stage fund for companies we bet on early - this fund allows us to support your growth and stay on the journey. This fund is only for existing portfolio companies

Our Investment Criteria

  • A massive market in the multi-billions achieved through an initial insertion point and a combination of “second and third acts” to expand TAM across additional customer segments or additional product lines -- just like a bowling ball can knock down all ten pins by striking the right head pin.

  • Successful startup teams building AI-powered companies don’t need to be full of ML PhDs but do need to be sophisticated about AI architecture, platforms, and tooling while still keeping the focus on delivering an excellent product that drives significant benefits to end-users and becomes recursively more valuable with more usage and users.

  • Ease of use and human-centered product design that allows humans to trust and augment the AI will ultimately drive adoption, usage, results, and industry penetration.

  • Early-stage Applied AI companies need a unique distribution approach to break through the clutter, get beyond pilots (where many startups get stuck), prove product-market fit, and drive rapid customer adoption without building massive and capital-intensive sales and marketing machines.

  • The best data will win. The most specific and specialized knowledge will win. Companies will transform into mission-critical systems of records with deep specialization and data moats.

  • Founders with deep domain expertise and insights that competitors can’t quickly obtain will more successfully navigate to a sustainable competitive advantage within a complex vertical. An earned secret is a critical edge.

Our Investment Process

If you’re building something massive, we want to hear from you.

We’re happy to offer feedback when an opportunity doesn’t align and share our diligence and conclusions with teams we back to inform their roadmaps and milestones.

We honor your time and can’t meet with everyone, but when we do, the process generally goes like this:

Community

For us, Community is more than just a catchphrase.

It is core to how we serve our founders and get things done.

We leverage our network built from decades of backing successful companies to give our founders top-tier access to talent, expertise, early customers, and mentorship.

We lean heavily into founder-to-founder connections both within and beyond our portfolio as peer mentorship and support are mission-critical at the early stage. We gather virtually and IRL throughout the year.

We take a whole-person approach to platform, offering group coaching, 1:1 mentorship, and points of inspiration through partnerships and curated programming.

Upcoming Events

From intimate dinners to exclusive talks with industry experts we engage our community of founders and the larger early-stage ecosystem with virtual and IRL events designed to connect, inspire, and engage.