Not a fund
We do not raise from outside investors. There are no limited partners, no fund life ticking down, and no committee that has to be convinced by a memo. The money is ours, so the only people we have to persuade are ourselves.
The practical consequence is patience. A fund has to deploy capital inside its investment period and return it inside its life, which quietly shapes every decision it makes, including which companies it can back at all. We can take positions that are hard to justify on a five-year clock, and hold them considerably longer than one.
It also means we can say no quickly. We are not obliged to look at a certain volume of companies, so we do not run a pipeline, and a conversation that is not going anywhere can end without anyone wasting a quarter on it.
What interests us
Businesses where the difficult part is genuinely technical. If the hard problem is distribution or regulation rather than engineering, we are probably not the right people. That is not because those problems are easier, but because we would be guessing, and you would be paying for our guess.
We are more use earlier than later. The decisions we can actually influence are architectural and organisational, and both get expensive to revisit once a company has scale.
How we decide
We read the code. Not as a formality at the end, but as the main thing. It is the most honest document a young company produces, and it usually says more about how the team works than any deck does. We talk to the engineers, ideally without the founders in the room.
We are looking for whether a team can tell us what is broken. Every early company has serious problems; the ones worth backing already know what theirs are and can describe them precisely. A pitch with no weaknesses in it is a pitch we cannot evaluate.
What we don’t do
- We do not invest in things we cannot evaluate ourselves.
- We do not take board seats we do not have the time to service properly.
- We do not ask for exclusivity, information rights we will never use, or terms designed to matter only in a disaster.
- We do not sign non-disclosure agreements before a first conversation.
If you are raising
Write to us directly. A short note about what you are building, what is hard about it, and what you have already tried is far more useful than a deck. If it is not for us we will say so quickly and tell you why.