Announcing Kindred Ventures III and Selector I
$312M of new funds for formation/pre-seed/seed stage startups
We are excited today to announce our third core fund and first opportunity fund, totaling $312M of new funds.
Our firm was founded on the view that in the highest impact areas of technology, entrepreneurs need a partner focused on 0 to 1 with early team and product navigation capabilities, and a deeper level of research into new technologies and markets. While we are ever-focused on software and internet theme areas, we continue also to be curious and energized about frontier startups exploring novel technologies and sciences in their mission.
To date, we have led or participated in investments across mobility and logistics, crypto/web3, machine learning, generative AI, digital health, financial technology, commerce, developer tools, and infrastructure, representing over $200B of market value. Our founders have engineered and designed many of the most used products in the world, and we are grateful to get to learn from them about the most cutting edge methods of bringing technology into society.
As we move into this new phase for our firm, we have reflected on a few things that we believe:
We like the very beginnings of cycles — investing at the frontier.
- We were lucky to back and learn from the founders and early teams at Uber and Coinbase during the height of Web 2.0 and the emergence of Web 3.0, respectively. Our investments are exploring the frontiers of generative AI and hardware, mobile technology on the battlefield, communities for digital asset creators, silent urban flight, new materials and systems for decarbonization, virtual platforms for cardiovascular disease, networks of virtual humans, and beyond.
- We have been invested in generative AI since 2019, thanks to our partnerships with many portfolio companies including Humane and HourOne as well as many coming out of stealth mode. We have discovered insights and new opportunities about deep/ machine learning and computer vision for over the past decade from Uber and Tonal.
- An enduring ecosystem of creators are making their livelihoods in brand new paradigms, and the non-fungible token and other programmable distributed networks continue to excite us across communities, marketplaces, networks, infrastructure, emerging markets, and finance.
Technology is not just essential to a better future, it is a bridge to get there.
- It will help answer the questions of how we care for ourselves, how we compete globally, how we express ourselves, and create a safer, more accessible, more open world. This requires a bold view of what’s possible — a world where magic can be made material. We believe in flying cars, in robot house cleaning, in programmatic money flows, onchain culture and communities, and in distribution of personalized, specialty medicine. We invest as far as the light touches, and sometimes into the dark, to find the founders who are telling the most compelling versions of the future.
Our companies have navigated (and written) the scaffolding of regulation within their fields
- In cities, using deep, novel applications of science and technology, allowing them to solve for 30 and 40 year problems in computing, address the emerging global fertility crisis, write new systems of software for transportation logistics, finance powered by digital money, supply chains, and in business communications.
The next generation of Internet, software, and frontier technologies will rhyme with the past, and product building, team building, and go-to-market remain unchanged.
- Our core fund strategy remains unchanged — we want to back a small number of early stage companies with a concentrated approach that is high-conviction, driven by partner-led coaching and mentorship, and supported by high quality research. We have invested in over 40 companies with this approach, and intend to continue to write $250K to $3M checks with this strategy in mind. Our opportunity fund presents a different opportunity. Our goal is to be the first coach and mentor to founders on their journey, but we believe that we can continue to support them with capital and friendship through their life.
We are in the midst of a revolution of underlying technologies, and many of the most ambitious new grads and young people in engineering are flocking to the frontiers of technology, led by the tidal wave of augmented and artificial intelligence in software. Our larger fund allows us to maintain the same conviction in the earliest stage — formation, pre-seed, and seed, while supporting our companies through their growth phase, and to IPO. Thanks to the endowments, charitable foundations, teachers retirement funds, funds-of-funds, families, and friends who have been steady and deep believers in us since the beginning. This work is made possible by their partnership, and we are grateful.
If you are building software, or at the frontier, and want a partner at the beginning of your journey, call us: hello@kindredventures.com
Silicon Valley is a state of mind and action,
Kindred Ventures
