Announcing K50 Ventures Fund II
It’s been quite the adventure seeing K50 develop over the last 12 years and I’m thrilled to announce the next step in our journey. I’m excited to announce that K50 Ventures will be spinning out from the venture studio, KairosHQ. For the past five years of my professional life, I have poured my energy into supporting incredible mission-driven founders and I am humbled by the progress they have all made. With over 130 investments already under our belt and top-decile performance (at least on paper), I could not be more proud to launch K50 Ventures Fund II to continue these efforts.
K50 Ventures provides the first check for founders transforming the world’s biggest industries to make life better for the 99%. With our global lens and focus on basic human needs, we believe we can partner with founders to make work and life better for our friends, family, and neighbors around the world. It’s exciting to publicly take this next step in our journey and I’m beyond grateful to everyone who has been a critical part of our success. It’s been a wild ride to get here.
K50 Ventures has been in the works since we started Kairos and the K50 community 12 years ago.
In 2008, my partner Ankur Jain started Kairos (fka Kairos Society) as an invite-only community for top entrepreneurial talent. The mission was to support and inspire world-class talent to solve critical, real-life issues through entrepreneurship. Each year, we selected 50 mission-driven companies that were disrupting established industries to positively impact billions of people. I was invited and joined for the first K50 in 2008, which was life-changing at the time as a young entrepreneur. Word got around quickly about Kairos and the K50, and we scaled organically to become active in 39 countries and were ingrained in top universities around the world. Each year the network became more powerful than the last. As we grew, we began to build a successful events business anchored by our annual summits, which were attended by top industry leaders, heads of state, and media that all wanted to help the next generation solve the world’s toughest challenges. Throughout the years, we fostered the growth of thousands of startups across the world including Freenome who solve for early detection of cancer raised $500M+, FiscalNote who make government relations simple and straightforward raised $50M+, Casper to fix sleep which IPOd, Oyo who makes travelling more affordable and raised $3.2B+, Periscope, who power live-video streaming sold to Twitter, and Brex, who save businesses time and money raised $700M+.
It was success stories like the above that inspired us to launch our first fund in 2016 to back founders and build our own solutions to the pressing issues everyday people faced that we knew could be solved through entrepreneurship. Backed by top founders and investors, we implemented two strategies with our first fund: 1) incubating companies, and 2) co-investing in companies at the pre-seed and seed stages. We backed the best founders at the pre-seed and seed stages we met through our community. If we didn’t find a solution to a problem we thought was important, we co-founded the company with a team we loved and solved it together. We co-founded three companies this way: Rhino, Little Spoon, and Cera. Seeing success with both approaches with excellent performance across our funds, we decided to build out each into its own platform: Kairos HQ to continue to create and operate companies, and our stand-alone venture fund, K50 Ventures to back the best mission-driven founders early in their journey. It was clear that in order to truly meet the needs of the companies we were building and the founders we had invested in, we needed to scale our efforts.
At K50 Ventures, we are the first check for founders building a better world for the 99%.
The time is certainly now! Wages have been stagnant for too long, families have little to no savings or access to credit, and their options for housing, healthcare, food, and education are all failing to meet their needs at a price point that makes sense. With the pandemic changing how we work and live, it’s abundantly clear now just how vulnerable the average person is around the world and how they need innovative alternatives.
After investing in over 130 companies that are tackling these problems, it’s clear that this is not talking about the base of the pyramid either — this is for the average family or individual and these are the biggest industries in the world. K50 companies like Self have opened up credit builder accounts for over a million people across the US to improve their credit scores, Groww launched investments for millennials across India, Frubana is improving the food supply chain across Latin America, and Mammoth Biosciences is making rapid diagnostic tests available for just a few bucks through their novel use of CRISPR. With success comes capital, and it’s been heartening to see how growth capital and great talent from around the world are shifting their attention towards solving the problems that matter for this demographic. You can see this shift in the public markets as well where companies like Square, Teladoc, CRSPR, Zoom, and others disrupt their incumbents by delivering a better, more affordable product to their consumer.
K50 Ventures will continue to be the conduit for founders to find funding and support. We are first-check investors with a community of mission-aligned founders and investors with insights from a firm that has a track record of identifying issues and building companies in these sectors from the ground-up.
We’re excited for what’s to come. We’ve assembled a great team, have dived deep into these industries, and can’t wait to share stories about the many founders we have backed thus far. In the meantime, check out our website, and if our mission resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you at hello@k50ventures.com.
We’re excited to be building towards a future where founders are tackling mission-critical problems to make life better for the 99%.
