It’s a new era for K50 Ventures
We built a home and community for purpose-driven founders worldwide. Here’s what’s next.
Six years ago, K50 Ventures was launched to be the first institutional check and long-term partner to founders who believe technology has the potential to unlock access and affordability for the world’s working class across health, finance, and work. We believed that the masses were being neglected by traditional venture capitalists who were ignoring the problems that plagued everyday people. Today, I am now joined by my partners, Adriel Bercow, Daniel Vasquez, and an incredible team that proudly supports our 150+ portfolio companies that are solving often overlooked problems the global working class faces when it comes to their health, finances, and work.
K50 founders are transforming their communities
Throughout it all, we’ve been hyper-focused on catalyzing real-world change for millions of people around the world. We’ve been lucky enough to witness radical transformation in our focus areas of health, finance, and work. This is what really keeps us going: the actual, tangible improvement of people’s lives — in their homes, at their jobs, and in their communities.
- Groww is democratizing investing in India for more than 20 million users.
- Every day, Frubana provides more than 600 tons of fresh meats, fruits, and veggies at 10–15% below cost for 75,000 restaurants and small groceries across Latin America.
- Mammoth Biosciences is making rapid diagnostic tests available for just a few bucks and creating new precision-based therapeutics with companies like Bayer through their novel use of CRISPR.
- …And so much more. You can see our whole portfolio here.
A closer look at our new brand
Today, we’re excited to celebrate our new team, brand and website — same mission, brand new look. Our new logo is still a K, of course, but now the letter itself is representative of the partnership between founder and investor, where the bottom portion serves as a supportive base for founders to come home to. The maroon color represents our heart for everything we do, and our new fonts embody our communication style: confident, clear, and concise. As a team, we won’t ask to be helpful and then ghost. We believe we are lucky to support founders in their pursuits. We have low ego and hate bullshit.
In celebration of the many milestones our companies have reached, and in anticipation of the future, I’d like to share a bit more on how we got here.
How our past informs our present
You might already know that the K50 community was originally created in 2008 as a program for the global purpose-driven founder community called The Kairos Society. The K50 (Kairos 50) program recognized the top 50 purpose-driven companies around the globe that were generating material impact. We hand-selected some amazing entrepreneurs who went on to build companies like Brex, Freenome, Fiscalnote, Casper, and OYO Rooms, worth $30B+ in total and inspiring thousands of young founders everywhere to start their own companies. The positive impact of the community inspired Alex Fiance, Ankur Jain, and I to launch K50 Ventures’ first fund and venture studio Kairos HQ. Two years ago, I spun out K50 Ventures and brought on Adriel, Jessica Spivack, our Director of Platform, and Stefanie Ng, our Director of Operations, to raise Flagship Fund II. If you want even more context, you can read more about our history here.
We launched K50 Ventures to foster and invest in the next generation of leaders. At a time when pre-seeds weren’t a business like they are today, our team at K50 invested energy, money, and time into early-stage founders, turning their passion for solving big problems for the working class into thriving businesses. Nothing was too early! We have always backed companies empowering the masses, and we continue to look for markets where incumbents and governments have failed, investing instead in new founders who have a burning desire and relevant experience to bring about real change in their communities. This sounds obvious now, but five years ago it was hard to find a founder building a company outside of enterprise SAAS, gaming, consumer social, and on-demand delivery.
The power of the global K50 Community
Lucky for us, the K50 community was global to begin with and we spent real time in markets outside of the US where founders were eager to transform their communities from the bottom-up. Our commitment to investing in and developing communities around the world has been and will remain one of our biggest advantages. We look at each problem and opportunity from a global lens which allows us to bring in new ideas to a similar problem in a completely different country. We’ve now made investments all over the world, mostly in emerging markets — from India and Indonesia to Nigeria and Egypt. Yet, Latin America, mostly Colombia and Mexico, was where we spent the most time outside of the US and the first region where we built up our team. There are over 600 million people in LATAM, yet the region is vastly underfunded. In 2021, venture funding reached $330B in the US, compared to $15B in LATAM. Looking at these numbers, and considering our own personal relationships and trend forecasting in the region, it was an easy decision to commit. If anyone remembers the opportunity that existed in China in the early 2000s, it’s similar and we see a lot of the same problems today in LATAM that our partners saw then in China. FYI — there was $1B raised in VC in China in 2005 and, in 2021, $135B was deployed.
We made our first investment in the region in Colombia in 2016, and to date, we’ve made 37 investments in LATAM in companies like Frubana, Fintual, Tul, Rio Grande, Worc, Kueski, Dinie, Ayenda, and Osana. In order to show our love and commitment to the region, we recently hosted a founder summit in Bogota, Colombia alongside the Estereo Picnic music festival, celebrating the work and impact of our global community of founders and our team. More details here.
And our founders love what we’re building. Andres Lawson, Founder and CEO of Osana Salud says, “I met K50 Ventures early in my journey and the team has been an invaluable partner. They led my pre-seed and have been supportive to me since Day 1. I know they’ll continue to be great partners.”
Doubling down on LATAM
As our LATAM community has grown and our commitment has increased in the region, we recently brought on a new partner to lead our LATAM efforts: Daniel Vasquez, a longtime K50 LP and venture partner. Daniel is based in Medellin, Colombia and his family office has been one of the most active and respected investors in LATAM. Daniel has been investing and supporting founders in LATAM as long as we have been investing. He is purpose-driven, established in the region, and invested early into companies like Kueski, Kushki, Bold, Bitso, Betterfly, Osana Salud, Somos, and more. His expertise and network will continue to help us serve founders across the region.
As we grow, we will continue to partner early with great founders who believe technology has the potential to unlock access and affordability for the world’s working class across health, finance, and work.
“While building Fiscalnote, my co-founders and I witnessed how hard it was to get to product-market fit, hire the first killer team members, and recruit the first group of investors,” says Fiscalnote founder Jonathan Chen. “We joined K50 back in 2014 before the K50 fund was launched to have access to the community of founders who had done it before and get the notoriety we needed to be taken seriously. Now as I launch my next company, we chose K50 Ventures to lead our pre-seed because we knew they understood our industry and we love the passionate community of founders in the portfolio, the invaluable resources, and the always available support. Ryan and the team are easily the most valuable investors on our cap table.”
We’re excited to grow our team and funds to be the best first-check partner for successful repeat founders like Jonathan and Andres. With capital being a commodity for the best founders, we continue to spend time earlier and earlier in the company-building process to show founders the value we can add as partners, while getting to know each other personally before we invest. Typically, we meet founders before they start their company to dig into problems together, while also introducing them to our community in order to validate ideas early. As we continue to build the firm, we will grow our investment and platform teams to make fundraising, recruiting, and business development easier for our founders.
Our team is expanding
Along with Daniel, this year we’ve continued to grow our team across the globe, welcoming Kirby Kaplan as our Director of Investor Relations, who joins us from Centerbridge Partners, Ariel Russo, our Associate who serves on the board of one of the most important retail groups in LATAM, and Maria Alejandra Horta Ochoa, our Platform Associate focused on LATAM who came to us from ProColombia and Avianca.
We are also joined by venture partners around the globe who have experience in our focus areas, including Alex Fiance (Founder, KairosHQ), Ankur Jain (Founder, KairosHQ & Bilt), Andres Blumer and Bruno Ocampo (Co-Founders, Mi-Aguila), Bobby Aitkenhead (IDC Ventures), Brian Finn (Rotor Capital), Dara Rahimzadeh (Angel Investor), Justin Feig (Reciprocity Fund), Ryan Howard (Founder of 100Plus & Practice Fusion Michael Zhao (Biotech Investor), Igor Konstantinovsky and Eugene Konstantinovsky (Masnavi Group), Tony Chou (Angel Investor), Zoe Oz (KairosHQ & Bilt), and Vince Fong (Founder of Stick Stack and Raze).
All that to say: our team is growing, and we’re more equipped than ever to support our global community of founders.
We want to hear from you
If you have an idea that has the potential to transform people’s lives for the better, we’d love to talk. We invest $250K-2M and can lead, but don’t have to. If you’re interested in joining our community, check out the open roles in our portfolio.
Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, or say hi at hello@k50ventures.com.
Finally, on behalf of the entire K50 team, I want to extend a huge thank you to the folks who have supported us and backed us along the way, especially 10X Capital, Grupo IDC and the IDC Ventures Team, Rotor Capital, Masnavi Capital, Sidd Pagidipati, Alex Chang, Petamber Pahuja, Michael Lowenstein, Tim Draper, Tim Hwang, David Stadlin, Laurie Hawkes, Robert Alexander, Mike Au, Kerem Ozmen, Katie Shea, Winter Mead and the Coolwater Team, Eddy Kleinans, Annaka West, the AngelList team, our legal teams at Cooley and Pillsbury, First Republic, the C42D team, all of the OG K50 Founders and Kairos Society community leaders, and many more.
