Cold Pitching Grand Ventures: Stage, Geography, and Sector Sweet Spots
As the current owner of the Grand Venture’s “info inbox” (info@grandvcp.com), I see dozens of cold emails each week. Some pitches fit our investment criteria and others fall outside of our focus. I hope this blog will provide founders with additional transparency around our investment thesis and help craft a better cold pitch. Today’s post will focus on the stages, geographies, and sectors we invest in.
Stage
The stages of early venture capital have evolved over the years complicating the definition of each stage. At Grand Ventures, the Seed stage is our sweet spot. In practice, that means we invest in companies from Pre-seed to Series A.
For potential pre-seed investments, we’re looking for companies that are post-MVP and have early revenue ($100–500K ARR). Even at those early stages, we are looking for growing companies that have proved product-market fit. Defining product-market fit is a topic for a future blog.
Our team is uniquely equipped to support companies with a well-defined product solution, adoption in the market, and revenues from $200K to $1M ARR. We love partnering with companies at this formative stage in their journey. The GV team experience and advisory board mentors and supports founders as they navigate the growing pains of foundational growth. Our team helped over 60% of our portfolio companies grow from Seed to Series A and beyond.
For Series A rounds, we’re looking for companies with between $1–3M ARR that are ready to scale.
With over $70M under management we’re able to lead rounds or follow, and we typically write first checks between $500K and $1.5M.
Geography
The best companies are built across the US and Canada and not just on the coasts. We focus on investing in “emerging geographies”, or areas that haven’t historically received venture capital funding. We’ve invested in companies across the US and Canada, from Toronto, to Atlanta, Salt Lake City and our own backyard, Grand Rapids.
Sector Focus
Since our inception, in 2017, the Grand Ventures investment thesis has evolved. Over the last year, we’ve decided to focus our investments in four key sectors: Fintech, DevOps, Supply Chain, and Healthcare IT / Digital Health. These four sectors rose to our priority because of our team’s (and advisory board’s) expertise in the sectors and the potential we see for disruptive technologies in each of these markets.
Fintech
If you meet the Grand Venture’s founder, Tim Streit, on the street, there’s no doubt you’d start talking about FinTech. Tim’s expertise stems from his early career at HSBC and subsequent years in the venture capital industry. Today, we are particularly interested in embedded finance solutions and alternative financing. To dig into our Fintech focus, check out Tim’s FinTech blog from last year, our recent investments in iink, and Carputty or investments in Elements and InvestNext.
DevOps
The broader DevOps space is not new to Grand Ventures. One of our very first checks in 2017 went to Astronomer, a data orchestration platform for Apache Airflow. Check out more about our investment in our partner, Nathan Owen’s, blog here. In particular, we’re interested in deep technological solutions that solve problems with observability, platform engineering, the developer toolchain in general, and even some areas that fall outside of the pure DevOps sector, such as DataOps. For more on how we think about this sector, check out recent investment in Payload CMS and why we invested.
Supply Chain
The news abounds with stories of supply chain disruptions. From stories on digitization, regionalization, or globalization, to the cost of inflation, rail strikes, and freight stuck on ships, supply chains continue to be top of mind. With our partner, Camila Noordeloos’ background at GE ventures, we’ve seen how the complexity of supply chains require a disruptive solution. Check out some of our investments, such as Tealbook, Paccurate, Chain.io, and Terminal49 to learn more about how we think about the supply chain space.
I would be remiss not to note the current market headwinds. While this blog focused on our investment thesis, the bigger question plaguing the industry today is, who is investing? At Grand Ventures, we’ve continued to leverage our due diligence process to determine if a company’s business model, vision, team, and strategy will become a category king. We’re still investing in the companies that display those qualities today, just as we did last year, and will continue to do in the years to come.
Are you a startup or an investor or incubator interested in partnering with us? Please do not hesitate to reach out to me and the broader GV team at info@grandvcp.com. If you’re another VC that loves the same sectors we do, we’d love to compare notes and collaborate.
