Founder Collective – Seed Stage Venture Capital

We’re often asked by entrepreneurs, VCs, and others in the entrepreneurial community, “What kinds of companies do you invest in?” The short answer is – almost anything. We’ve backed startups developing solutions in industries ranging from AdTech to Zoological DNA tests. /🧵

We build the best AI pilots in the world and can integrate and deploy them faster than any company in the world.

We backed Claire's startup and are massive fans of her podcast! Let's speedrun to 100K!

"How do you make tech that’s truly wearable? For Whoop, whose core product is a performance and recovery tracking band, the answer is to make it invisible." vogue.com/article/why-fi…

"The new roles are an investment in the brand’s hardware innovation, advanced research, product development and global brand growth. The majority of new roles will be based at the company’s Boston headquarters, with additional hiring across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia." athletechnews.com/whoop-plans-hi…

Our fund has backed Uber, Venmo, Shield AI, Suno, and a bunch of the best software-based businesses of recent decades. We've also seen great success in cat food, supplements, baby toys, and furniture. Non-thematic investing opens your mind to weird & wonderful ideas.

💰 Shellworks has raised $15 million in Series A funding. techfundingnews.com/shellworks-15m… The round was led by @alterequity. Other investors include @natfriedman through @nfdg, JamJar Investments, and existing backers such as @fcollective, @localglobevc, and @Thirdsphere. #climatetech #femalefounders #womenintech #news #startups #uktech #innovation #investment #vcfunding #expansion

Gauntlet thrown! #ProudInvestor

Last week, @MikeyShulman announced that @suno has surpassed two million paying customers and $300M in annual revenue. I would love to say I had a grand theory about where AI was heading when I was the sole investor in their pre-seed round in 2022. The truth is I’m largely tone deaf to tech trends, but I do have a reasonably good eye for founders. So far, much of the AI story has been about making engineers more efficient. Suno is about making music more experimental and accessible. That shift has a lot to do with Mikey. He studied physics at Columbia, earned his PhD at Harvard, and later taught at MIT. That kind of academic pedigree can produce a prima donna. Mikey is the opposite, combining serious intellectual firepower with the creative instincts of a jazz band leader. (Fun fact: he’s also an accomplished bassist.) As impressive as he is, I was encouraged by the chorus cheering him on. Hugo Van Vuuren and Nancy Zimmerman were emphatic in their praise. His co-founders and former @Kensho colleagues, Martin Camacho, Georg Kucsko, and Keenan Freyberg, were similarly lauded by every reference I checked. When people you respect harmonize like that, it’s wise to listen. In the early days, the team was experimenting with different ways to commercialize the engine that would become @suno. They were commercially ambitious, but also deeply committed to empowering creators, and early enthusiasm from creative customers gave confidence that they were on the right track. Major talent and Minor ego is a rare combination, but in this case has produced one of the most consequential developments in music since MTV.

Met Mikey f2f for the first time in May 2022. The magnitude of what the @suno team has accomplished in ~3.5 years in mind-blowing 🙏👊 from the entire crew @fcollective

The best partnership since peanut butter and chocolate – @shieldaitech + @anduriltech!

@rishidean Exactly. If you’ve actually built a company, you’re less likely to get scared by volatility, and much less likely to mistake a clever notion for a working theory. That's why we only have founders as partners.

Never take advice from people who have never built a damn thing, and don’t understand how marketplace businesses work. This is such trite drivel to anyone that knows anything 🫠

@sabakarimm 👋 We're open for business at $500K-$3M. "Modest" $1B exits move the needle quite nicely for our fund! foundercollective.com

Fundraising in 2026: ✅ 30m - tell me more 🚫10m - not interested 🚫3m - not interested 🚫 1m - not interested 🚫300k - not interested ✅ 30k - tell me more

This has been a tougher year to recruit MBA Associates. I asked our current one why? He said everyone wants to be a founder - they feel like the opportunity cost of not founding is too great. When MBAs think something is the thing to do and least risky that just might be a lagging indicator ;-)

We don't manually test features anymore. You can now run continuous QA features in Claude using “Feature Review” by Ranger. Feature Review is an always-on AI QA that runs in the background, fixing features while providing you and your team with full visibility. Never ask Claude to fix errors again.

100% agree with Garry's core point about Boston. However, Massachusetts remains the 3RD LARGEST STARTUP HUB in the western world, and has produced as many $1B startups as NYC with 1/5th the population – and that's excluding biotech. We're rebuilding, not cooked ;-)

The venture business has gotten harder for VCs, and a lot of founders are feeling the downstream effects of that. My guest, @micahjay1 , GP at Founder Collective, appropriately named what changed: Noise. The market got noisier and the work got more transactional. When fundraising processes compress into “we met Tuesday, decide by Friday,” you lose the compounding benefit of trust and context. It starts to feel like day trading, not partnership in a business where your seed investor is going to be on your cap table for the better part of a decade. For founders, this is important to understand because fundraising is already a high-velocity process. Investors default to speed and signal and may have to cut corners on actually getting to know the people they are back. Founders get pushed toward optics over substance, twisting themselves in knots to call their revenue ARR so they can share the highest headline numbers to investors that barely dig a layer deeper. Worst of all, it becomes harder to build real alignment with your partner before the money hits the bank account. As a founder, the right move move is to design for relationship density early, not just process efficiency. Meet investors you might want to work with before you need to hard pitch them on your round. Do back-channel references so you understand who you're dealing with. Don't just check with the companies that succeeded but more importantly check with the ones that did not. You're entering into a relationship that lasts longer than the average American marriage. Act like it or you'll be another one of the messy founder VC divorce horror stories soon enough.

Vintage really matters. 2017 kickoff vintage had early companies primed for VCs sitting at home in 2020 investing gobs of $’s. For the most part that capital drowned those early companies who hadn’t yet figured out product market fit and thought the 💰 would do it for them. That’s always an awful mistake.

Couldn't be more proud of the @shieldaitech team for the years of effort that went into being selected to provide AI pilots to the CCAs. It was a journey to get here, with much competition, many milestones, and down-selects. We're excited about the integration work we've been doing and will continue to do with @anduriltech on Fury. I agree with Anduril's SVP Jason Levin when he says, "The U.S. Air Force deserves a lot of credit for designing the program in a manner that emphasizes speed, constant competition, modularity, and ongoing, rapid integration of best-of-breed hardware and software capabilities.” It started in 2019 with AlphaDogFight which we competed and won. Then went to live-flights on F-16 with DARPA ACE. And now onto operational capabilities with @usairforce - Aim High, Fly, Fight, Win! defensedaily.com/usaf-cca-missi…

Thank you James and the team at @OLIXComputing for having @fcollective alongside you from the outset. It's a huge vision to take on the likes of @nvidia .