Pre-Seed Fund Features
Quote from Ndubuisi Ekekwe on February 5, 2019, 6:28 PMThis is what one company, an agro-investor, expects for its Pre-Seed Fund investments. Read the mindset of this company to understand what needs to happen as you begin that planning in your startup.
Our flagship funds focus on Seed to Series B and we pass on a lot of companies because they’re simply too early and we need to see more traction. A Pre-Seed fund would look to make the first institutional investment in a company at the earliest stages where a small check can give us the greatest ownership. These would generally be companies with valuations <$5M where the upside potential is the highest, but so is the risk. We would be looking to make 10-20 relatively small bets, depending on the size of the fund. Our focus would be on entrepreneurs with a track record of significant academic or professional exceptionalism. In pre-seed, diligence is necessarily limited and investment decisions are often made on experience and gut instinct. You are really betting on the jockey, not the horse. Specifically we’d be looking for those founders with prior successful exits and entrepreneurs who are at their very earliest stages of company development but who share the qualities of the founders of companies like Indigo, Blue River, Planet Labs, Plenty, Granular, Impossible Foods, FBN (and if you’ve met these founders you’ll know what we’re talking about). Again, the risk is highest at pre-seed, but it’s also where the upside can be the highest since 10x exits are possible even with $50M exits.
This is what one company, an agro-investor, expects for its Pre-Seed Fund investments. Read the mindset of this company to understand what needs to happen as you begin that planning in your startup.
Our flagship funds focus on Seed to Series B and we pass on a lot of companies because they’re simply too early and we need to see more traction. A Pre-Seed fund would look to make the first institutional investment in a company at the earliest stages where a small check can give us the greatest ownership. These would generally be companies with valuations <$5M where the upside potential is the highest, but so is the risk. We would be looking to make 10-20 relatively small bets, depending on the size of the fund. Our focus would be on entrepreneurs with a track record of significant academic or professional exceptionalism. In pre-seed, diligence is necessarily limited and investment decisions are often made on experience and gut instinct. You are really betting on the jockey, not the horse. Specifically we’d be looking for those founders with prior successful exits and entrepreneurs who are at their very earliest stages of company development but who share the qualities of the founders of companies like Indigo, Blue River, Planet Labs, Plenty, Granular, Impossible Foods, FBN (and if you’ve met these founders you’ll know what we’re talking about). Again, the risk is highest at pre-seed, but it’s also where the upside can be the highest since 10x exits are possible even with $50M exits.