Our Next Chapter: From Jane VC to January Ventures

Announcing Our New Name and Expansive Vision

When we launched Jane VC in 2018, our vision was based on our longstanding view about female founders: they have been systematically overlooked but have consistently outperformed. We continue to believe in the opportunity to deliver outsized returns by investing in visionary women.

Our Portfolio is Rich in Texture and Diversity

In the last year and a half, we’ve met thousands of founders & companies, and invested in 20 startups. Our portfolio is rich in texture: the veteran startup exec who is disrupting the insurance industry, the first-time founder enabling the creator mindset at an enterprise level, the mother whose Gen-Z daughter inspired a new vision of connectivity, the serial entrepreneur developing technology to save our planet. What ties them together are their bold ambitions coupled with unique insights.

We recognize the value in backing diverse founders and we believe in the power of investing in intersectional people. In our current portfolio of 20 companies, 10 of the founders are people of color. All of the teams have at least one female founder, co-founder or CEO, and 12 also have a male co-founder. Diversity has been proven to drive financial profits, exits and overall returns.

Identifying Outliers and Opening Doors

We invest early, at pre-seed and seed, and we’ve realized that our most valuable role is opening doors for founders — be it with potential customers, hires, advisors or investors. So much of success is about access.

But venture capital is not known for access. It is a network-based business that relies on pattern recognition to drive investment decisions. Only 11% of venture capitalists are women. This dynamic reduces access to capital for women, and excludes promising founders and companies from the traditional VC ecosystem.

Over the last year and a half, we’ve asked ourselves, what does the start of a pattern look like? The answer is that it starts with an outlier — something that initially looks odd, out of place, not like the others. Until, that is, those outliers are recognized as the new standard, the new archetype.

We believe the founders who will build the next decade’s unicorns will look fundamentally different — there will be more women, and these founders will be more ethnically diverse and geographically distributed. We believe in this new wave because the founders in our portfolio are those outliers who are paving the way and quickly establishing the new norms.

Expansive Vision and New Name

As we near our two year mark, we’re excited to announce the evolution of Jane VC into a more expansive vision to invest in the next generation of founders. With that comes a new name — January Ventures.

Our focus is still on female founders, and our vision for the future is to support a broad group of underrepresented founders. We want to appeal to visionary founders regardless of age, ethnicity, geography or background. Not everyone is a Jane; there are Jannekes, Juanas, Jahas and Jiaos to name a few. We want them all to feel welcome.

January also represents beginnings — a fresh start each and every year. This name seemed fitting given that the founders in our portfolio are the outliers paving the way and establishing new models for successful tech leaders. Our role is to proactively find these outliers and bring this new pattern into focus.

Our investing strategy remains the same: pre-seed and seed stage software startups with a B2B go-to-market. We invest where the world is heading, and believe massive demographic, technological and behavioral shifts are creating new opportunities within the future of work, digitization of health and transformation of industry. We are proud to have an incredible group of LPs supporting this strategy including Marc Andresseen (fun fact: we cold pitched him when we bumped into him at the Rosewood), Chris Dixon, Arlan Hamilton, Atomico, Bain Capital Ventures and Wildcat Capital Management. By design, our LP base is >50% women — we want our LPs to reflect the diversity of the companies we are backing.

Investing Early in Founders of the Future

Times of crisis can also be times of opportunity. However, we are also aware of how crises can exacerbate privilege. Now, more than ever, we can’t let diversity fall by the wayside.

We are excited to continue backing founders based on their tenacity and ambition, not their pedigrees or who they know. This open minded, ambitious, equal opportunity tech ecosystem is the one we want to see exist in the world. We plan to create it with January Ventures, by investing early and opening doors for the visionary founders of the future.

Follow us on Twitter, learn more about January Ventures here and pitch us here. If you’re a woman building the next big company, we want to meet you!