In 1984, Apple aired a commercial that became Silicon Valley mythology: a lone heroine hurling a sledgehammer at IBM. The message was simple: incumbents look unbeatable until they aren't.
Today, the largest tech companies in the world want you to believe AI will belong to them alone. We started 1984 Ventures to back the founders who prove them wrong.
The safest way to get funded is often to look exactly like what got funded before. We built 1984 Ventures to be the first check for founders who are early, unconventional, and difficult to categorize. No warm intro or prior pedigree required.
The biggest AI companies of the next decade won't look like SaaS companies with copilots bolted on. They'll have different margins, org charts, workflows, and entirely different assumptions about how work gets done.
We focus on first-time founders. They don't carry years of assumptions about how an industry is "supposed" to work. They build around what AI makes possible now, not what worked five years ago. Some of our best investments came from founders who had no business starting a company on paper.
We lead pre-seed rounds with checks up to $1M and help founders close the rest. We move quickly, usually within a week. No warm intro required.
We stay deeply involved, but we care less about performative metrics and more about whether you're building something people desperately want. PMF before optimization.
From there, we help with hiring, fundraising, and navigating the moments where most companies break. 75% of our portfolio has gone on to raise Series As from firms like Sequoia, A16Z, and Founders Fund.
We've also written a Founder's Handbook covering fundraising, cap tables, hiring, M&A, and the mistakes we see founders repeat over and over again