Get funded within a week of your first meeting.
No warm intro needed.
There's never been a better time to start a company or a worse time to raise your first round, particulary for a first time founder. We're fixing that.
This is not a twelve-week incubator with a sprint to Demo Day — most programs drop you after that. We stay for 12–24 months, until you raise your A, helping you in three ways:
We will help you create your slides, practice your pitch, and time your raise correctly. Then we will make introductions to the right firms for your stage. 75% of our portfolio companies have gone on to raise a Series A from firms including Sequoia, Founders Fund, a16z, Index, Khosla, Greylock, and Accel.
We help you vet, and close your earliest hires — the ones that will make or break your first 18 months. We've seen enough early teams to know what good looks like at the pre-seed stage.
Think of it as your personal 24/7 WhatsApp line for the years to come.
We invest primarily in B2B applications (horizontal and vertical), infrastructure and devtools, and digital health. But our curiosity doesn't stop there. What gets us excited is three things:
The best early pitches show us something we hadn't seen. Maybe it's a workflow only an industry insider would know or a customer behavior that defies conventional wisdom. If your pitch makes us say "I hadn't thought about it that way," you're on the right track.
The most interesting opportunities rarely come with a crowded pitch landscape. We're drawn to problems that are pressing but also feel too niche, too early, or too unglamorous to attract attention — until suddenly they're not.
Being early looks identical to being wrong. We've learned to get comfortable with ideas that make other investors nervous, because the startups that define a category rarely arrive when the category is obvious.
If you're thinking about quitting your job but aren't excited about joining an accelerator with 200 other startups, you should apply.
If you're still at school but have been building something on the side, you should apply.
If you're already full-time on an idea, you should apply.
We are primarily focused on US-based startups.
We will invest $1M to lead a $2–3M pre-seed round — and we'll help you fill the rest
No. This is a core investment from our fund, with programming tailored to your specific needs until you raise your Series A.
Not often. We prefer teams of co-founders with at least one technical founder, but we do invest in solo founders when the fit is right.
We are happy investing in pre-revenue B2B companies. Our preference is that you have an idea and early design partners or customers, including unpaid ones, so we can validate the customer need.
Our goal is to work closely with you to achieve product-market fit and then raise your next large institutional round.
We've also written a Founder's Handbook covering cap tables, M&A, fundraising decks, and more.
“1984 has the superpower of being my first WhatsApp if everything is going well or badly.”
James Hawkins
CEO of PostHog