Steel, grid, freight, claims, trials. Sectors where the software is thirty years old, the buyer is sceptical, and the founder has to have done the job before. That constraint is the whole thesis.
Every fund has a thesis slide. Ours is written out because a thesis you cannot argue against is not a thesis, it is a mood.
The easy software has been written. What is left runs on a spreadsheet a single person maintains, sits inside a regulated process, and moves eight figures a year. Nobody built it because you had to understand the industry first, and understanding the industry took a decade nobody in software wanted to spend.
What that means for you: we will not ask you to make the market bigger. We will ask how you got the domain knowledge.
Two founders build the same thing. The one who spent nine years inside the buyer's org sells it in a quarter; the other spends two years learning why the procurement cycle exists. At pre-seed there is no product to differentiate on yet — there is only who can get into the room.
What that means for you: your first ten conversations matter more to us than your architecture diagram.
By the time a category has a name and a conference track, the seed round is a competitive process at a valuation that requires everything to go right. We would rather lead a round that sounds slightly wrong out loud and write the memo explaining why we are willing to be wrong in public.
What that means for you: "no one else is doing this" is not an objection here. It is usually the reason we took the meeting.
Anything that turns a planner's spreadsheet into a system of record. We have backed steel, machining, warehousing, and ports. The pattern is a buyer who can quantify the downtime you remove, to the hour.
Modelling, dispatch, forecasting, and measurement. The regulatory clock makes this slow and makes it durable. We will underwrite a two-year sales cycle if the contract that comes out of it is a decade long.
Close automation, reserving, underwriting, compliance across jurisdictions. We look for a regulator in the loop, because that is the moat nobody funds and everybody needs.
Payments, prior authorisation, trial operations, lab automation. We do not invest in anything whose value depends on a clinical outcome we are not qualified to assess, and we say so in the first call.
Verification, static analysis, build infrastructure. Small markets that pay well because being wrong is catastrophic. Bottom-up adoption with a compliance budget behind it.
Consumer social, gaming, crypto trading, ad tech, and anything where the moat is a model someone else trained. Not judgements — we simply have no edge, and taking your meeting anyway would waste the two weeks you could spend with a fund that does.
We publish these so you can decide whether to spend an hour with us. Nothing here changes once you are in the room.
We lead most rounds we join and take 10–15%. We are happy to co-lead, and happy to be the only institutional money on the cap table.
Before revenue is fine. Before the product is fine. Before the co-founder has quit their job is usually too early, and we will tell you that in the first call.
Two meetings, one reference call, a written memo you are allowed to read. Then a yes or a no, with the reasoning attached either way.
| Term | Our position | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Instrument | Priced equity, or a post-money SAFE at pre-seed | You should know your dilution on the day you sign it, not eighteen months later. |
| Ownership | 10–15% at entry | Enough for the fund to work. Not enough that your Series A becomes a negotiation with us. |
| Option pool | Sized with you, after the round | Pre-money pool expansion is a discount dressed as governance. We do not ask for it. |
| Board | One seat if you want one; observer otherwise | A board is a tool. If it is not useful to you yet, taking a seat is theatre. |
| Pro-rata | Right to participate, never an obligation on you | We will not block a round to protect our percentage. That has ended companies. |
| Liquidation preference | 1× non-participating | The standard. Anything stacked on top of it transfers risk to the people doing the work. |
| Information rights | A monthly note, in whatever format you already write | We will not send you a reporting template. Nobody has ever been saved by a reporting template. |
| Founder vesting | Four years, one-year cliff, credit for time already served | You were building before we arrived. Pretending otherwise is just repricing your past work. |
Illustrative standard positions for this demonstration template — not an offer, and not legal advice.
Written down so you can hold us to it. If we slip a step, you are entitled to say so, and we will tell you where the delay is.
Applications are read on the Monday after they arrive. No associate filter, because there are no associates. If it is a clear no, you hear that within two days rather than in three weeks of silence.
The partner who takes this meeting is the partner who would join your board. We will have read whatever you sent, including the technical part. Bring the deck you already have.
Usually a working session on the thing we disagree about. One reference, chosen by us, called by us. We tell you who we are calling before we call them.
One partner writes the investment memo, including the section arguing against the deal. You are allowed to read it — most founders do, and several have told us the bear case was the most useful document they got that year.
A decision, in writing, with the actual reason attached. If it is a no, the reason will be specific enough to be useful to the next fund you talk to. "Too early for us" is not a reason we are permitted to give.
Every figure on this site describes a fictional fund built to demonstrate a website template.
Nothing here is an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy an interest in any fund, and nothing here is investment, legal, or tax advice.
We publish no returns, multiples, or valuations, and you should be sceptical of any seed fund that does at year six. Past outcomes would not predict future ones in any case.
If you are using this template, replace this section with the disclosure your counsel gives you, and register wherever your jurisdiction requires it.
Good. Those are the meetings worth taking. Send it over and we will argue about it inside two weeks.