The Fund 100

Retrospective on our first one-hundred investments

When The Fund started in 2018 we set out to build the early-stage ecosystems in cities and regions outside of Silicon Valley. Our first experiment in New York began with the goal of pooling founder capital to invest in the next generation of startups. Just over three years in and that experiment has turned into some of the most active pre-seed investment funds in New York, Los Angeles, London, and The Rockies, and we’ve built a community of over 400 founders who’ve built and scaled as many startups.

Looking back on three years, four geos, five funds, and around $12 million of investment capital, we’ve looked at well over 1,000 businesses and backed over 100 spanning across 32 industries. With over 50 percent female partners, we’re also proud that 43 percent of our portfolio companies are founded and run by women.

Across our first hundred investments we’ve seen 46 percent of them focused on solving consumer-oriented problems, 43 percent business-to-business. We’ve seen roughly one-in-five of our companies focus on health, telemedicine, and capturing new opportunities around regulatory change. Headway, one of our earliest investments, has now gone onto raise $26 million from Accel, Thrive Capital and Google Ventures.

Roughly one-in-ten of our investments have been in future-of-work platforms like Contra, The Cru, and Talent Hack, considering our shifting workforce needs and the tools necessary to manage and mentor remotely. Ten percent of our companies have focused on financial services, solving problems around business banking, tax planning, alternative investments, and financial planning and analysis (FP&A). These companies span the globe from Cube Software in New York to Loc.Tax in Belgium.

Another 8 percent of our investments have been in consumer categories including breakout brands like Playbook, BEHAVE Candy, Cleancult, Pair Eyewear, Ten Little, LALO, and Ohne. And not to be diminished, another 45 percent have fallen into a wider distribution of industries from cybersecurity to agricultural robotics to supply chain and education technology. Reply.AI, founded by two incredible Spanish brothers, also led to our first unicorn exit, acquired by Kustomer and Facebook.

Check out our whole The Fund 100 recap of our first three year journey. We couldn’t be more proud of the community we are building and will continue catalyzing the early stage startup ecosystems across a number of new geos in the coming year.