A pre-seed fund run by exited founders.
The founders of FoundersEdge, Greg and Jess, have both built and sold companies. We've been through the ups and the downs, and we'll help you through the same. We lead or follow, we don't take board seats, and we don't run an accelerator. What we do is help founders with a unique approach to venture.
Stage-focused, and specific about it.
The same criteria we run internally, published so nobody spends a meeting finding out.
We invest in
- AI-native software, where the AI is core to the product and not a wrapper on someone else's.
- Technical founding teams that are already shipping.
- Repeat founders, mostly. We'll back a first-timer who brings real depth somewhere else.
- Founders with a distribution edge in an industry they already know. Technical depth is the floor here, not the whole case.
- Companies anywhere in the US, and international founders who are incorporating in Delaware.
We don't invest in
- Anything past seed. We're pre-seed, usually before a million is raised, and we don't participate past the seed round.
- Anything that isn't a Delaware C-corp.
- Medical devices, hardware, CPG, crypto, agencies or services businesses.
- Non-technical founding teams planning to outsource the build. Someone in the founding team has to have serious technical chops.
Five things we do differently.
All five are verifiable before a round closes, and all five continue after it.
We're data-driven.
We try not to guess at what's actually helpful to founders. We've done the work to study success and failure, surveying more than 3,000 entrepreneurs to find where experienced founders get stuck. That research became the Founder Index, a dataset we use to find the founders pattern-matching misses. It also changes how we give advice: we separate our own opinion from what the research says actually makes entrepreneurs more successful, and we tell founders which one they're getting.
The Edge, our LP network.
Our 50+ LPs are predominantly founders and operators with their own exits behind them, with deep experience across a range of industries and verticals. They're searchable by what a company needs that month, and they're committed to helping the portfolio in a deep way. Most of that help arrives as introductions, and customer introductions are the ones that matter most at this stage: an LP already inside the industry is a shorter path to a first buyer than cold outreach. Introductions to the investors who lead the next round come from our co-investor network. When an LP invests in the fund, they're investing in every company in it.
Rethinking venture.
We think a lot of venture capital is broken, so we've rebuilt our end of it. An investor should be an extension of the team, working through how to de-risk the company. Money is one of the least valuable things we give you. It matters, but partnership, customers and strategy are what catapult a business. What comes with the check is closest to a built-in advisory board, without the governance that phrase implies: every two weeks you're in a room with Greg and Jess working through whatever the biggest challenge is right then, whether that's pricing, a first sales hire, the next raise or tension between co-founders. We're typically one of the first investors in, and we borrow some of the financial mechanics YC popularized to target 4 to 5 percent ownership. No board seats and no governance, observer rights only, and a deep commitment to helping you win.
Founder multiplayer.
The founder journey can be a lonely one, and our research says working with other founders in small cohorts significantly de-risks it. So we run remote-first cohorts of multi-time founders. The standing session inside them is the CEO Roundtable: a closed room where founders at the same stage bring what they're stuck on and hear from people who have already solved it. Resources, customers and investors get shared across the group. There is no curriculum and no demo day. It's the one room where everyone else is a peer rather than an investor, a different kind of help than we can give.
The most technical operators on your cap table.
That's what founders tell us, and it's because we're deep in the same AI tools, skills and technologies we use to build FoundersEdge itself. We're versed in the latest trends because we're working with them every day, not because we read about them. When a founder walks through an architecture decision or a model choice there's no translation layer, and the conversation starts where it would with another engineer.
Great entrepreneurs are notoriously unemployable. We hope you'll give us the opportunity to back this company, or perhaps the next one.
Greg Raiz
General Partner
Application to term sheet, inside a month.
Apply.
Every application is read by someone on the team.
First response.
Usually inside a week. A pass comes with the reason behind it.
We share our work.
Market sizing, a competitive map and a co-investor list, researched by us and handed to the companies we partner with.
Terms.
A $100–$200K first check, a seat in a small same-stage cohort, the LP network, and pro-rata reserved for the next round.
Send us what you're building.
FoundersEdge invests in pre-seed software companies at the intersection of AI and UX.
Pitch Us